Piero Ginori Conti

Piero Ginori Conti was an Italian aristocrat, chemist and industrialist who in 1904 built the first geothermal power generator at Larderello, Italy, using steam from underground volcanic vents to drive a small piston engine connected to a dynamo that lit five light bulbs, the worlds first electricity ever generated from geothermal steam. By 1913 the Larderello site he pioneered had grown into a proper geothermal power plant with substantial generating capacity, the first geothermal power station in the world built to supply electricity to the wider grid. Larderello, the site of Contis original experiment, remains in operation as a working geothermal power complex more than a century later, one of the longest continuously used renewable energy sites in the world. His 1904 demonstration is recognized as the founding moment of geothermal electricity generation as a technology.