At the beginning of summer 2021, gas prices started increasing tremendously globally due to a wide array of factors, from an exceptionally cold winter in Europe in 2020, to macroeconomic fallouts of the COVID 19 pandemic, without mentioning geopolitics, to technical issues in infrastructure bottlenecks of the fossil fuel production infrastructure.
As a result, gas prices shot up on the European spot market from 5-10 €/MWh in 2019-2020 to 50 €/MWh in September 2021. However, the story does not end here and will continue inn 2022.
This crisis is not just and “energy price crisis”: geothermal power plants are not more expensive to build and operate. Geothermal district heating and cooling prices did not increase several times over.
Geothermal technologies provide many different types of benefits to the electricity system beyond the simple operation of a flexible electricity generator.
This factsheet, developed in the framework of the GEOSMART project, explores the pathways for geothermal to contribute to solving the energy price crisis.
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