What is an alternative natural energy resource based on underground hot water sources is call?
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Geothermal power is the use of geothermal heat for electricity generation. It is often referred to as a form of renewable energy, but because the heat at any location can eventually be depleted it technically may not be strictly renewable. Geothermal comes from the Greek words geo, meaning earth, and therme, meaning heat. Geothermal literally means earth heat.\n\nGeothermal power is generated by mining the earth's heat. In areas with high temperature ground water at shallow depths, wells are drilled into natural fractures in basement rock or into permeable sedimentary rocks. Hot water or steam flows up through the wells either by pumping or through boiling (flashing) flow. Experiments are in progress to determine if a fourth method, deep wells into "hot dry rocks", can be economically used to heat water pumped down from the surface. A hot dry rock project in the United Kingdom was abandoned after it was pronounced economically unviable in 1989. HDR programs are currently being developed in Australia, France, Switzerland and Germany. Magma (molten rock) resources offer extremely high-temperature geothermal opportunities, but existing technology does not allow recovery of heat from these resources.\n\n\nElectrical generation\nGeothermal-generated electricity was first produced at Larderello, Italy, in 1904. Since then, the use of geothermal energy for electricity has grown worldwide to about 8,000 megawatts of which the United States produces 2,700 megawatts.\n\nThree types of power plants are used to generate power from geothermal energy: Dry steam, flash and binary. Dry steam plants take steam out of fractures in the ground and use it to directly drive a turbine that spins a generator. Flash plants take hot water, usually at temperatures over 200C, out of the ground, and allow it to boil in steam separators and then run the steam through a turbine. In binary plants, the hot water flows through heat exchangers, boiling an organic fluid that spins the turbine. The condensed steam and remaining geothermal fluid from all three types of plants are injected back into the hot rock to pick up more heat. This is why geothermal energy is viewed as sustainable. The heat of the earth is so vast that there is no way to remove more than a small fraction even if most of the world's energy needs came from geothermal.\n\nThe largest dry steam field in the world is The Geysers, about 90 miles (145 km) north of San Francisco began in 1960 which has 1360 MW of installed capacity and produces about 1000 MW net. Calpine Corporation now owns 19 of the 21 plants in The Geysers and is currently the United States' largest producer of renewable geothermal energy. The other two plants are owned jointly by the Northern California Power Agency and Santa Clara Electric. Since the activities of one geothermal plant affects those nearby, the consolidation plant ownership at The Geysers has been beneficial because the plants operate cooperatively instead of in their own short-term interest. The Geysers is now recharged by injecting treated sewage effluent from the City of Santa Rosa and the Lake County sewage treatment plant. This sewage effluent used to be dumped into rivers and streams and is now piped to the geothermal field where it replenishes the steam produced for power generation.\n\nAnother major geothermal area is located in south central California, on the southeast side of the Salton Sea, near the cities of Niland and Calipatria, CA. As of 2001, there were 15 geothermal plants producing electricity in the area. CalEnergy owns about half of them and the rest are owned by various companies. Combined the plants produce about 570 megawatts.\n\nThe Basin and Range geologic province in Nevada, southeastern Oregon, southwestern Idaho, Arizona and eastern Utah is now an area of rapid geothermal development. Several small power plants were built during the late 1980s during times of high power prices. Rising energy costs have spurred n
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Fossil fuels, such as oil, natural gas, or coal, are non-renoewable sources of energy since the supply of them on Earth is pretty much fixed.
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Biopower..\nCooking fat needs pre heating as mostly it is solid at ambient temperature.. Therefore it won't flow thru the pipes.\nBut generally with some good design then biopower could be as reliable and just as quick to start up as fossil fuels.\nIt all depends how you generate the electricity.. Steam turbines are more efficient than internal combusion engines and depending on the cost of fossil fuels could be equally as cheap.
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Some resources we use are renewable and some are not. True renewables include energy sources like wind and solar. Sort-of renewables include water, food and firewood. Although these can be tapped or grown to satisfy demand, aquifer draw-down and soil erosion can limit how great a load can be sustained. All material resources need to be used wisely, not wastefully, since most resource use usually entails waste products, expense and disposal of unused material. Nonrenewables can be either reclaimable, like metals, or expendable (nonreclaimable) like petroleum. A reason for special care in consumption of expendables is that the supply is limited. Once used up, they're gone for good. \nReclaimables: In the 4.5 billion years of earth's existence, seismic and erosive action changed the distribution of materials in it; many valuable minerals became concentrated into a small number of areas, making them far more practical to extract than if they were more uniformly distributed. This fortunate situation is a one-time happening; if we throw them away they become widely dispersed, so when the concentrated sources run out, we either lose them or we have to collect them some time later at great expense. This is is why we need to recycle aluminum and many other metals including copper, lead, zinc, titanium and even iron. You'd think we'd keep pretty careful control of the more expensive stuff like gold, silver and platinum, but surprisingly a little of that still gets tossed (but less than used to be). Actually aluminum is abundant and not hard to find, but it takes a lot of energy to extract it from its ore, so reclaiming it pays too. \nExpendables: The petroleum we are using up today took many millions of years to form. At the current consumption rate we will use up all the petroleum we can get in 45 years (ref.). After that, we have to have figured out an alternative or we are in deep muck. Currently we have no practical alternative, especially for mobile, "go anywhere anytime" uses like cars. Hydrogen sounds good on the surface, but the only practical way to mass-produce it is from petroleum, losing energy as we do! So if we can postpone that moment of awful truth by conserving fuel now, we have a better chance of developing a true alternative. I hope you're on the side of the future. Your children will thank you.
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So far, there's not enough demand to warrent the extra cost of developing alternative energy sources.  In order to stop using oil (for power) we will need to find cheaper ways of getting alternative energy or become much more motivated to do so.
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what's the heat source?
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NativeEnergy is actively developing Native American and farmer-owned wind, solar, and methane projects around the country and is supported by Melissa Etheridge.\n\ncc
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A renewable energy source is one that can be "renewed" , or can be produced again. Examples are wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal. Non-renewable energy comes from sources that cannot be created again, such as petrolium and coal.\nOur world is now looking for new renewable energy sources to take the place of nonrenewables when they run out.
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Natural gas is a very good source for energy, but it is non-renewable with our current technology. \n\nHydro-electric is a viable energy source for electricty. It will always be available unless the water cycle ends.\n\nCoal is a good source for heat and power, but it does have some polluting characteristics in its natural state.\n\nNuclear is good for electricity production, steam generation and heat (from steam), it does leave residual waste, that is more concentrated radioactivity than what occurs naturally.\n\nFuel cells require power to produce but they work very well. They use readily available materials and can be scaled to the power output that is needed.\n\nGeothermal is good for heating houses and on a large scale in some areas for producing electricity. It is also a renewable power source.\n\nWind and solar are two more options that are becoming readily available for the end user. They are generally coupled with a battery system for calm periods of weather and night time.
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Green energy that includes natural enegetic processes.  Geothermal power, wind power, small-scale hydropower, solar power, biomass power, tidal power and wave power fall under such a category. Some versions may also include power derived from the incineration of waste.\n\nRemember that no power source is impact-free. For instance, concerns are raised over bird kills and in some cases noise pollution by windmills and over heavy metal use and associated mining damage by raw materials used for constructing solar cells.\n\nHere in Greece we have used windmills  ancients before electricity but now we use it to produse electricity for our islands. We use also solar cells and  small-scale hydropower to produse electicity.
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A good place to start will be to look at the following websites \n\nThermal Energy and States of Matter\nhttp://www.pschweigerphysics.com/thermenergy.html\n\nThermal Energy\nhttp://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/physics17/chapter6/chapter6.html\n\nThermodynamics and Thermal Physics guides\nhttp://physics.about.com/cs/thermodynamics/\n\nIf your doing a project you might look into "Ocean Thermal energy conservation" as a topic.\n\nOcean Thermal energy conservation is used to generate electricity using the temperature difference of seawater at different depths
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Thermal energy IS heat.
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It is indeed being done, and I have toured a geothermal plant in New Zealand.\n\nMost ways of generating geothermal power rely indirectly on the heat of the molten rock beneath the surface. This heat usually moves closer to the surface via fluids that travel up local networks of faults and fractures. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Geothermal_energy_methods.png for a simplified illustration of this.\n\nSee the wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal, for further discussion of the ways geothermal energy is extracted today.\n\nThe point made in the previous answer is also very valid. Powers at be favour the production of traditional energy via coal,oil and gas, and so a lot of money goes into extracting those and keeping them more economically viable that other alternative energy sources like Geothermal energy.
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You did a great job of identifying the common energy found in the general press.  However, you did leave out Biological, Geothermal and Oceanic Energy.  Geothermal sources are well documented there are several untapped sources that could add almost 1% to the US energy sources.  Others who have responded to you shared Biological sources such as Methane and Ethanol.  However, they failed to mention the Methane Hydrates that are in the Caribbean Sea.  (This is technically a fossil fuel rather then a renewable.)\n\nWhen you spoke of water I take it you were thinking hydro-power such as dammed river basins.  There are three primary Ocean based sources that I think do not get much play.  Thermal, Wave and Tidal are all Ocean water power.\n\nThermal power makes use of the difference in deep water cooler temperatures and warmer surface temperatures.  Using a Rankine or Sterling engine it should be possible to use the cooler water of the deep ocean (between 200 and 400 meters) to return the working fluid to fluid and extract power from the difference in the phase change or fluid expansion.  The issue is to achieve this depth requires that the power extraction needs to be fairly far into the ocean and unless the power generated is used to convert water to hydrogen the transfer of the power under water is inefficient.\n\nWave energy uses two different mediums, one is the difference in air pressure in a cylinder as the waves raise and lower the pressure in the cylinder increases and reduces  and act as a kind of low pressure bellows for moving air.  Whether this would be enough for producing significant energy remains to be seen.  (A new method using a fluid and a valve that takes advantage of both the increase and the decrease of pressure exerted by the changing water levels appears to have some merit.)  The other method is a direct mechanical energy conversion where the rising wave front raises a buoy which either pulls up on a crankshaft or a cable and in the trough the cable length or crank returns to minimum.\n\nAnd finally there is tidal, there are two different types of Tidal or Ocean current extraction.  The first is the most common in which a bay or tidal estuary is dammed (barricade) and the difference in heights between the Ocean and the tidal estuary form the head or force applied to a submerged turbine.\n\nThe other method is called Tidal Stream.  In this method the turbine is submerged in a natural narrowing such as an inlet or in deeper water and take advantage of the flow or currents of water energy.  Of the two the Tidal Stream is the least common and is in it's infancy.  As you can place a large quantity of Tidal Stream converters in open Ocean waters it has the greatest opportunity to generate the most energy for the least amount of environmental change.\n\nHowever, I do have a question for you.  In your consideration of Solar energy you probably have explored Photovoltaic Cells and Solar Furnaces; however, have you explored Solar Chimneys?  There was an experiment done in the late 70's in Spain in which a large metal "Chimney" was painted black and as it heated up cooler surface air would enter at the bottom and rise towards the top where a turbine was installed.
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electricity or power obtained from moving water\nmainly from dams and tide power plants
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Are you referring to hydroelectric power?\n\nWater behind the dam is stored energy called potential energy because it has the potential to do work, but isn't doing any work at the moment.  As the water flows down through the turbines of the hydroelectric plant, it is kinetic energy, or energy that is actually doing work.\n\nThe turbine spins a generator, which is connected to the power grid through transformers.\n\n\nA newer, experimental variant of hydroelectic power is using large volumes of water in man-made, elevated lakes to store energy.  During non-peak usage periods, such as late at night, electric pumps will pump water into these lakes.  Then, during peak usage periods, during the day (particularly the afternoon), the water is allowed to flow down through pipes to turbines to generate electricity again.   It's not a very efficient system, but does offer a possible way to store electricity until it's needed.
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1.) Solar heat collectors that store sun energy in oil or water. Walls that are a foot thick will heat up during the day and release the heat into the house at night.  \n2.) Burn renewable fuels like alcohol/ wood/ charcoal/ biogas/ natural fat candles\n3.) Compost/fermentation - Decomposing organic material generates heat, it was used to heat greenhouses years ago. The irish used to make poteen by fermenting potatoes, sugar and water. The pot filled with the mash gave off heat so they would put the pots in their beds to warm them up.  \n4.) Body warmth - fill your home up with animals or friends (humans generate about 60 watts depending on size)\n5.) Reversible exothermic (give off heat) chemical reactions - certain salts and water mixed together generate a lot of heat. The japanese are developing self heating cans using this concept. \n6.) Friction rub the house walls to warm them up.\n7.) Drop heavy objects from a height and when they hit the floor the kinetic energy turnms into thermal energy\n8.) If you are not living n the house fill the house up with radioctive material like plutonium that will make the house hot.