Current state of the societal readiness level in the tested countries

More geothermal energy (GE) is needed for stable baseload renewable energy/heat supply and seasonal heat storage. Because of the high up-front investments in drilling and the risk of failure, non-invasive early exploration methods are important to minimize the uncertainty of geological conditions while reducing exploration costs. However, the limited availability of subsurface data hinders the development of the geothermal industry's ability to identify and focus on the most promising sites, e.g., in terms of probability of success or lowest risk for seismicity.

In addition to geological and technological risks, political and economic conditions vary from country to country and within a country from one administrative level to another (national, regional, local). Moreover, the societal acceptability of a technology whose details are unknown to most non-experts requires trust in experts and trust in decision-making bodies (Siegrist, 2021, Seidl et al., 2022). 

This report presents the results of an extended desk study that includes data on all 14 cases in nine countries that were studied in the GO-Forward project. The research question reads as follows: “What is the current state of the societal embeddedness level (SEL) of deep GE technologies in each of the 14 cases in nine countries that are studied in GO-Forward?”