• 作者： 王大蔚
• 中文摘要： People have been using the geothermalenergy in cooking or taking a bath in naturalhot springs all over the world dates back toearly man. Recently, geothermal energy wasused in horticultural greenhouse and light indus-trial process plant. The energy crisis in 1973created a severe impact on many industrialnations. Increasing scarce and costly suppliesof natural oil have spurred the search foralternative energy source for electric powergeneration. To supply urgent energy needs,many nations are initiating and expandingventures on some promosing energy alterna-tives, such as: solar energy, wind energy,tidal energy, synthetic fuel and geothermalenergy etc: It is fortunate that Taiwan havebeen endowed with significant geothermalresources which in the long term shouldbecome on important source of energy forelectric power production. Geothermal energy is a natural heatderived from the earth's magmatic heat.Only a small fraction of the earth is anouter, cold-shielding the biosphere from thetremendous magmatic heat storage inside.We can hardly comprehend the vastness ofthis energy within our celestial planet. Theproblem is how to tap this energy for thebenefit of mankind. In recent years, geothermal resources areattractively increasing attentions as a poten-tially important contributor to the energyfamily. There are several geothermal fieldin the world and some country have takenadvantage of this natural resources to producepower from them. Italy was the first to usethe geothermal energy of her soil to build apower plant in 1904, with present capacityof 430 MW, which rates next only to theGeysers, U.S. with 520 MW capacity. TheGeysers plan to reach 1800 MW geothermalproduction within the next ten years. NewZealand has capacity of 290 MW, followedby Japan's 66 MW present geothermal gener-ating capacity. Mexico, Russia, Philippinesand many other countries are pushing aheadwith their geothermal development program. The geothermal energy must in the longrun be competitive with nuclear power andfossil power plant. The experience we gainedshowed it is evident that geothermal powerproduction has the least cost among knownpower plant types. It is fuel free and what'smore, it is our own energy source that can(To Continued on Page 37)
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