If you are watching television or browsing in the internet right now, you will find that Indonesia is facing energy crisis. This problem is not a new problem, it has started years ago, but until now the problem has never been solved. Energy crisis especially electricity is not a simple problem. This crisis causes many cities in Indonesia experienced blackout regularly. This blackout can cause big problems for most people especially for industrial players. The effect of this regular blackout can cause industrial sector loss much money. Looking further, this energy crisis is caused by many reasons, one of them is the over load of electrical burden that is held by PLN’s generator. This over load make the life time of the generator become shorter and easily broken. The limit amount of fossil fuel source and the fluctuating price also has a great contribution to our energy crisis. When oil and coal price is raised the production of energy should be reduced in order to keep the expense of money stable. The other reason is the life style of Indonesian people in using electrical energy. Most of Indonesian people do not use this precious energy wise fully, we often waste electricity for nonsense without thinking that it will cause energy crisis. And the last reason why we suffer energy crisis is the high rate of population growth in Indonesia. Indonesia citizen grow rapidly, therefore the electricity demands also grow in the same rate of the population growth. In order to solve this problem we have to look for new source of energy, to supply our energy demands. Many experts propose to use nuclear energy and the others propose to use geothermal energy. Nuclear energy is clean and efficient; nevertheless the lack of power to overcome international (in this case US) political pressure make nuclear energy is not a good option for Indonesia. This condition makes geothermal energy become the strongest candidate to replace coal and oil to supply our electricity demands. Even though it is less efficient and expensive cost, geothermal is better than the other source of energy to generate electricity because less production of polluting waste, the abundance of source and the system itself that easy to maintenance.
Generating electricity using geothermal is less efficient than the other method, like nuclear power plant, or diesel generator. The causes of its less efficient are the water transport system that is not optimized and the heat loss. In geothermal mechanism, water is injected through long pipe in to high porosity rock layer basement, creating a water reservoir. The heats that exist in this rock layer vaporize the water so the high pressure vapor can flow through second pipe intersected the first pipe, and then moving a turbine. The turbine connected to generator to generate electricity. The high pressure vapor condensed along the way, reducing the pressure of water vapor. This condensation makes the energy to move the turbine reduced. Until now geoscientists cannot optimized this transport system to increase the efficiency of geothermal technology. Beside the unexpected condensation effect, geothermal system has another deficiency factor, the heat loss. Pipes used in this geothermal technology has tendency to absorb heat. The more we want to increase the vapor production, the longer pipe we need, the longer pipe we have, and the more heat to loss. Like all things in this world nothing seems perfect, and so does this geothermal technology.
Although using geothermal to generate electricity seems simple and promising, there is a factor that inhibit the development of geothermal technology in Indonesia, the expensive cost. The electricity produced by geothermal itself is more expensive than the one generated by diesel or coal generator. This high cost majorly comes from the building process cost. Building a geothermal energy plant is not simple. We need to check whether the location where we want to build is suitable or not. A lot of test needed, and the complexity of the observation method make geothermal location survey cost much money, moreover the isotope and porosity test, the most important test to do, cannot be done in short time. Hence, because of these lots of things that cost so much money, building geothermal energy plant cost almost twice than diesel generator energy plant. Actually spending much money in this alternative energy for developed country is not a big deal, but for developing country like Indonesia, which most of the people live in poverty, spend the government budget financing alternative energy program like geothermal energy plant seems useless. The idea of allocating money to finance alternative energy program never been thought by our government. Most of our people think that the money can be more useful if it is used for increasing our people social condition, by giving incentive, or subsidizing the human primary needs. So as long as our government does not start to care of our energy crisis, and haunted by poverty, geothermal energy development will not be optimal.
Since environmental issue is becoming hotter nowadays, reducing carbon emission is important since this green house gas is the main contributor of global warming effect. As a result, now people cannot create systems and machines that produce too much waste that can pollute the air. Dealing with our energy crisis, if we want to create a solution for our crisis, we have to consider the effect of our solution to the environment. Then as the response to this issue, geothermal comes to be an environmental friendly solution. The main reason why we should develop geothermal energy plant is because of the less waste produced by. There are two types of geothermal energy plant model, the open loop model, and the closed loop model. The open loop model still emits gas; however the gas is not green house gas (carbon dioxide) but H2o gas. Like its name, the open loop model of geothermal power plant constructed by pipes and underground reservoir which the injection pipe and the production pipe (the one used to flow vaporized water) does not connected above the ground. So the vaporized water, after moving the turbine comes out freely by out gassing. The second model, the open loop model, is more environmental friendly than the previous model. The water that is transported during the process will not come out to atmosphere because there is not any way out, or in the other words this closed loop model emits no pollution to atmosphere. In spite of its good performance dealing with environmental issue, the closed loop model still needs some improvement in order to keep the water flow in the same rate.
Not like the other source of energy that can be categorized as limited, geothermal energy can be said unlimited. The main source of this energy is earth’s internal heat. This heat exists in everywhere beneath the earth’s layer and has lifetime almost forever. With this characteristic, geothermal energy can be said as the most reliable energy source. So choosing geothermal as our solution for our energy crisis is right. The only thing we have to consider if we want to build geothermal power plant to solve our energy crisis problem is just the location, location where we can put water from upper layer to underground reservoir. It is the most important aspect to consider in building a geothermal power plant. In bad location the energy of geothermal cannot be used as effective as the energy from good location. The term ‘good location’ refers to location where below its surface there are high porosity rock layers. High porosity means, the rock layers have great tendency to let flow liquid matter such as water. High porosity rock layers are found in diverse rock layer, or simply we can say that the source of geothermal energy in a country is based on the diversity type of its rock layer. The more it is diverse, the more chance to find high porosity rock layer to create water reservoir. In Indonesia to find those characteristic is not hard, we have thousands of island that can be nominate as candidate to build geothermal energy plant, in those islands the diversity of the rock layers are amazing, you will find that high porosity rock layers Indonesia can be said everywhere. With this great abundance of geothermal source make Indonesia become the most potential geothermal field in the world, after United States, and Philippine. However not like the other two countries, that have developed their geothermal potential well, we still need to increase the effort to develop all the potential we have in geothermal.
In every technology, the most important process is the maintenance. Good maintenance means longer lifetime of the technology. Maintenance cost is included in the production cost, so maintenance has great influence in how much money we need to spend. The maintenance cost can be varying according to its complexity. The more it is complex, the more money you have to spend. The same way occur in geothermal technology development. We need to maintenance our geothermal power plant regularly, in order to keep the system working in the proper way. However maintenance on geothermal power plant is simpler than the other power plant, such as nuclear power plant. In geothermal power plant maintenance, we just have to check the amount of the water in our underground reservoir, checking the turbine, and checking the pipes. Those checking process is simple, we just need to check the pressure, the condition of the pipe, and the turbine that’s it. Simpler maintenance, imply cheaper maintenance cost. So when Indonesia develops geothermal technology to supply our energy demands, the cost of maintenance will be cheap. Even though at the beginning we need a lot of money to invest, the rest of our infestation will not cost the investor more money. Besides its promising future to solve our energy crisis, geothermal also attract investor to invest their money in this program.
As explained before geothermal technology has two problem, the low efficiency and the high cost. The only thing we can do to overcome the efficiency problem, is research. If we want to increase the efficiency, researches about this field have to be done. Indonesia has many geoscientist and engineer, I am sure may be ten years later, the efficiency of geothermal can be increased. Talking about the high cost, it is true that the energy produced by geothermal is more expensive than energy produced by oil and gas, but it is just temporary, when the development of this technology increase to an significant amount the energy cost will not be expensive anymore, Moreover if the oil price still increasing, the cost of energy produced by geothermal will decrease sooner. Besides those two problems in my opinion the biggest problem of developing geothermal is the government. Infestation in geothermal needs lots of money, like my explanation before, there are some people in the government think that infestation in alternative energy is nonsense compare to subsidizing gasoline price. If we still think that way I am sure that our dependence to oil and gas will not be ended. So to solve this problem we need to do some actions, first we need to do more research in this field. More research means more evidence to influence the government, the second is socialization. We need to enlighten our community about this energy crisis problem, and the solutions that available. If we have done those two actions, the government will not abandon this issue anymore. In summary, building geothermal power plants in Indonesia to solve our energy crisis is promising. Some disadvantages like less efficiency, and the high cost, can be tolerate by the advantages of having this technology like less pollution production, great abundance of source, and easy maintenance. Indonesia should build geothermal power plant to solve the energy crisis problem. It is not easy to start the development, but like my parents always say to me, nothing is too hard if you have started. We just need to start, and let see how this wonderful technology solve our problem.
Tulisan ini saya buat dalam rangka pemenuhan tugas Kuliah Academic writing, benar-benar tulisan yang menguras kemampuan cipta rasa dan karsa saya. hehe
