[HN Gopher] Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our ...
___________________________________________________________________
Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet
Author : pseudolus
Score : 138 points
Date : 2025-03-02 19:33 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| pseudolus wrote:
| https://archive.ph/mkwrR
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I've designed a lot of hardware in the Oil and Gas, HVAC and pump
| spaces. If anyone wants to design and build hardware in this
| space my contact info is in my bio.
|
| There is real opportunity here.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| Is this a PR campaign by Quaise?
|
| Yesterday Real Engineering published a video about the importance
| of geothermal energy and talked about them and today it's the New
| Yorker.
|
| And unless I'm missing something, neither outlets mentioned this
| being part of a campaign or anything of that sort.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| It is an interesting application of technology, and hits the
| "good use of oil and gas tech" button as well. So there is a
| chance that this was just a natural pickup from the company
| press release.
|
| ... But it definitely smells like a guerrilla marketing
| campaign.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| I am highly suspicious of the Real Engineering channel. It
| seems like he does full on marketing videos for whoever is
| willing to pay or provide access. The video on Helios was
| suspect and so is this one.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Personally I thought the video was interesting. Even if it's
| promoting a company agenda, the technology itself is cool. I
| learned some stuff.
| jw1224 wrote:
| Even Sabine Hossenfelder did a video about it today too:
| https://youtu.be/dOIlMdIqXbQ?si=FG4ZdDq6jkjk_nMp
| giantg2 wrote:
| I wonder what affects we might have when cooling the earth
| (ground). Smacks of the same sort of hubris that we couldn't
| possibly warm the earth. I guess conservation of energy is a hard
| concept to comprehend.
| Aachen wrote:
| This sounds rather dismissive that anyone could have thought
| about this. I never looked up what effect this has either (in
| my defense, I'm not a user of this type of energy), but that
| doesn't make me conclude conservation of energy is hard to
| comprehend
| mbrumlow wrote:
| Also. What are the effects of brining that heat up to the
| atmosphere?
|
| One day humans will realize that their existence and energy use
| will always have an environmental impact.
| thomasmg wrote:
| In many places it makes sense to heat the earth (yes) in summer
| using the heat pump (using electricity from photovoltaics) so
| that efficiency in winter is better.
| lkbm wrote:
| Not guaranteeing I got these conversions correct, but I believe
| the rough estimate for the thermal energy of the Earth is on
| the order of 10^31 Joules.[0] while the rough estimate for
| human energy use is 10^20 Joules per year.[0]
|
| So if we switched to 100% geothermal (a few orders of magnitude
| more than we're actually discussing using), we'd be using on
| the order of a hundred trillionth of the energy per year?
|
| [0] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/51920/amount-
| of-...
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
| outime wrote:
| At least here in Finland, it's becoming more and more common for
| houses to use this kind of energy. I've even noticed a few
| isolated apartment blocks using it. Finland obviously requires a
| lot of heat, and it seems that everyone I know who uses it is
| happy, so it's certainly interesting technology.
| phreeza wrote:
| Is that really geothermal, or is it a heat pump? A heat pump
| just uses the thermal mass of the earth to provide more
| efficient electric heating and cooling, it doesn't heat using
| geothermal power.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| Ground source heat pumps are generally considered to be
| "geothermal".
| moogly wrote:
| You're not wrong; however that is an unfortunate misnomer
| since ground source bore holes (along with horizontal soil
| collectors and lakebed collectors) on the order of 100-300
| m deep are still utilizing heat from the sun stored in the
| ground, and not heat produced from Earth's core.
|
| I'd say it's a pretty good idea to not conflate the two by
| using more precise language, even if not doing so might be
| "technically correct".
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think the Otaniemi project didn't pan out too great and that
| was proper geothermal. Ground source heatpumps are great. But
| those are often just capturing heat that comes from sunlight
| and get stored if I have understood right.
| Animats wrote:
| 2008 article on deep geothermal power plant.[1] 2016 article on
| shutdown of plant.[2] "The technology worked but unfortunately
| the cost of implementing the technology and also the cost of
| delivering the electricity that was produced to a market was just
| greater than the revenue stream that we could create."
|
| There's a group called DEEP which is trying to combine deep
| geothermal with fracking technology, to get better heat transfer.
| This creates small earthquakes as a side effect. They're working
| on that.[3]
|
| A startup called FERVO is still trying.[4]
|
| Shallow geothermal for building heat works fine, but it takes a
| lot of drilling just to get some heat.
|
| So far, nobody seems to have a profitable deep geothermal power
| operation.
|
| [1]
| https://e360.yale.edu/features/deep_geothermal_the_untapped_...
|
| [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-30/geothermal-power-
| plan...
|
| [3] http://deepgeothermal.org/home/
|
| [4] https://fervoenergy.com/
| citadel_melon wrote:
| Iceland has profitable geothermal, no? Maybe you meant that
| geothermal has not achieved profitability in non-especially
| favorable environments.
|
| I think we should be subsidizing geothermal to make the
| technology cheaper and cheaper, like we had with solar and
| wind. Seems plausible that we could make the technology
| economically feasible in more geographic areas (similarly to
| solar) and mitigate duck curve inefficiencies other green
| energy technologies suffer from.
|
| Also to hedge my statement: solar is not economically feasible
| everywhere, but it is now economically feasible in many more
| environments (with sufficient sun coverage) than before.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Iceland has profitable geothermal, no?_
|
| Iceland doesn't have natural gas. (I also imagine the winds
| and high latitude make solar complicated.)
| stevage wrote:
| They do have some solar PV. Looks pretty weird seeing
| panels at like 60deg.
| xcskier56 wrote:
| Iceland has boiling hot water at the surface and so doesn't
| need to drill far to reach hot rocks do to all the volcanism
| there. This does not apply to the vast majority of the world
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Are deepsea power cables from Iceland feasable or they'd
| have to store it as ie. hydrogen to send over?
| Reason077 wrote:
| Feasable, and the concept has been proposed, but doesn't
| look likely to be built in the near future. There are
| still lower hanging (more profitable) fruit when it comes
| to building undersea HVDC cables.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelink
| jfengel wrote:
| Seems like one might hold off on underseas power cables
| until we figure out how to keep Russian and Chinese ships
| from having so many accidents.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Iceland exports carbon free electricity in the form of
| aluminum.
| Reason077 wrote:
| It's not carbon free. Iceland's geothermal fields have
| carbon emissions because gasses trapped beneath the
| surface are released along with the steam when they're
| extracted. It's still low-carbon compared to a natural
| gas power plant, of course, but not compared to
| wind/hydro/nuclear.
|
| And aluminium production is _certainly_ not carbon free:
| the smelting process reduces aluminium oxide to aluminium
| metal using carbon electrodes, producing around 14 tonnes
| of CO2 per tonne of aluminium.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| The point is that smelting the aluminium takes tons of
| electricity, so doing it in Iceland where that's produced
| via geothermal is effectively exporting that electricity.
| hinkley wrote:
| And it's a relatively light material. So if you've got
| some place where the carbon footprint of collecting and
| transporting bauxite is relatively low, you can use
| excess power to smelt more aluminum.
|
| The problem with opportunistic loads like wind and solar
| is whether you can afford to strand expensive factories
| full of equipment for hours or days at a time while the
| power availability is compromised. At least with geo this
| is a smaller problem.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Depends on the source of that carbon
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Good point about releasing co2 from the reservoir, thanks
| for the correction.
|
| I did not maintain that the aluminum was carbon free.
| glenstein wrote:
| Well the question was "Iceland has profitable geothermal,
| no?" and your answer appears to be yes. Which is important
| because it means the upshot is that there are viable
| applications, which contrasts against the argument that
| lack of generalized solution means we need to reject it
| wholesale.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| The point likely was that even though both are
| "geothermal" they aren't really in the same category, so
| facts about one may not apply to the other.
| caminante wrote:
| Not quite.
|
| The original comment (by @animats) specified shallow
| (viable) versus deep (unviable).
|
| _> nobody seems to have a profitable deep geothermal
| power operation._
|
| That nuance got lost.
| petre wrote:
| They also have volcanic eruptions every few years.
|
| https://www.visiticeland.com/eruption/
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Iceland sits on an active volcano.
| dboreham wrote:
| So do many populated places.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" Iceland has profitable geothermal, no?"_
|
| The USA actually produces far more geothermal power than
| Iceland. So does New Zealand.
|
| The Geysers geothermal complex in California alone has more
| than double the capacity of all geothermal plants in Iceland
| combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers
| glenstein wrote:
| I think the point of the Iceland example was to illustrate
| the local viability of geothermal. But your reply seems to
| be emphasizing the relative value of geothermal in the U.S.
| vs Iceland which I don't think is a question that anything
| important hinges on. The upshot of U.S. geothermal
| production should be "awesome, so much the better for
| geothermal!" I find it bizarre and unnecessary to decide
| that the upshot is supposed to be "yeah, suck it Iceland!"
| It just has nothing to do with anything.
| mmooss wrote:
| If the full cost of carbon technologies was paid instead of so
| much being externalized, how competitive would these geothermal
| solutions be?
| ben_w wrote:
| Probably still not competitive -- given that PV and wind are
| in most places already the two cheapest electrical sources,
| the remaining part of the power equation that geothermal can
| still help with is then competing with one of either
| batteries or a global power grid.
|
| (I really should turn my notes on global power grid into an
| actual blog post, so I can link to it, given how much it
| comes up).
| epistasis wrote:
| Fervo isn't just trying, they are succeeding in bringing the
| drilling advances used in fracking, along with other innovation
| to get through the harder rocks typically encountered when not
| drilling for fossil fuels, to deliver dispatchable and storable
| energy. It's actually much better quality of power plant than
| nuclear because it can be scaled up and down throughout the day
| economically, whereas nuclear becomes even more uneconomic if
| it is forced to match the needs of the grid, and the reactors
| typically require far different designs than what is usually
| built (France has done a bit with this).
|
| I would bet on geothermal over nuclear in a second for future
| electricity generation. Its so much more promising, has a tech
| curve, and has far more innovation and advanced tech adoption.
| Animats wrote:
| > It's actually much better quality of power plant than
| nuclear because it can be scaled up and down throughout the
| day economically...
|
| It's not that nuclear reactors can't be built to vary their
| output. It's that nuclear power is almost all fixed cost. If
| the average power level over a year is 50%, the power cost
| doubles. Geothermal has similar economics.
| caminante wrote:
| Geothermal isn't cheap. Trimming those fixed costs means
| siting on fault lines/earthquakes and higher opex
| (insurance).
|
| Fervo/Google got dogged for announcing their plant in UT
| because they avoided disclosures about the capacity [0].
| It's more of a very small scale pilot of a couple MWs, but
| they buried key facts about the project assumedly on
| purpose due to lack of significance.
|
| [0] https://blog.google/outreach-
| initiatives/sustainability/goog...
| micro2588 wrote:
| Fervo's initial demonstration project was next to an
| existing power plant in Nevada which previously failed to
| produce at it's stated capacity over time (Battle
| Mountain) so they were able to tie in extra MWt capacity
| to an existing ORC turbine. Fervo's technology has to be
| located somewhat near existing traditional hydrothermal
| geothermal resources because it's the convection along a
| fault that produces an above background thermal gradient
| near enough to the surface for it to be economical. That
| is true for their demonstration area in Utah which is
| located near the existing Blundel geothermal power plant
| in Milford Utah.
| loeg wrote:
| https://www.quaise.energy/ is working on the drilling cost
| problem.
| znkynz wrote:
| Makes the classic mistake that claims that Geothermal power is
| carbon free. Its not. It can be made better through reinjection =
| https://www.gns.cri.nz/news/carbon-re-injection-revealed-to-...
| daveguy wrote:
| Or you could use closed loop geothermal, which is better for
| reliability too.
| alex_young wrote:
| Geothermal power plants emit 99% less co2 than equivalent sized
| fossil fuel plants.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/geothermal/geothermal-en...
| knappe wrote:
| If you're interested in geothermal, David Roberts did an
| interesting podcast on Fervo who are experimenting with fracking
| style drilling but used for geothermal, which is now being called
| "enhanced geothermal".
|
| https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
| phreeza wrote:
| One thing I have never quite understood about geothermal, maybe
| someone can enlighten me: the energy flow from the Earth's core
| to the surface is not that huge, less than 1 watt per square
| meter. Doesn't that fundamentally limit the usefulness of
| geothermal power as a general solution outside of exceptional
| spots where this gradient is locally much higher, or there is an
| opportunity to collect from a wide area with a single small
| borehole? And if I drill a hole and collect 500 watts from it on
| a 100 sqm plot, am I effectively siphoning the heat from my
| neighbors plots?
| brightball wrote:
| That has always been my understanding.
|
| It's useful for HVAC for a home for example, where you aren't
| trying to do a conversion to electricity but instead are
| directly leveraging the consistent temperature to reduce strain
| on the system.
| phreeza wrote:
| Yea that is a heat pump scenario where you are also putting
| energy back in at certain times, that makes sense to me too,
| it doesn't have much to do with extracting geothermal energy
| from the core iiuc.
| meindnoch wrote:
| The cited value is the energy flow through the surface, which
| is about 0.1 W/m^2. But this is conducted through kilometers of
| rock and soil, which acts as insulation. Geothermal power works
| through _convection_ instead of conduction. You inject cold
| water into a borehole, and hot water (steam) comes back, and
| spins a turbine.
|
| Convection can extract energy at a much higher rate than
| conduction through the crust.
|
| If you boil a pot of water, you can still comfortably hold the
| pot's handle if it's long enough, indefinitely. This is heat
| conduction. On the other hand, if you try drinking from the pot
| with a straw, you'll find it very painful. This is convection.
| archon1410 wrote:
| Perhaps a stupid question, but... what are the risks?
| Wolndn't extracting too much energy from the earth's core
| cool it down, at least a little bit? Or does it contain so
| much energy that extracting it to replace all of 'surface
| generation' won't make even a little difference?
| whatshisface wrote:
| We can't drill anywhere near the mantle, geothermal
| extracts energy from the upper part of the crust.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Earthquakes! There are couple comments mentioning
| "fracking" around, that's destabilizing the land by
| injecting acid to get energy out. The acid is dangerous,
| and so are breaking up soil deep down.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I guess if you could extract enough energy from the core it
| would reduce convection which would in turn reduce the
| strength of the earth's magnetic field.
| tylerhou wrote:
| > Wouldn't extracting too much energy from the earth's core
| cool it down, at least a little bit?
|
| The earth generates ~50 terawatts of energy through
| radiation/other processes, while global energy consumption
| over the last year was 0.003 terawatts. I think we're fine.
| lurk2 wrote:
| Where are you getting 0.003 terawatts? Another user
| elsewhere in the thread[0] claimed "Global total energy
| (not just electricity) consumption is currently
| 180,000TWh/year, or about 20TW."
|
| Google is showing me other figures like 25,000 terawatt
| hours of electricity consumption annually.
|
| [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43234856
| tylerhou wrote:
| Oops, I missed the thousands. So 3 TW, which is larger,
| going by Google stats, and 20 TW by the other users. So
| that's not negligible.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Look at a cross section of the Earth:
| https://www.britannica.com/science/oceanic-crust
|
| The deepest bore of all time was 12 km deep. The crust is
| between 5 km and 100 km and thinnest under the ocean. The
| numbers involved here are staggering. One might as well
| hope to stop the Earth's winds with a windmill.
| whatshisface wrote:
| What stops you from cooling down the area around the borehole
| to the point where you are conduction-limited again?
| jopsen wrote:
| You probably do cool down the surrounding area.
|
| But my guess is that the 1w/m2 quoted by GP is no where
| near the energy we get from the sun. Quick Google says
| sunlight in the order of 1kw/m2 (sure that's dependent on
| where you are, it sun doesn't shine at night, but we're off
| by 3 orders of magnitude here).
|
| So probably it'll have no effect on surface temperature.
|
| Besides, the heat is mostly released anyways when driving a
| steam turbine, and the electricity also becomes heat, in
| your computer or whatever.
| Retric wrote:
| Pulling heat from km below the surface isn't going to
| reduce surface temperature by 1w/m2, but ~0.001/m2 over
| thousands of years. Thus the issue is warming the area
| more so than cooling it.
|
| What matters here is the recharge rate, but all power
| plants have a finite lifespan. You can simply move
| somewhere else up to the point you run out of untapped
| geothermal energy across the surface of the earth which
| is a rather crazy number.
| Retric wrote:
| On what timescale? Over even just a few second timescale
| you are cooling rock, but digging deeper gives higher
| starting temperatures and more volume to remove heat. So,
| dig far enough and you can get an above some temperature an
| arbitrary long period say 100 years.
|
| Given your geothermal power plant operates for 100 years
| and pulls from say 1w/m2. Then you move to a new location
| for 100 years, and then come back you're limited to 1w/m2 +
| 1w/m2 = 2w/m2. Have not 2 locations but many and eventually
| you're fully recharged.
| cyberax wrote:
| > And if I drill a hole and collect 500 watts from it on a 100
| sqm plot, am I effectively siphoning the heat from my neighbors
| plots?
|
| Pretty much. But the Earth's crust has a lot of thermal mass,
| so there's enough energy stored there to last for a long while.
| epistasis wrote:
| Enhanced geothermal uses fracking to expose absolutely massive
| amounts of m^2 through fracking between two parallel, long,
| horizontally drilled bore holes. Current efforts seem to show a
| minimum of 30 years before there will be loss of heat quality.
|
| The sorts of drilling talked about for enhanced geothermal are
| on the scale far far above the needs of a house, IIRC about 5MW
| per bore hole pair, with many connecting from a single point on
| the surface. It's also at distances kilometers into the earth.
| electric_mayhem wrote:
| I'm renovating an old building that doesn't currently have any
| HVAC.
|
| I tried like hell to get a geothermal heat pump set up for it.
|
| This entailed researching companies that make good geothermal
| equipment and talking to all of their preferred vendors to get
| quotes.
|
| Literally every shop I talked to, and they were over a dozen that
| are supposed to be installing these companies equipment told me
| they don't install them because air source heat pumps are so much
| cheaper.
|
| Even with tax credits and rebates (which may not exist by tax
| time next year when they would pay out), when I finally found a
| company that would do geothermal, they want 120K USD for a basic
| system.
|
| if I want to be able to run different rooms in different modes
| (entirely possible given that it's a 5500 square-foot building)
| we're talking 180K total to work in a heat recovery option.
|
| Meanwhile the same company will do Mitsubishi H2i air source heat
| pump set up for the entire building for 57K after credits and
| rebates.
|
| The air source heat pump solution is less efficient and uses more
| electricity, but the clincher for me was that the cost of each as
| a complete system, ground source or air source plus the cost of
| solar raised to drive their respective loads.... Came out as a
| wash over their lifetimes. Except the air source plus solar
| solution costs 40K less upfront than even the cheapest and least
| functional ground source solution.
|
| I would genuinely love it if it were otherwise, but I have months
| into this and ground source just doesn't seem economically viable
| at this point
| grumbelbart wrote:
| That's just economy of scale, though. It's always more
| expensive to be the early adaptor. In Switzerland, 15% of all
| buildings are heated using geothermal heat pumps.
| thomasmg wrote:
| Yes. And in Switzerland, I believe most new houses have some
| other type of heat pump (drilling for geothermal is not
| allowed everywhere, or too expensive). This all still needs
| electricity; but many houses now install photovoltaics. (At
| least where I live.)
| kragen wrote:
| This is completely unrelated to the article, which is about
| geothermal power, not ground-source heat pumps.
| emtel wrote:
| As pointed out in the intro to the article, the total amount of
| power generated in the earth's center is ~50TW.
|
| Global total energy (not just electricity) consumption is
| currently 180,000TWh/year, or about 20TW. So we would have to
| capture nearly half of all available geothermal energy to replace
| current energy usage.
|
| Meanwhile, Solar PV covering (a favorably located) 1% of the
| earth's surface area would generate 20TW. (This is based on the
| estimate of 400kwh/year for a 1m^2 panel in a sunny area from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency.
|
| I don't expect geothermal to do well in this showdown.
| krona wrote:
| > favorably located
|
| That's the problem, isn't it?
| epistasis wrote:
| With enhanced geothermal, especially that being explored by
| Fervo, a massive fraction of locations on earth are opened up
| to favorable geothermal.
|
| Fervo is actually drilling and producing energy today, and
| scaling the technology, using existing technologies. If
| Quaise is successful, it will only enhance what Fervo is
| already accomplishing, but we don't need the huge technical
| advance of Quaise to get a massive amount of geothermal
| energy on the grid.
|
| The Volts podcast has been following Fervo over the past few
| years, and they have met and exceeded all their milestones so
| far. (Unlike, say, big fission or fusion startups)
|
| https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Geothermal should be an obvious choice for new-build homes. Put
| a ground-source heat pump source in the ground, and build your
| home on top of it.
| cyberax wrote:
| This works well only in a few cases. If you live in an area
| like Pennsylvania or New York, then you're far better off
| with an air-source heat pump. It's cheaper to install, and
| the average air temperatures are warm enough for the air
| source to work well.
|
| If you live in a place like Minnesota, then the ground-source
| pump needs a water table. Or you'll just be freezing the
| water in the ground. And you'll likely still be better off
| with an air-source pump.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The ground loop just needs to be deep enough to be in a
| zone with relatively stable temperatures. Apparently 6 to 8
| feet in Minnesota: https://www.minnesotageothermalheatpumpa
| ssociation.com/geoth...
|
| (note, the 6 to 8 feet is for a closed loop, horizontal
| system)
| cyberax wrote:
| The heat pump works by pumping the heat out of the
| ground. And the soil is a pretty good insulator, so
| you'll eventually just freeze the water in the soil
| around the pipes.
|
| It looks like this: one day in winter, the temperature of
| the coolant in the loop outlet falls below 0C. And after
| that, it starts dropping down by about 1C a day, until
| the pump becomes a resistive heater. If you sized your
| loop correctly, it hopefully happens towards the end of
| the heating season.
| epistasis wrote:
| This is very different from the sort of geothermal being
| discussed for power generation.
|
| Residential geothermal for home heating and cooling could
| make a ton of sense, but more likely based on the scale of a
| residential natural gas network.
|
| Drilling a hole per home is super expensive. Replacing gas
| pipes with moderate thermal pipes would be about the same
| cost as gas infrastructure but allow the massive efficiency
| gains of larger scale. Heat pumps operating on pumped water
| through these sorts of pipes doesn't need very high or low
| delivered temperatures to be effective, as long as it's
| somewhat above the -20C of the extremes of winter.
|
| Thermal storage quantity scales roughly with volume (x^3) and
| storage costs roughly scale with surface area (x^2). Though
| I'm not sure if storage plays much into the gas -> thermal
| plans that have been explored.
| spockz wrote:
| We have that in the Netherlands in plenty of cities called
| "stadsverwarming". It is hot water pumped around in a
| closed loop and residences take heat out of it with heat
| pump. The source is the cooling off industries, power
| plants, or dedicated heaters.
|
| They currently are efficient but still expensive because of
| a law that the pricing has to be similar to heating with
| would have been.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| The problem, as I understand it, is that one has to drill and
| hit the pocket where the geothermal power comes from. Now,
| here in Eifel, every drilling requires a permit (EUREUREUR),
| every drilling costs about EUR20k, you may have to drill more
| than once to hit the pocket. And Eifel sits on an old mega
| volcano.
| brazzy wrote:
| > So we would have to capture nearly half of all available
| geothermal energy to replace current energy usage.
|
| No, you're completely misunderstanding the meaning of that
| number. 50TW is not the power _generated_ in the earth 's
| center, and definitely not the " _available_ geothermal energy
| ".
|
| It's the _heat flow_ that reaches the surface. The _newly
| generated_ heat (from radioactive decay) is a fraction of that
| (estimates vary between 20% and 80%). The rest is a loss of the
| primordial heat that has been stored in those billions of cubic
| kilometers of magma for billions of years. And this loss has
| been happening for billions of years and there 's plenty left.
|
| So there are no physical reasons why we could not extract 500TW
| or 5000TW from geothermal energy. We'd be depleting the
| priomordial heat much faster than before, but it would still
| easily last for millions of years.
|
| Of course, whether the engineering to do it on that scale would
| be feasible, let alone cost-effective, is a different question.
| card_zero wrote:
| 100 billion multiples of world energy use in 2010, according
| to an old IPCC estimate.
| emtel wrote:
| Ah, interesting. I had thought that any primordial heat would
| have long since cooled, with the remaining heat flux simply
| being the result of radioactive decay.
| metalman wrote:
| Here are a few examples of drilling technology that will try and
| drill 10-30 km down through the crust into areas with enough heat
| to make supercritical steam. Lasers, plasma, etc. Russians did it
| the hard way back in the day.
|
| https://www.foroenergy.com/drilling
|
| https://www.ieg.fraunhofer.de/en/references/ppgd.html
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S199582262...
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/new-tech-cuts-rock-without-grind...
| piokoch wrote:
| "There's a very decent chance you can do that with wind and
| solar,"
|
| It is so pathetic that Standford professor spreads this kind of
| crap. No, wind and solar will not save us, as on majority of our
| planet we have long period of time without wind and solar.
|
| Unpredictability of solar/wind energy forces to use something to
| balance the grid. Which, typically, has to be gas, as only gas
| power station has sufficiently fast start/stop cycle (about 1h in
| case of modern installation, lignite power plant has several
| hours cold start, coal power plant even more).
|
| And gas means CO2 emission, even though in some countries, which
| were buying gas from Russia through Nord Stream, it was
| considered to be "ecological", similarly like "biomass", that is
| burning wood and corn (and as we all know burning wood does not
| emit CO2, right?).
|
| In addition, this is economical idiocy. When there is too much
| wind/sun, you need to pay producers to stop producing, not to
| overload the grid. When there is no wind/sun you need to buy
| energy paying overpriced spot prices. That's why "renewable
| energy champion" - United Kingdom has the most expensive energy
| on the planet.
|
| We have one ecological, 100% CO2 emission free, source of energy
| - nuclear energy (check France if you don't believe it works).
|
| But how Standford professor might promote nuclear power plants
| when for long, long years all major universities and
| organizations, with Greenpeace on the head, were fighting nuclear
| energy, leading to the shitty situation we have now.
|
| 10 years ago anyone who wanted to work on nuclear energy research
| were treated like Holocaust denier, so there was almost no
| development of new tech in that area.
|
| And now exactly the same people, who were telling us how bad is
| nuclear energy, are telling us to use wind/solar. What can go
| wrong...
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" nuclear energy (check France if you don't believe it
| works)"_
|
| France's latest nuclear reactor, Flamanville 3, was finally
| connected to the grid in December 2024 after 17 years (!!) of
| construction beset by problems, delays, and massive cost
| overruns.
|
| Nuclear can be part of the solution, but renewables are much
| cheaper and faster to build. So for every $/EUR spent, you are
| achieving more CO2 reduction, much more quickly, by building
| renewables compared to building new nuclear.
| numpad0 wrote:
| US Navy has been building, commissioning, operating nuclear
| submarines successfully, literally every years for at least
| past two decades. The sub reactors are PWRs, only built with
| unadulterated high purity Uranium.
|
| The "problems, delays, overruns" is basically euphemism for
| political sabotaging. I can't feel so sympathetic to those in
| denial of that.
|
| It's just hot rocks boiling in a pressure cooker. 1940s
| technology. Not 1940s as in Portal timeline. Making
| assumptions that there must be complicated technical
| challenges that cannot be overcome or could delay
| construction as long as 17 years to mitigate is just stupid.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| When you can spend $2 billion to provide electricity for
| 150 people then it works fine. I'm not sure many cities
| would be happy with that though!
| kragen wrote:
| You'll note that the US Navy, despite this extensive
| experience and relative immunity to political sabotage, has
| not replaced its diesel fleet with a nuclear fleet. Neither
| have the French, British, Chinese, Indian, Russian, or PRC
| navies. The Russian navy, which has built more nuclear
| submarines than any other, is actually transitioning to
| fewer kinds of nuclear-powered ships. That's because
| nuclear power is more expensive than diesel power, which in
| turn is more expensive than solar and wind power.
|
| Moreover, it turns out that years-long construction is also
| the norm for naval nuclear power; for example,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borei-class_submarine says:
|
| > _The launch of the first submarine of the class, Yury
| Dolgorukiy (Iurii Dolgorukii), was scheduled for 2002 but
| was delayed because of budget constraints. The vessel was
| eventually rolled out of its construction hall on 15 April
| 2007 in a ceremony attended by many senior military and
| industrial personnel.[11] Yuriy Dolgorukiy was the first
| Russian strategic missile submarine to be launched in
| seventeen years since the end of the Cold War. The planned
| contingent of eight strategic submarines was expected to be
| commissioned within the next decade, with five Project 955
| planned for purchase through 2015.[12]_
|
| > _Yuriy Dolgorukiy was not put into the water until
| February 2008. On 21 November 2008 the reactor on Yuriy
| Dolgorukiy was activated[13] and on 19 June 2009, the
| submarine began its sea trials in the White Sea.[14] By
| July 2009, it had yet to be armed with Bulava missiles and
| was therefore not fully operational, although it had been
| ready for sea trials on 24 October 2008.[15]_
|
| > _On 28 September 2010 Yuriy Dolgorukiy completed company
| sea trials._
|
| And on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_094_submarine:
|
| > _A Type 094 was photographed by commercial satellites in
| late 2006 at the Xiaopingdao Submarine Base.[9] The first
| commissioned in 2007[1] and six were in commission in
| 2020.[5] They began nuclear deterrence patrols in December
| 2015.[10]_
|
| Admittedly, that's only 9 years rather than 17 years.
|
| So, in fact, there are complicated technical challenges
| that create many-year-long delays. And they are not due to
| "political sabotaging". In cases like nuclear warfare where
| there is no alternative to nuclear power, it can clearly be
| made to work, but so far nobody has figured out how to make
| it economically competitive with other energy sources in
| situations where they are viable. That's a technical
| challenge nobody has been able to overcome yet.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| > (check France if you don't believe it works)
|
| France's nuclear provider has incredibly high debts, which is
| only possibly because they are state backed. So no, nuclear
| energy does not work economically.
| 2thumbsup wrote:
| Solar and wind energy has a problem, which is storage. We have
| not yet developed a competitive solution to store energy on
| commercial scale that works everywhere.
|
| Nuclear energy is stable but generally quite costly per kWh
| compared to renewable energy.
|
| Nuclear energy and renewables in combination balances out
| disadvantages. Nuclear energy reduces the need for energy
| storage solutions in renewables by providing a base load, while
| renewables would enable cost-efficiency in even quite energy
| demanding uses (e.g. carbon capture, generating methane etc.).
| mperham wrote:
| Is it 2015?
|
| You can buy 10x as much solar+battery as nuclear these days.
| Nuclear is simply too complex and dangerous to compete.
| Chilko wrote:
| Yeah when it comes to these discussions, I think most
| people are unaware just how much the cost of solar & BESS
| (at the large scale) has fallen in the past couple years.
| zekrioca wrote:
| You miss listing so many alternatives:
|
| 1. Building better/more transmission lines interconnecting
| carbon-intense grids with low-carbon ones. This is cheaper than
| ramping up nuclear, and will needed regardless of the
| technology.
|
| 2. Batteries are becoming more and more efficient. One can even
| mine with electric excavators.
|
| 3. Wind and solar not necessarily need to be connected to the
| grid initially. Look at ERCOT. This incentivizes demanding
| moving where electricity is generated, specially in small
| countries. Look at the UK.
|
| You still do not solve the issues with nuclear waste (10k year
| problem) and its high prices (LCOE). Also, you cannot build
| nuclear everywhere, specially in the emerging world. We need a
| mix of solutions, there is no silver bullet in this situation.
| Chilko wrote:
| I love how your response conveniently ignores any mention of
| energy storage technologies, several types of which are having
| rapid technological advancement.
| alas44 wrote:
| Recent video on the topic by Real Engineering, interviewing a
| start-up in this domain that aims at creating new technology to
| dig 10km+ bore holes using plasma to vaporise rocks
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Highly speculative. Last I looked they had drilled inches in a
| lab.
| adrithmetiqa wrote:
| These guys have made huge progress with their closed loop system
| https://www.eavor.com/technology/
| sampo wrote:
| Finland tried a project, drilling two 6km deep holes. The
| temperature at 6km depth is 120C. The idea was to pump water down
| one hole, and get heated water up from the second hole. But the
| rock wasn't porous enough, they could not get enough water to
| flow from the bottom of one hole to the other hole. So in the
| end, they couldn't extract enough heat out of the setup.
|
| https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/drilling-finlands-deepest-wel...
|
| https://yle.fi/a/3-12414600
| dboreham wrote:
| Planetary Dyson Sphere.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-02 23:00 UTC)