Sperry Low Temperature Geothermal Conversion System, Phase 1 and Phase II. Final report. Volume III. Systems description

The major fraction of hydrothermal resources that have the prospect of being economically useful for the generation of electricity are in the 300/sup 0/F to 425/sup 0/F temperature range. Cost-effective conversion of the geothermal energy to electricity requires the conception and reduction to practice of new ideas to improve conversion efficiency, enhance brine flow, reduce plant costs, increase plant availability, and shorten the time between investment and return. The problems addressed during past activities are those inherent in the geothermal environment, in the binary fluid cycle, in the difficulty of efficiently converting the energy of a low-temperature resource, and in geothermal economics. Explained in detail in this document, some of these problems are: the energy expended by the down-hole pump; the difficulty in designing reliable down-hole equipment; fouling of heat-exchanger surfaces by geothermal fluids; the unavailability of condenser cooling water at most geothermal sites; the large portion of the available energy used by the feed pump in a binary system; the pinch effect - a loss in available energy in transferring heat from water to an organic fluid; flow losses in fluids that carry only a small amount of useful energy to begin with; high heat-exchanger costs - the lower the temperature interval of the cycle, the higher the heat exchanger costs in $/kW (actually, more than inversely proportional); the complexity and cost of the many auxiliary elements of proposed geothermal plants; and the unfortunate cash flow vs. investment curve caused by the many years of investment required to bring a field into production before any income is realized