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>For the past several decades, small earthquakes (less than 2.0) are regularly recorded in the area. This has been demonstrated to be caused by the water injection process used to produce the geothermal electricity at the power plant

TIL that the ongoing minor earthquakes at the Geysers I see when I make my daily check of the California earthquake map are man made, not natural.

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Fun fact: the epicenter of the magnitude 7.1 earthquake in 2019 was directly beneath the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, a site that hosts a 300MW injection-recharged geothermal field:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ridgecrest_earthquakes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Air_Weapons_Station_Chin...

https://openei.org/wiki/Coso_Geothermal_Area

It's a geothermally active area anyway - so seismicity is there to start. But yes, I am pretty sure the consensus is the water injection process causes the seismic activity.

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