'Japan cannot ignore Geothermal energy after Fukushima'

 With Japan facing 2.5% reduction in its power production due to failure of all four nuclear power plants in Fukushima following severe earthquake and tsunami, it cannot ignore tapping its vast geothermal resources to fill the gap, a top official of an Indian Geothermal company said here today.

"Japan will take a long way to recover from this disaster. But its immediate emergency is to bridge the energy gap that resulted due to sudden shortage of 2.8 GWe (power generation).

"These four reactors generate 22 billion kWhr, contributing 2.5% of total Japan's electricity demand. Now this shortage has to come from other energy sources like oil, coal, natural gas, solar, wind and geothermal," Managing Director of Mumbai-based Geosyndicate Power, Varun Chandrasekhar told PTI.

"Although Japan has large geothermal resources, it overlooked this important source that could replace 100% Japan's planned nuclear power generation capacity in the coming decades.

"It cannot ignore this important vast resource, given the advantage of having all the turbine and geothermal power plant manufacturing giant companies, like Mitsubishi Corp, Fuji Electric and Toshiba, on its board," he said.

Considering the time taken to recover from the disaster like Fukushima, constructing geothermal power plants is a much simpler option to put the power back in the grid, he said.

 A power plant based on geothermal energy harnesses the heat from the earth's inner layers to produce electricity.

"As on today, Japan is generating 3,000 GWh (units) from 18 geothermal power plants contributing 0.3%  of total electricity production. Eight geo-thermal power plants are located in northern Japan and four of these are located in and around Sendai," he said.