Department of WTF, geothermal bureau

According to the Great Gazoogle, there are geothermal resources in the United States with approximately 10 times the energy potential than all currently existing coal-fired power plants. No, really:

As part of that effort, the Mountain View, California-based company’s philanthropic arm, “Google.org,” on Tuesday published a new Google Earth map of the geothermal resources in the continental United States, created from data collected by the Geothermal Laboratory at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, which received a $489,521 grant from Google for the project.

The new map, an update of a running one that SMU scientists prepared in 2004 and 1992, estimates that the technical potential of geothermal in the U.S. is nearly 3 million megawatts (2,980,295), or 10 times the capacity of all the installed coal power plants in the country today. It’s available to view in an image format and also as a downloadable KML layer file for Google Earth.

Ok, apparently it would take 10-15 years to get even a demonstration plant open for some of these technologies. But dammit, let's get on this! It took less than 10 years for us to go from Kennedy's famous speech to a man on the moon. We clearly have the capacity.

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