Latest news with #GreenFire
Miami Herald
27-05-2025
- Miami Herald
13-year-old falls off Memorial Day parade trailer and dies, Ohio officials say
A teenage boy is dead after falling off a trailer during a Memorial Day parade in Ohio, officials say. The 13-year-old was part of a parade held in the community of Green. He fell off the front of a trailer being pulled by a pickup truck and was 'critically injured,' the Green Fire Department said in a May 26 news release. According to the city of Green, the Memorial Day parade was scheduled to begin at 10 a.m., after an annual pancake breakfast fundraiser at an area fire station. The boy fell off the float at 11:23 a.m. and was hit by the trailer's tires, the Summit County Sheriff's Office said in news release. 'Green Fire, who was on site, responded immediately and transported the child to Akron Children's Hospital,' firefighters said. However, the boy died due to his injuries. 'The incident remains under investigation,' officials said. The teen has not been publicly identified, but the department said he attended North Canton City Schools. Green is a roughly 10-mile drive southeast from downtown Akron.
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Pilot project seeks to fix Achilles heel of geothermal power
A pilot project from a team of oil industry veterans could save one of California's key clean energy resources from terminal decline. On Thursday, the Oklahoma City-based GreenFire Energy announced it had restored new life to a defunct well in the Geysers, the world's largest geothermal power station — and one that has been in a state of slow, decades-long collapse. By means of technology that taps the heat from underground — rather than the rapidly depleting water — the GreenFire team turned a well whose electric production had flatlined into a power producer. That offers a potential lifeline to the Geysers, which currently generates about 630 megawatts of on-demand, carbon free electricity to Northern California — down from 2,000 megawatts in 1987. 'You can see these gray wells — they've been abandoned,' said Rob Klenner, a former oil and gas engineer who is now GreenFire's chief executive, pointing to a diagram of the site where boreholes once funneled steam — heated by plate tectonics beneath California — up to spin turbines. 'There's still heat in this area, but it's kind of like a dry well,' Klenner said, comparing it to petroleum. 'Like, 'Hey, we got a little bit of oil, but not enough to make this economics, and then they shut everything in,'' Klenner said. The reason for the decline: the ferocious pace at which conventional forms of geothermal energy can use up water. Today, the Geysers plants use an average of 15 million gallons — 22 Olympic pools — per day. The complex's 18 power plants, spread across 45 miles, tap into the source in the form of the steam that spins their turbines. While this largely comes from treated municipal wastewater, it nonetheless represents a significant loss of water in a famously water-stressed region — and a significant brake on the ability of so-called hydrothermal fields to produce power. GreenFire's next-gen system, which sits atop a well that had also been largely abandoned for lack of pressure, takes an approach that produces power without losing water. Rather than spinning a turbine with the physical force of superheated water — which is then lost to the atmosphere — GreenFire's team circulates water in a closed loop to restore production. Now, as the steam rises from the hot rock below, it hits the heat exchanger of a different kind of power plant called an Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC), a closed-loop system full of a 'working fluid' that boils at a much lower temperature than water. As the working fluid moves through the pipes of the ORC, it spins a turbine and generates power — before releasing its heat into a condenser and falling, exhausted, back into the pump to start again. Inside the well, something similar is happening, Klenner said. The rising steam dumps its heat into the ORC and then gets reinjected into the new underground closed loop. 'It cools back down, and then we would reinject it,' he added. 'So now there's no water coming to the surface anymore.' He compared this system to injection wells that coax new oil out of failing oil wells — with the difference that ideally nothing leaves the ground. As the buzz in geothermal energy increasingly focuses on 'enhanced' forms of the technology that use techniques like fracking to create artificial underground cavern networks, Klenner hopes that techniques like this one offer a low-hanging fruit to revitalize existing resources. Proponents of enhanced geothermal (EGS) hope for geothermal drilling on a scale that rivals the oil and gas boom of the 2010s. But while GreenFire has its own EGS projects, Klenner noted that side of the business, almost by definition, means creating electricity at new sites which planners will then have to figure out how to connect to the grid. At the Geysers, he said, 'The infrastructure is already there. They already have the wells. They already have the power lines. Rather than going to an area where, you know, we want to go do this for the first time, we're working in an area that has everything already put together — which helps lower the cost hurdles.' Bringing the Geysers back to its late 20th Century peak, he noted, would be the equivalent of adding a gigawatt to the grid — the equivalent of building, say, hundreds of new wind turbines, with none of the challenges that such new builds entail. 'If we can do this in existing wells, and we could simply just double production, there's large opportunity,' he said. Updated at 9:50 a.m. EDT Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Officials propose banning popular water activity after uptick in complaints: 'Someone's really going to get hurt'
A proposed bill in Minnesota would ban wakesurfing along a stretch of the United States' longest river. The Mississippi River runs through the heart of Minnesota, giving residents access to plenty of aquatic recreational activities. But for a six-mile stretch just north of Minneapolis, Fox 9 reported, the river becomes more like a lake, with wake boats causing large waves that many residents believe are too dangerous. "It's going to happen that someone's really going to get hurt," local resident Tom McCullough told the news station. "When you have a dock or a floating dock or otherwise, you're like a drunken sailor trying to stand up on that dock. So, heaven forbid you have kids down here playing in the water." That, along with a fear that the waves could cause coastal erosion, prompted state Sen. John Hoffman to author a bill banning the boats, and wakesurfing, from that six-mile area. Opponents of the bill, including the boating industry, point to studies that show that boat wakes help aquatic life by increasing the amount of oxygen in the water. Those studies also show, however, that boats are best for the water and the shoreline when operating 200 feet from shore. Other studies, such as one from Wisconsin's Green Fire in 2024, show that wake boats can have a major impact on the environment. "Major issues of concern from wake boats and recreational wakes include elevated risks of spreading aquatic invasive species, accelerating shoreline erosion, damaging aquatic plant communities, resuspending lake sediment, water column mixing, and disturbing fauna," the report stated. The Sierra Club has noted that recreational boats and jet skis combine to use 1.4 billion gallons of gas annually. Although there are companies working on electric boats to combat that problem, it's still a hobby primarily powered by dirty energy. Between those environmental concerns and potential safety issues, many feel this bill is a no-brainer. "This is something they can easily do," McCullough told Fox 9. "We're not changing the world. We're just making this area safe." Do you think governments should ban the production of gas-powered lawn equipment? Absolutely Yes — but not yet I don't know Heck no Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
