Preliminary Technical Risk Analysis for the Geothermal Technologies Program

This report explains the goals, methods, and results of a probabilistic analysis of technical risk for a portfolio of R&D projects in the DOE Geothermal Technologies Program ('the Program'). The analysis is a task by Princeton Energy Resources International, LLC (PERI), in support of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on behalf of the Program. The main challenge in the analysis liesin translating R&D results to a quantitative reflection of technical risk for a key Program metric: levelized cost of energy (LCOE). This requires both computational development (i.e., creating a spreadsheet-based analysis tool) and a synthesis of judgments by a panel of researchers and experts of the expected results of the Program's R&D.