Getting into Hot Water: Good for Defense Department.

• Author: Heckmann, Laura

SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- The Defense Department's reliance on civilian power grids exposes it to "unacceptable" strategic vulnerabilities such as natural disasters and cyberattacks, and the solution might be in the ground, one expert said.

Geothermal energy generates power from the heat in the planet's crust, creating an energy source that is "on 24/7" with a supply line "straight down to the center" of the Earth, said Ken Wisian, associate director of the Bureau of Economic Geology's Environmental Division at the University of Texas at Austin.

It is uninterruptible, unbreakable and once perfected, "rapidly scalable," making it an ideal solution to the Defense Department's power grid vulnerabilities, he said recently at the National Defense Industrial Association's Science and Engineering Technology conference.

Geothermal energy has been a global energy source for more than a hundred years, but its potential remains relatively untapped, said Wisian, who is a retired Air Force major general. Advances in drilling and exploration technology, however, have put it on the "cusp of a revolution," and the Defense Department needs to get in on the action.

Conventional geothermal energy mines a naturally occurring water or steam system deep--typically miles--underground, Wisian said. A relatively new approach called "Geothermal Anywhere" mines the heat in the rock using an artificial circulation...