Tournament Round 1, Match 11 - (3) Waste to Energy vs. (6) Geothermal Energy

(3) Waste to Energy vs. (6) Geothermal Energy. It's like the World Cup! In ways I don't really know...

Waste to Energy

Waste to Energy is fun. There's two major ways to do it. First, the gases released from landfills can be captured and sent to companies that want to use that gas to power boilers or generators. The other way is for waste to be sent straight into a furnace that generates steam which creates electricity. A third way is to put waste into your DeLorean's fusion generator, but that's not very popular and happens mostly in Back to the Future.

Impact on the Environment (13/15):
It's good, it really is. Making waste useful for something other than taking up space is great. And it can reduce the amount of natural gas we have to mine out of the ground. But the downside is you're still burning things and that creates carbon emissions. Good, but not perfect.

Practicality (9/10):
I mean, I don't see what's impractical about this. The garbage is already being gathered up to be put in landfills. Why not add a few steps to make it useful for something? And the landfill gases are being burned off a lot of the time now anyway, so it doesn't make sense to let it go to waste.

Sustainability (9/10):
We will ALWAYS have garbage. In some form or another, garbage is going to be around until (really after) humans die out or get raptured off to heaven (or hell if you don't recycle. God's watching you). If we put these W2E systems in place now, they'll be good for something like 30 years after the landfills are closed. And if we make things break down even easier, that could last even longer.

Awesomeness (5/10):
Wow, burning garbage. That's... um... great. I'm pretty sure people have been doing that in developing countries hundreds or thousands of years before they were even called 'developing countries.' Nothing too exciting here.

User Input (1/5):
I was tempted not to give points for this one because the puns were so bad, but rules are rules.

Geothermal Energy

Geothermal Energy is what the name implies, energy from the heat in the earth. Mostly it's used for heating buildings, but there are ways to make energy from steam generation. To oversimplify how this works, tubes filled with water are put deep underground and as the water flows through the earth, it heats up and is piped up to the surface where that heat is utilized.

Impact on the Environment (13/15):
Geothermal Energy is so useful that most buildings with geothermal wells don't even need to rely on fossil fuels to heat them at all. And operating these wells don't release any carbon emissions, which is great! There are some concerns about what taking heat out of the ground will do to the composition of the earth, but it hasn't seemed to do too much damage so far.

Practicality (8/10):
Geothermal Energy is much like other alternative energy sources: installing it is the hardest part. Once the system is in the ground, it's nice and reliable and consistent. There are some concerns about where you can dig and the possibility of striking some unknown cave system that will collapse or awakening mole people that will burst forth from the earth and kill us all. Other than that, it's a pretty decent system.

Sustainability (7/10):
A lot of people will probably say that it's a safe and secure system. For now and the next 20 to 30 years, yes, it is a good safe system. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (my nickname: Great Gulf Oil Spill or G-GOS) is making me concerned about what happens when these pipes rupture. We could have steam explosions right underneath a large metropolitan area. And how do we measure or even fix these pipes which are thousands of feet under the ground?

Awesomeness (7/10):
I mean, it is an awesome concept. I'll give it that. But you can't see anything except for a pipe that comes out of the ground. Snoooooze.

User Input (0/5):
I don't blame you, I was rooting for the other one, too.

Alright, let's tally those scores!

Waste to Energy: 37
Geothermal Energy: 35

Yikes! The closest one yet in this tournament! And just think if that comment hadn't been left! W2E would have won by 1 point! Tomorrow (maybe Sunday) I'll be taking a look at (2) Solar Power vs. (7) Nuclear Power.

As I promised yesterday, here are the rules for the next round of the tournament. I obviously have to re-rate everything on a different scale, because otherwise you'd already know that Recycling [35] would beat Wetland Conservation [31].

There will be three criteria for ideas to get points. 20 points for how good (environmentally speaking) the average person feels when they use or take advantage of the product or idea. 20 points for how guilty they feel for not using the product or idea. And 10 points for user comments. Each comment comes out to 2 points, with a max of 5 comments per idea. Sounds good? Good!