Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice,
A geothermal startup aiming to source energy directly from undersea volcanoes just hit a major milestone that could bring round-the-clock clean energy to cities on the northwest coast of the United States and serve as a critical proof of concept for other regions, with particular relevance for the other 14 countries situated along the Pacific Ring of Fire.
Seattle-based energy startup Endurance Energy just announced that it successfully created net-positive energy from its underwater geothermal plant in a world first. The company successfully demonstrated a full operations cycle from drilling to electricity generation in a major breakthrough for next-gen clean energy tech. Although the demonstration created less than 10 seconds of positive energy production, the implications of those ten seconds are hard to overstate.
"On Sept. 27, we put a power plant on an active underwater volcano and made power," said Andrew Redd, founder and CEO of Endurance Energy. "This historic milestone is also our first end-to-end test. We now know, firsthand, what works at depth, what needs to be improved, and how to build the next system for sustained commercial generation."
Not only does the brief achievement serve as a critical proof of concept for the technology, the project also "showed that operators in Seattle could control the system from an offshore location, remotely starting and stopping the equipment, monitoring temperatures and pressures, and collecting data
