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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- The federal government planned to hold a lease sale Tuesday for public lands suitable for geothermal development.
The Bureau of Land Management in Salt Lake City was to auction 17 parcels in Utah and 10 in Idaho.
Geothermal -- a time-honored source of continuous power -- is ramping up across the West. California and Nevada are the country's leading producers of steam-powered electricity.
Companies also are rushing to exploit Utah's unrealized geothermal potential on an edge of the Great Basin desert, where boiling water circulates a few thousand feet under the barren landscape.
A Utah company, Provo-based Raser Technologies Inc., started producing geothermal power last year at a site about 15 miles west of Minersville in Beaver County.
The BLM has leased hundreds of thousands of acres for geothermal development in the past few years.
(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
