GUÐLAUGUR ÞÓR ÞÓRÐARSSON, ICELANDIC MINISTER OF ENVIRONMENT, ENERGY AND CLIMATE, ROCHELLE LONGVAL, VP GEOTHERMAL BLUE SPARK ENERGY, AMY MILLER, BLUE SPARK ENERGY, AND RÓSBJÖRG JÓNSDÓTTIR, CEO OF IREC,
The Iceland Renewable Energy Cluster invited all companies and individuals to submit their innovations for the IGC 2024 Innovation Award, which is being awarded for the first time this year.
The award aims to recognize and celebrate outstanding technological innovations and projects in geothermal energy in the fields of climate resilience, sustainability and emission reduction, technological breakthroughs, new geothermal applications, and improvements in energy output or efficiency.
This award is a great opportunity to highlight the groundbreaking contributions of the exceptional innovations currently growing within our sector. The IGC committee aims for these solutions to be recognized internationally.
The winner is ÍSOR - Iceland Geosurvey, promoting flexible couplings.
According to our review, all members of the nomination committee agreed that the winner is ÍSOR, for their flexible couplings. Generally, wells are an operator’s most important asset in a power plant. Flexible couplings represent a novel patented technology, which has been in development for the past 10 years. Their goal is to mitigate casing failures in high-temperature wells, thereby increasing the reliability of wells and possibly leading to increased flexibility in the operation of power plants using the technology in drilling. Here, the focus is on Novelty and Technical Achievement.
The ÍSOR project exceeded greatly in the fields of security and stability, promotes increased safety for drilling, and enhances the current knowledge within the field to innovate a new technology - with the potential of being applied on a global scale!
Honorable recognition goes to Blue Spark Energy, promoting technology to mitigate scaling in geothermal systems.
Better understanding and increased options to improve the utilization of geothermal energy, even with variable characteristics, include new challenges such as scaling in boreholes and pipelines.
Blue Spark Energy brings new and most appreciated technology to the industry which if all goes in the best way could increase the security of geothermal and even further in other fields.
Again, the focus is on Novelty and Technical achievement but also on adapting technology proved in other industries to geothermal environments. This innovation provides new ways for scale removal and expands the potential of current technological solutions available within the field of scale removal. The panel of experts believes strongly in the Blue Spark Energy technology and looks forward to following the future developments in the coming months and years.