Step 8: Dig Deeper

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"There are 5,000 megawatts of geothermal power in hot water coming up from abandoned oil wells in West Texas," says Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association, a trade consortium. "All that energy is just being wasted. Our ability to use the heat from the Earth is expanding far faster than the actual use of this technology."

Geothermal energy taps the Earth´s internal heat to produce electric power or to heat buildings. Hawaii, Alaska and the Western states have long been recognized as geothermal resources, but a new class of power plants will be capable of producing electricity from geothermal reservoirs with temperatures as low as 160