Question by Cara: Why are geothermal energy and solar energy power plants good alternatives,?
but at the same time not always easy to have?
A. Both are nonpolluting and inexpensive to maintain, but their startup costs and limited locations make them difficult to have everywhere they might be needed.B. Geothermal energy may cause unwanted volcanic activity while solar energy is not useful unless the Sun is shining.C. The operating costs of both are too high.D. Geothermal energy can cause pollution, but both geothermal and solar energy are easy to capture.
Best answer:
Answer by Lennard Boehnke
If either is used by a private home, the energy supplying company will pay you for whatever extra power you have, if you send it to them.
Add your own answer in the comments!
3 Responses
How are you measuring “good”? In my world that means economic. Solar is not economic and geothermal is marginal.
I can’t see how you can say geothermal is inexpensive to maintain. That is not true.
C is the best answer by default.
A Geo is sometimes polluting, because the water brought to the surface has chemicals that are bad for people and the environment. Some of the chemicals eat up the equipment = corrosive leading to expensive to maintain. We can re-inject the water back about where it came from but that uses most of the energy the hot water produced.
B There is no evidence that extracting geo energy, causes volcanic eruptions. In theory, geo may delay or prevent a volcanic erruption = let’s put lots of geo plants at Yellowstone National Park.
D Easy may be correct at a few locations, but a well ten miles deep is expensive and is likely to fail, without high expertise. There are few locations where shallow wells give lots of hot water. Getting energy from warm water on a hot day gets quite difficult.
A) is the good answer, the other answers include partially correct statements .