Benvenuti in Italia!

Hi everyone! Wow, sorry for the long absence. My internet access has been somewhat stunted as I traveled through the French-German border, back to Paris, and on to Berlin. I'm now in Pisa for the European Geothermal Energy Council (EGEC) conference.

Here's a quick recap of what I've been up to.

Soultz and Karlsruhe:
I traveled to Soultz sous Forets, which is located near the French-German border, approximately 50 km north of Strasbourg in the Alsace region of France. The train ride out to Soultz took me through the French countryside, which is absolutely beautiful and exactly what I pictured. Tons of farmland, cute little houses and towns, very old and quaint. Soultz itself is an adorable little town. I met Dr. Albert Genter, one of the lead scientists at the Soultz project, who incidentally was making the same journey from Paris that I was, as he commutes every week from Orleans, just south of Paris. He drove me to the project site itself, which I was very excited about as Soultz is one of the oldest "EGS" projects, and (I'm fairly certain) the oldest currently in operation. I put EGS in quotes because, as I mentioned before, EGS is a somewhat amorphous term, and Soultz is not a purely EGS site. In actuality, it taps into an existing reservoir that greatly contributes to the flow rate and connectivity of the network. We discussed the history of Soultz a great bit, and spent some time talking about some of the unique geographic characteristics of the site. I got a tour of the facility, which was very short because Soultz is actually a very small project. It was very interesting to see what was going on there because Soultz is purely a research operation, it is not used at all for generation of commercial energy and none of the electricity produced is fed into the regional grid. Instead, the project managers are waiting for France's feed-in tariff revisions to be officialized (raised to .20 cents per kWh) before officially connecting into the grid. The delay is entirely political and is quite interesting in that everyone agrees that the tariff should be implemented, it is just waiting to be signed. Interesting effect of bureaucracy on the industry.

Dr. Genter treated me to a delicious lunch at a very cute little restaurant nearby. One of the site's managers and the financial administrator of the site joined us. When we completed our discussion, Dr. Genter drove me back to the train station, where I moved on to Karlsruhe, Germany, which is quite literally just on the other side of the border. I checked in to the Barbarossa Hotel, dropped off my things, and explored a little bit. It was already getting quite late, so I stopped in for a quick schnitzel and beer at a small restraunt. The waiter was hilarious and friendly and sent me off with what I think was a shot of licorice liquor, which seemed to be the standard. I arrived back at my hotel thoroughly exhausted and promptly fell asleep.

The next day, Dr. Thomas Kolbel, also a manager at the Soultz plant, picked me up from the hotel and drove me to Bruchsal, which is about 30 km northeast of Karlsruhe. The site there is one of the few Kalina cycle power plants in the world (versus the organic rankine cycle). The primary difference is that they use different fluid mediums--Kalina cycles use a mix of ammonia and water, whereas most ORCs use isobutane or something similar. Each cycle experiences different levels of efficiency at different temperatures. Dr. Kolbel was extremely nice and we discussed quite a bit about the German feed-in tariff system and how it differs from the feed-in tariff in France. As a side note, to get to Bruchsal, we had to drive on the Autobahn, which was very exciting! We were driving somewhere around 200 km per hour!

Unfortunately I wasn't feeling very well and developed quite a bad cough. When I arrived back at my hotel that day, I wanted to walk around the town a bit but instead fell asleep for a good 3 hours. I woke up with a slight fever so I decided to take it easy the rest of the day. The next day I left early and caught a train to Landau, still in the Rhine graben. I was picked up from the station by Dr. Joerg Baumgaertner, again, a manager of Soultz, and one of the lead people at Landau. Landau, it can be said, is a baby of the Soultz project, as are many in the area. Dr. Baumgaertner is an extremely jovial and good-natured man, and we had a very nice chat over a cup of coffee at the site. It was particularly interesting to discuss the permitting process for new sites, and the prospective of new projects in the Rhine graben. Landau is also one of the only successfully operating commercial EGS projects. It was essentially undertaken to prove that EGS can produce a commercial project, though the scale is still less than what is needed to demonstrate large-scale viability. After a tour of the facility, I traveled back to Karlsruhe and then back to Paris.

Paris round 2:
My second stint in Paris I stayed with a friend from Georgetown, Frank, and his family. They were extremely generous hosts and treated me to a nice French meal in addition to a few home-cooked ones that were quite enjoyable. This bit in Paris was really more for my enjoyment than the project, as my contact in Ademe rescheduled our meeting for the conference in Pisa. I got to do a lot of sightseeing, which was a lot of fun. I went up the Eiffel Tower with Frank and saw Paris beautifully lit up. I also went to the top of the Arc de Triomphe with Sam, which offered another incredible view. I went to the top of Notre Dame, visited the Lourve, spent some time at the Musee d'Orsay, and got to spend a bit of time basking in the beautiful weather in some of Paris's public parks. I spent a lot of time with Sam and Frank, which was nice after so much traveling alone. I had the most delicious pain au chocolat I've ever tasted, and ended up watching quite a bit of tennis as the French open was going on (and Frank's family are huge tennis fans). I was rooting for Soderling, but oh well.

Berlin:
After a fabulous couple of days in Paris, it was time for me to move on. I took an overnight train to Berlin. That was an experience in and of itself. I was in a compartment with six beds, two columns of three stacked up, and I was on the top bunk. It actually ended up being not so bad, except that I had a very poor view from up there. In the end it didn't matter much since I essentially slept the entire way. I awoke in Berlin around 8 in the morning and traveled to my hotel. Unfortunately, on the train ride there, my cold made a come back and I was stuck in my hotel most of the day with a very bad cough. I did a little exploring but got very tired very quickly so I returned for an early night. The next day I was happily feeling much better, so I decided to go on a walking tour of Berlin. It was very interesting and the tour guide was excellent. The tour focused a lot on the history of Berlin, which is as complicated and fascinating as I expected. Berlin is a very interesting city because, despite its rich history, or alternatively because of it, the city itself is extremely new, with lots of development still going on. My tour guide explained that it has been said of Berlin that it is always doomed to become, and never to be. Because so much of was destroyed in the war, and then later much of Eastern Berlin was redone by the Soviets, many of the old-looking buildings are total reconstructions of their predecessors and are actually not that old at all. Quite the contrast to Paris which is literally over-flowing with beautiful historical buildings and monuments. In any case the history of Berlin and Germany more broadly is hugely interesting and I am embarrassingly ignorant about much of it. I hope to rectify that upon my return to the city. I noted a few museums that I would definitely like to hit when I get back there. After having some dinner I headed back to the hotel since I had a very early flight the following morning. After making some arrangements and preparing for my day of travel ahead, I went to bed. As a quick side note, Germans (bless their souls) are quite generally fantastic at English, which made my life blissfully easy in Berlin. Berlin is also much more...not necessarily westernized, but has certainly absorbed much more of western influence. In Paris there were McDonalds around, but in Berlin, there are Burger Kings literally everywhere, tons of McDonalds, a few KFCs, and a bunch of Starbucks.

En Route:
The journey to Pisa took almost the entire day. Since I'm a rather nervous traveler, I left a big cushion of time at the Frankfurt airport. I arrived there early, because Ryan Air is apparently the most ontime European airline, at around 9:15 in the morning. My flight to Pisa departed at 2:45. Obviously I had a great deal of time to kill. I spent this time reading, writing a bit, walking aimlessly around the tiny terminal, and grabbing a snack every now and then. Finally I got on my flight to Pisa.

Pisa so far:
I arrived at my hostel at around 5:00 pm. After a brief recuperation I set out to find a sim card and to buy a big bottle of water since it's not drinkable from the tap here. I also had to find some tights since both the pairs I brought have since gotten rather horrible runs. That was the hardest part of my expedition as it's currently about 75-80 degrees in Pisa and pantyhose are not in very high demand. As a general rule, most of Europe is not air conditioned, and I find myself a bit spoiled. It wasn't too big of an issue in Berlin, which hovered around a pleasant 72-75 degrees, but Pisa is much more humid and I've caught myself being rather whiny about it. Despite that, I summoned the will to walk over the Leaning Tower. It was already quite late in the day so I didn't get to spend much time there, but I did take a few photos of the area. It's almost surreal seeing it in person after seeing so many photographs. Half of my trip so far I've spent unable to really process that fact that I'm actually experiencing what I'm experiencing. In any case, I spent some time just lying the grass, staring up the tower and cathedral and listening to some music. It was rather relaxing.

Tomorrow morning it's off the conference, which I'm rather excited, but quite nervous about. I hope that it will be useful to my research and that I'm able to meet and talk with some of the people in attendance. It should be quite the experience!

I promise I'll try to update a bit more frequently from now on! Hope everyone is doing well!