Water treatment is powered by the geyser and in turn the leftover brown water feeds the geyser.
Pretty neat (for sewage)!
That doesn't sound right. It seems to come from Wikipedia with a 2019 date, but even then:
The Geysers produced 5,543 GWh in 2022 [1].
California generation from renewables:
2019: 64,336 GWh [2]
2023: 76,153 GWh [3]
[1] https://geysers.com/The-Geysers/Geysers-By-The-Numbers
[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
[3] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
I found an estimate for a typical AA batteries energy content as 4 watt-hours. (14.4 kj).
Rounding the energy output from ‘the geysers’ to 6 Terawatt hours (6000 gigawatt hours), means 1.5 trillion AA batteries per year, every year.
That’s a lot of battery changes! In fact, if someone went around doing nothing but changing batteries, 1 per second, 12 hours a day, 365 days a year, they’d need a staff of approximately 100,000 of those people to keep up.
I can see why it was more economical to do what they’re doing. Also, apparently only 4 billion AA batteries are made per year [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235197892...]
However, most geothermal systems already have issues with lots of salts and minerals being pulled from the surrounding rock (even with in-Situ water), to the point that maintaining equipment when things are constantly trying to dissolve and/or crystallize in them is one of the dominant costs.
So as long as the water is treated enough it doesn’t ‘cook’ into a gelatinous mass when it hits the hot rocks, it probably isn’t making the problem any worse.
Some geothermal systems in the Salton Sea have had issues with deposition of metal sulfides, with the deposits being so rich in silver they are in effect high grade ores (including native silver metal). Unfortunately these weren't economical to extract, but they do act as artificial replicas of natural ore forming systems.
See also: the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes whose epicenter was the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake geothermal plant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ridgecrest_earthquakes
https://news.usni.org/2019/07/09/california-earthquakes-leav...
https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=35.766&mlon=-117.605&zoo... (Epicenter)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Air_Weapons_Station_Chin...
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/10874/?...
Do you have any information which directly supports this?