A total of 42 students from the Zonzamas Integrated Vocational Training Center and the Las Maretas Secondary School (Arrecife, Lanzarote) are participating this Thursday in a guided tour of the Timanfaya National Park together with two researchers from the Public University of Navarra (UPNA). This visit is part of the events celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Timanfaya National Park, linked to the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Energy of the Government of the Canary Islands.
They will be accompanied by Miguel Araiz Vega, tenured professor at UPNA, who teaches subjects related to heat transmission, refrigeration systems and thermal engineering, and Elba Elía Ibarrola, a student of the degree in Industrial Technology Engineering at the same Navarrese university center.
The visit will begin at the Mancha Blanca Visitors and Interpretation Center, where students will attend a conference on geothermal energy, and will continue on the Islote de Hilario, an area of geothermal anomalies and the place where the geothermal prototypes developed by the UPNA are installed.
The students from Lanzarote, who are training in studies related to renewable energies and the maintenance of thermal and fluid installations, will learn how this new technology works, based on thermoelectric generators and high-efficiency heat exchangers, "robust, modular, scalable, very easy to maintain" and which does not produce environmental impact.
These activities, which are part of the program of events celebrating the fifty years of Timanfaya as a National Park committed to dissemination, conservation and scientific research, are completed with the conferences scheduled for Friday.
Conference on the geothermal potential of Lanzarote
The conferences New possibilities for geothermal energy in Lanzarote. From the Timanfaya National Park to Antarctica and The Timanfaya National Park and its geothermal study. History of two parallel lives, organized within the framework of the program of events to commemorate the fifty years of Timanfaya as a National Park, will present the geothermal potential of the island and the progress made so far.
Within the framework of these conferences, the results of a recent work carried out by the Public University of Navarra (UPNA) will be addressed, which has allowed the development of a unique technology worldwide on the island to convert the geothermal heat of the soil into electrical energy without the need for an underground water reservoir or the installation of turbines, pumps or fans.
David Astrain, industrial engineer and professor at UPNA, together with professor Miguel Araiz Vega and doctor in Geology José Albert Beltrán, one of the leading specialists in geothermal energy in Spain, will address this and other issues in this free and open access presentation on Friday, March 28 at 5:00 p.m. at the Mancha Blanca Visitors and Interpretation Center (Lanzarote), for which prior registration is recommended because capacity is limited. It can also be followed by streaming through the Youtube channel.
Carried out within the framework of the Electrovolcan project, this technological advance has had an enormous international impact, since it has allowed for the first time the continuous electrical generation on Deception Island, one of the active volcanoes in Antarctica. The power generated now feeds the volcanic monitoring and research sensors throughout the year.
Both NASA and the GNS institute of New Zealand have shown their interest in this new way of harnessing the geothermal heat of the soil implemented in the national park.