The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently released a report titled “GeoVision: Harnessing the Heat Beneath Our Feet,” which concludes that with technology improvements, geothermal electricity generation could increase more than 26-fold from today — reaching 60 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity in the U.S. by 2050. Furthermore, the report states that the market potential for geothermal heat pumps (GHPs) is more than 14 times larger than existing capacity, which is the equivalent of supplying heating and cooling solutions to 28 million households.
While this outlook is very rosy, the report also listed a number of barriers that may prevent rapid consumer adoption of GHPs, including slow development of new technologies to improve GHP system cost and performance, high initial upfront costs, poor public awareness and confidence, and inadequate financing options, to name just a few. Manufacturers continue to remain enthusiastic about GHPs, but they agree that the geothermal industry has its work cut out for it.