04/04/08 Heating Up Renewable Energy

Heating Up Renewable Energy. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Tracey Laskey is in hot water. No really. His farm sits right on top of a whole lot of hot water. LASKEY: What we've got is roughly a 1000 acre ranch here and we have three main wells on the ranch and they all run roughly 195 to 199 degree water. One well was tested at 5000 gallons per minute at 199 degrees at 18 feet left so there's a lot of water. The term is geothermal and Laskey biggest problem is having enough cold water for a shower. The geothermal wells come from vents in the Cascade Mountains and the Mt. Shasta area. He says they have tried a number of different ideas to use the hot water. LASKEY: We've done some experiments throughout the years with some frost control in corn fields. One thing we did do before we got into a lot of stuff was we used to feed potatoes to cows and they would choke on them. In the winter, they would freeze and choke and so we started cooking the spuds. We would cook 2-ton batches in the hot water and feed them cooked spuds. He says there have been quite a number of other ideas that have come and gone over the years but what do you do with that much hot water? They found they could use it to heat greenhouses. LASKEY: The first year we had about $50-thousand dollars worth of plants and I didn't know if we could really sell that many plants in Klamath Falls or not but in 3 weeks we were out. And we just expanded just about every year since then and last year I think we sold over $800-thousand dollars worth of plants in Klamath Falls. They have recently opened up part of the land as a geothermal park to allow other businesses to come in and develop potential new ideas. But Laskey says they are currently working on generating electricity. LASKEY: We've been at 199 degrees and it's never been quite hot enough to produce electricity. When we first got into this they needed 350 degrees, ten it came down to about 270. Now they're down to about 250 and with this energy crisis going on and with the high fuel prices it's become really favorable to some of these power companies and we just signed a deal with a power company to come drill to see if they can hit 250 degree water and produce a 10 meg power plant to produce green electricity. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org