Israel and Spain began this trend (Spain also required photovoltaic energy systems in new buildings as of 2005–Wikipedia) and I sure hope we’ll be continuing the trend here in the U.S.!

Take a look here for more on the new law.

In a paper from Arizona State University: they say: Different parts of the Earth are composed of a variety of elements in varying amounts. Earth’s crust contains a variety of noble gases, one of those being helium. Natural helium occurs as two isotopes, helium-4 (4He) and helium-3 (3He.) Typically, helium-4 is more abundant in Earth’s crust, whereas helium-3 is more abundant in the mantle below. Thus, the helium-3/helium-4 ratio of the gas found in groundwater can provide an indication of the extent to which the water has interacted with volcanic rocks derived from the mantle.

In short, by testing water, these scientist think they can find where to put plants.

Now what they are not saying is this could cause a land cash boom as energy from this could be found on peoples properties, and such energy rights would belong to the property holders. This happens with things like oil. Own the land, make the money off the power. So far Geothermal plants are only in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah, but there are other possible locations, and with this technique we will probably find out if they are there or not.

Now these other potential locations for Geothermal sources are in places like New Mexico, Montana and Much of the Midwest … Now nobody is talking about this, but you conspiracy folks are going to love this. Here is your homework assignment. Try to figure out where geothermal energy could be and match that to Ted Turners land holdings and notice that his interest seems to be to own land over aquifers. Keep in mind this is something I’ve noticed in passing, not something I have hard facts on. His Florida holdings are probably unusable for geothermal, we don’t have bedrock here so we don’t do the geothermal power stuff.

That being said, I did get a geothermal heat pump for my new house. But that is another story that I will tell some day in one of my renovation articles.

-GReg

Photo: Imperial Valley California Geothermal Plant

One last off subject note. I was looking at that page about Ted Turner, and it said he owned land in New Mexico to the tune of 1,105,905 acres. I had no idea how big this was. So I looked up the area of Rhode Island, a state I’ve driven across and around to use as a measure. It’s 1,044.93 (square miles). A quick visit to Google will tell us that 1,044.93 (square miles) = 668,755.2 acres. So Rhode Island is 40% smaller than Ted Turners holdings in New Mexico.

I saw a commercial on TV about WaterFurnace and I couldn’t wait to check out their website to find out more. What I really wanted to know was the nuts and bolts of how this geothermal-for-normal-people thing really worked, and to be honest, I was pretty skeptical. Their website is thorough enough for me to be convinced that it works and is real. For a more unbiased opinion check out the US Dept of Energy website.