Providing All China Energy Need with Geothermal and Other Renewables

Abstract

Fossil energy is great in terms of cost, convenience, infrastructure, and other issues. However it has many problems such as limitation of resources and the emission of green house gas that causes serious pollutions. For example, the heavy smog encircled a large area of China in recent years. Hundreds of flights have been cancelled and highways have been closed when that happened. Climate change, environment disaster, pollution, and energy insecurity may be among the greatest problems of the current world. Solving these harms requires essential changes in the present energy infrastructure. In this paper, we have analyzed and discussed the feasibility of providing all China’s energy need for all of the purposes, including space heating/cooling, electricity, transportation, and etc. from geothermal, wind, and solar energies (GWS). The geothermal resource in 3.0-10.0 km deep hot dry rock in mainland China is about 2.5×10^25 J in total, which is equivalent to 8.60×10^8 million tons of standard coal. If only 2% is explored and utilized, the energy is equivalent to about 5300 times as much as the total annual energy consumption in China in 2010. The annular solar resource is equivalent to hundreds of times as the total annual energy consumption in China. This shows that it is possible to provide China’s all energy need with GWS, considering wind energy and other renewables as a plus. The barriers to the all renewable plan might be primarily social and political, not technological or economic. The absolute energy cost in a GWS world may be greater than that today but the effective energy cost (after considering the increased costs of medical treatments, environmental recreation, and water treatments caused by pollution and disasters because of consuming fossil energy) of a GWS world could be less. We also predicted the growth rates of the renewables in China and found that GWS could meet all the energy need of China in 2055 or so.