Yesterday Nevada Geothermal reached an agreement with Ormat to provide infrastructure for its Blue Mountain geothermal power plant. The agreement calls for a $20M fixed price procurement and construction plan under the guise of a “Limited Note to Proceed” agreement. After the characterization of the resources at Blue Mountain, this is another step toward commercialization and harvest of the resource, which appears to be about 10MW per well and a 190C (375F) temperature.

Drilling at Blue Mountain, Nevada

Photo Credit: Nevada Geothermal

Vulcan Geothermal company has put forth its vision for a “green gigawatt” by tapping into the rich geothermal resource of the Basin and Range province largely located in north and central Nevada. What makes this different than any other approach? They’ve done a great job of characterizing resources across the range with most likely outputs, not only of their portfolio of geothermal prospects, but across the region. They’ve also taken the time to include other renewable sources like wind and solar thermal when considering transmission upgrades.

We applaud the bold vision that Vulcan has articulated at the G3 Plan site and look forward to seeing this vision moved toward reality as the multitude of developers with prospects in this general area work to bring their respective plans to fruition. Note to the Vulcan staff, it would be a good idea to have your website work with industry standard browsers like Firefox, this Internet Explorer only stuff is bush league, your vision deserves an open access professional touch. It might be worth a small investment to make that so…

Earlier this week, Calpine emerged from bankruptcy protection after a prolonged struggle that saw multiple delays. The issue is now trading on the NYSE under symbol CPN-WI. The new issue will have 423 million shares outstanding meaning the market capitalization of the company at today’s values is nearly $7B. We’ve been a bit skeptical that Calpine could emerge, but have been proved wrong as they are now back in business and moving forward.

Let’s hope that the generator can stay in business and invests in the geothermal portion of its portfolio, after all, there are no ongoing fuel costs!

We’ve written several times about Chena Hot Springs in Alaska and the small-scale (400kw) geothermal electricity project going on there. Recently, Popular Mechanics called on the resort and wrote a great article about how the geothermal system works for HVAC in extreme temperatures and is used in horticulture. Chena is not just a resort, it’s an innovation ecosystem around the uses of geothermal resource. The images below are part of the story, there’s much, much more content there, we encourage you to visit and read the whole story.

Western Geothermal announced this week that drilling permits have been secured for the first two wells in its bid to revive the old PGE Unit 15 in the southwest corner of the known geothermal resource area. The company expects that they will drill 8 wells to reach production capacity for commercial operations which are expected to commence in 2010. Thermasource will be the prime contractor on drilling operations and will use the Northern California Power Association’s drill rig to perform the work.

Unlike most geothermal drilling projects, this is a pretty sure bet since there were production wells sited here in the past and the geological structure has been studied for decades. When the Western Geothermal project comes online, it will be the second project (Bottlerock being the other) to bring more production online in the Geysers region. Between Calpine and NCPA, the two active producers today, the total output of the area is around 900MW.