During his recent address at the winner announcements for Clean Energy Prize at MIT, Dan Reicher, Google's director of energy and climate inititatives, emphasized geothermal as the most underserver renewable energy area with great potential. According to Reicher, there is three times as much potential from geothermal compared to wind, and the oil and gas companies are interested in pursuing and developing geothermal energy technology.

Many geothermal power plants are currently operational around the world, converting heat into electricity from geothermally superheated steam. Enhanced geothermal technology, for example, allows engineers to pump water underground, create cracks through which water is heated from oncoming underground heat, and then used in steam turbine electricity production processing. Reicher further states that the big advantage of enhanced geothermal is that it can be done anywhere in the US, even in areas like Maine, which have sufficient undergronud heat potential.

Commercialization is another story though – risks are high, and according to Reicher, we have a long way to go before making geothermal energy a commercially viable electricity production resource. The US Recovery Act, adopted earlier this year, puts some USD 400 million into geothermal research. Computing will have a significant role in this by providing geological modelling and simulations. Information technology and energy technology intersect – "IT and ET – that's where we are heading in part at Google", said Reicher.