Lithuania is booming with renewable energy sources, with electricity increasingly generated from wind and solar, but geologists, energy specialists and defence experts are also discussing another option: geothermal energy underfoot.
The use of geothermal energy, which is generated from hot water, steam or very hot rocks underground, is nothing new, and Iceland has built a large part of its economy around this form of energy. Now it turns out that Lithuania has the potential to tap into it too.
Studies suggest that Lithuania’s theoretical geothermal capacity could reach around 25,000 megawatts, more than 12 times the country’s total electricity demand. According to geologist Saulius Šliaupas, Lithuania is located on one of the most thermally active parts of the East European Platform. The East European Platform is a geological structure that is generally considered too cold to be used for energy production. Šliaupas said that the average heat flow in the East European Platform is about 43 milliwatts per square meter. In Vilnius, it is 39 milliwatts per square meter, but in the western part of Lithuania it reaches 70 to 80 milliwatts per square meter, and in some bores even 90 milliwatts per square meter, which is a unique phenomenon in the entire platform.
The geologist explained that the anomaly is caused by the composition of the crystalline bedrock, which generates heat from the radioactive decay of various elements – including potassium, thorium, uranium. As a result, western Lithuania, especially in the Baltic sedimentary basin, has a geothermal potential that its neighbors do not have.
Simonas Valadkevičius, director of the energy company Lavastream, said that
geothermal energy’s competitors are not wind or solar energy, but imported electricity,
which currently covers Lithuania’s basic demand. Lithuania imports a large part of its electricity from Latvia or Sweden, and the choice is to go in the direction of nuclear energy, which has uncertain costs and is a time-consuming process, or to use what is already available, namely geothermal resources in western Lithuania.
Geothermal energy is attractive from an economic point of view. According to calculations made by the investment bank Lazard in 2025, electricity produced by new geothermal plants costs 56-93 euros per megawatt-hour, while a new nuclear power plant would produce electricity that would cost 120-188 euros per megawatt-hour. Over the past 15 years, the cost of nuclear power has increased by 47%, while geothermal energy has increased by only 16%. Valadkevičius added that geothermal energy could become even cheaper over the next decade. He said that the technologies would become reliable in terms of quality, risk management and cost, and geothermal energy extracted in western Lithuania could become several times cheaper than the developers of offshore wind farms promise.
In addition to economic considerations, geothermal energy is attractive for another reason – it does not require supply chains. Kristina Rimkūnaitė, an expert at the NATO Vilnius Center of Excellence for Energy Security, pointed to a clear link between fuel logistics and military vulnerability. She said that, looking at NATO’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, it took five to six liters of diesel to deliver one liter of diesel, and about half of the incidents with casualties occurred directly during the transportation of fuel or water, which is a lack of a logistics-dependent energy system.
Meanwhile,
in the case of geothermal energy, the “fuel” for operation is obtained from a source below the power plant.
There are no tankers or convoys required, and there are no supply chains to disrupt. The resources are also underground, and they are much harder to destroy than solar panels or wind turbines. Rimkūnaitė noted that in California, geothermal energy has been used to supply military bases since the 1980s, and two military facilities in Germany are also currently supplied with geothermal energy, and its wider use is being considered. She said that the use of geothermal resources should be developed in peacetime, as the process is longer than installing solar panels or building wind turbines. At the same time, once geothermal energy is used, it is one of the most stable and secure resources available.
Rimkūnaitė expressed concerns about the solar energy infrastructure, as some of the panel elements contain controllers manufactured in potentially hostile countries, thus jeopardizing their operation in crisis situations.
Read the full article in English here: https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2919110/the-future-of-lithuania-s-energy-industry-lies-beneath-its-feet
Read also: Latvia’s National Guard seeks greater participation from the regions
The post Lithuania’s energy future: underfoot, not in the air appeared first on Baltic News Network.
