Development of Metric for Measuring the Impact of RD&D Funding on GTO's Geothermal Exploration Goals (Presentation): NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

The Department of Energy's Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) provides RD&D funding for geothermal exploration technologies with the goal of lowering the risks and costs of geothermal development and exploration. In 2012, NREL was tasked with developing a metric to measure the impacts of this RD&D funding on the cost and time required for exploration activities. The development of this metricincluded collecting cost and time data for exploration techniques, creating a baseline suite of exploration techniques to which future exploration and cost and time improvements could be compared, and developing an online tool for graphically showing potential project impacts (all available at http://en.openei.org/wiki/Gateway:Geothermal). The conference paper describes the methodology used todefine the baseline exploration suite of techniques (baseline), as well as the approach that was used to create the cost and time data set that populates the baseline. The resulting product, an online tool for measuring impact, and the aggregated cost and time data are available on the Open EI website for public access (http://en.openei.org).