To date, 66 thermal water and steam-and hydrothermal fields have been exploited in Russia. Half of them are in operation providing approximately 1.5 million Gkal of heat annually (Povarov and Svalova, 2010). Approximately half of the extracted resource is used for space heating, a third for heating greenhouses, and about 13% for industrial processes. There are also approximately 150 health resorts and 40 factories bottling mineral water.

Heat pumps are at an early stage of development in Russia. An experimental facility was set up in early 1999 in the Philippovo settlement of the Yaroslavl district. Eight heat pumps are used for a 160-pupil school building. There are also some buildings using heat pumps in Moscow (Svalova, 2010).

A district heating project is being proposed for Vilyuchinsk City on Kamchatka (Nikolskiy et al., 2010).

Unfortunately, no specific data were provided on direct-use geothermal, thus it was suggested that we use the data from WGC2005 (Svalova, personal communication, 2009).

Based on data from Kononov and Povarov (2005) and modified by Lund et al. (2005), the breakdown of the various applications are:

16.5 MWt and 328 TJ/yr for individual space heating;
93.5 MWt and 1,857 TJ/yr for district heating;
160 MWt and 3,279 TJ/yr for greenhouse heating (estimated at 46.5 ha);
4 MWt and 63 TJ/yr of fish and cattle raising;
4 MWt and 69 TJ/yr for agricultural drying (wool washing, paper production and wood drying);
4 MWt and 63 TJ/yr for swimming and bathing;
25 MWt and 473 TJ/yr for industrial processes;
1.2 MWt and 11.5 TJ/yr for geothermal heat pumps – mainly in Kamchatka, consisting of 100 units.

The total for the country is then 308.2 MWt and 6,143.5 TJ/yr.

The installed capacity figures are confirmed in a paper by Butuzov et al.