GEOTHERMAL DIRECT USE DEVELOPMENT TO OPTIMIZING RENEWABLE
ENERGY UTILIZATION FOR AGRICULTURAL AND TOURISM ACTIVITIES IN INDONESIA Written by : Nicolas Jalu Pangesty, Muhammad Dzulfikri Firdaus, Adidanu Saputra Indonesia becomes a blessed country due to a huge natural energy resource, especially geothermal energy. Up to 40% of the world geothermal resources that separated into 312 places in whole area, makes Indonesia have the highest potential of geothermal energy. From 28 Gigawatt, the production of this renewable energy just reach 4.7 % utilized based on Pertamina Geothermal Energys prognosis in 2015. So there are a lot of opportunities to develop geothermal energy to increase the utilization of this energy for every aspect of life. Nowadays, Indonesia has been developing direct use implementation for geothermal energy utilization to many kinds of agricultural and tourism cases. Geothermal manifestations on the surface such as hot spring or geothermal wells, etc., can be applied for direct use applications. Generally, the geothermal resources located at the heights or mountains where the agricultural activities and tourism mostly placed. They need heat for their process and activities, so this is the perfect chances to develop geothermal direct use development. The simple utilization of geothermal direct use comes from getting steam from small geothermal wells for spa and hot swimming pool, brine from separator in existing power plant, and produce the heat or steam from traditional shallow geothermal well for mushroom cultivation, copra and cocoa drying. In other cases, direct use can utilized for palm sugar processing and manipulate the aquaculture environment such as mixing the hot water from geothermal manifestation with fresh water to make the optimal environment for catfish grows. Some area of geothermal energy production, located at the tea plantation, where the heat of steam can utilized for the drying and withering process of tea leaves. Through the activities of geothermal direct use, can be the simple way to optimize this renewable energy utilization in every opportunity with the easy method, green, and cheap. The advantages are to increase the productivity of agricultural and aquaculture activities, decrease the fuel use, decrease the emission, and decrease the cost of agricultural processing. So, Geothermal direct use is the perfect chance to optimizing geothermal utilization and advantages.
Keyword : Geothermal, Direct utilization method, Agriculture