Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet

> 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.

> I would bet on geothermal over nuclear in a second for future electricity generation.

I don't understand that though; geothermal power is on paper much more low-tech, safer, cheaper, and deployable everywhere compared to nuclear. Why didn't it become the default way to generate power?

Or is deep drilling in fact more difficult or expensive than nuclear fission?

"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."

I'm glad that you are so bullish on a technology that still has very little to show for itself.

It should also be noted that the economics of geothermal installs also are the same ones as drilling for oil and gas -- so the cheaper drilling gets, the cheaper access to competitive resources.

Majority of electrical power - solar + nuclear is our best energy shot. Heating probably go with heat pump for 90% of the market.

That said - all of the above approach (including geothermal) - it shouldn't be this insipid argument of Geothermal vs Nuclear.

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

> "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

Ormat (NYSE ORA) is a publicly traded geothermal company and they are profitable.

They also have volcanic eruptions every few years.

https://www.visiticeland.com/eruption/

Iceland sits on an active volcano.

> Iceland has profitable geothermal, no?

Iceland doesn’t have natural gas. (I also imagine the winds and high latitude make solar complicated.)

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).

I worked both as a reporter and in public relations (not at the same time) and stuff like this happens for various reasons:

  - an institution can publish a report as part of a regular schedule (e.g. unemployment by the BLS) or as one shot thing (e.g. a study on clowns distribution in arid areas). This leads many reporters to publish articles about basically the same subject, but in an uncoordinated manner;  

 - PR agencies often coordinate with media outlets from various backgrounds and markets to publish about some particular topic (company, product, campaign, ...) either at the same time, or in coordinated waves;  

 - trends and public discourse can make it so that many sources cover almost the same thing at the same time (e.g.: bitch resting face, rat boy summer, ...);  

 - luck is, always, a factor.

Paul Graham has an essay on this subject from 20 years ago that's still very relevant.

>Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

It's apparently publicists "pitching" stories to 'relevant' reporters and 'influencers'/YouTubers.

I recently saw a xeet, from a columnist, complaining about irrelevant PR pitches; it gives some insight into how they work. See: https://x.com/dhume/status/1892994787734602001

My 2c would be:

- tech-oriented publicists / marketers definitely do know that HN exists and matters

- there are “benign” ways to game HN, like releasing at an optimal time for readership / upvotes

- there are less nice ways, like sock puppet accounts / botting

- all of these things are certainly done regularly

- it doesn’t mean that everything you read was an astroturfed psy-op or whatever.

I can confirm that this sort of phenomenon has happened to me and am as curious as you are to find out more about it

I mean, puff pieces exist, and basically every media outlet is a corporate mouthpiece. Don't be surprised by this.

I don’t see the issue. Videos like the one on Helios is one of the reasons I subscribe to his channel. I want to learn more about companies doing ground breaking innovation. Of course such a video has some PR aspects to it. Everyone knows that a company granting such access wants something out of it. This is almost high school level media literacy. You should take such videos with a heavy dose of healthy scepticism, but it’s still very interesting to watch.

And if he gets some money out of it which he can use to help fund production of some high quality videos on historical engineering topics now and then, that’s just a win-win IMO.

I've noticed the same is happening with the Undecided with Matt Ferrell channel. I really enjoyed his content on green energy projects at the beginning, but it seems like lately he's just creating press releases in video form.

Personally I thought the video was interesting. Even if it’s promoting a company agenda, the technology itself is cool. I learned some stuff.

All the "Real Engineering" videos I've ever seen were full of egregious factual errors, so I stopped watching them.

His videos are genuinely very interesting and informative. If he does a promoted piece once in awhile that primarily dig into the science + engineering behind something while also getting a company's name out there, I don't really mind. (So long as it's disclosed)

It's really really hard to 'aim' a 6km deep hole. Hitting a slab of tough rock can deflect the drillbit off course. If you remember the Chilean miner rescue in 2010, who got rescued by a new hole being drilled - they had 3 seperate holes being drilled at the same time as backups, just because they were worried about the success rate of actually hitting their target. And that was only 0.7km underground.

directional drilling could work if they started nice and high up and aimed to meet somewhere, but turning 90 degrees at the bottom of a 6km borehole is going to require a 6km long directional drilling rig, and probably a fair bit of extra depth to make that turn. it might be possible, but at those depths everything becomes much more difficult to the point where it might make more sense to just give up and abandon the project.

it does like a good opportunity for the fracking techniques mentioned elsewhere in this thread - drop some explosives down those boreholes and see if you can artificially increase the porosity.

Kinda funny to think of geothermal energy as non-renewable.

Of course they all are in some sense…

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.

100 billion multiples of world energy use in 2010, according to an old IPCC estimate.

This whole discussion seems a bit confused. 50TW is the amount that does reach the surface naturally as far as I can see. The amount that escapes.

In the Earth itself there is some enormous amount, far far larger, with more energy being generated as well from radioactive decay

So it's not like some sort of oil situation where in 250 years we'll be at Peak Mantle, i.e. "The planet has spent millions of years generating this heat and we're draining it at an unsustainable rate!"

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

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.

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.

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 (€€€), every drilling costs about €20k, you may have to drill more than once to hit the pocket. And Eifel sits on an old mega volcano.

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?

What stops you from cooling down the area around the borehole to the point where you are conduction-limited again?

There is no way to tell yet what the longevity of the resource will be as it's too early. In fracked resources the main issue is "short circuiting" where increased flow rates travel along preferential paths between the doublet wells as the source rock cools and cooling rate of the source rock in general. This causes the MWt of the resource to decline per injection / production well. Fervo is getting around this by drilling extra wells per pad to be turned on in response. Many geothermal resources decline over time as heat is slowly extracted and these declines are somewhat manageable by tuning the injection production well rates and drilling new wells. They are built into the economics of existing plants. Geothermal is kind of extractive and not "renewable" in this way over medium term time scales, you need to continuously keep drilling at a certain rate. Rock is a good insulator and it takes a long, long time for it to heat back up.

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.

Ground source heat pumps are generally considered to be “geothermal”.

I installed a ground sourced heat pump a couple of years ago, and my heat pump manufacturer refers to it as geothermal: https://www.waterfurnace.com/switch . Most people don't think of this as 'geothermal' however so I avoid using the term.

It's a mix of geothermal energy (extra heat), and insulation/thermal mass abitrage. Several hundred tons of rock/stone/soil are a great insulator, and are going to be consistently above freezing, which means you get a munch higher starting temperature for heatpumps if the alternative is freezing air.

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.)

This is completely unrelated to the article, which is about geothermal power, not ground-source heat pumps.

Storing multiple days of consumption is feasible but definitely harder than the usual case of storing hours.

The pricing problem sounds like an artifact of how you've structured the market, not a fundamental obstacle to the profitability of intermittent power sources.

An alternative structure that would solve the problem would be for generation operators to buy put options for energy they expect to be able to produce, eliminating the risk of a price collapse. Consumers who want access to such intermittent energy would have to write those put options, which would be limited to particular times on particular days when they could use the energy. Having written the option, they would have to accept the generation operator's decision whether or not to exercise it. Utility-scale storage providers could write puts for low-demand times and buy puts for high-demand times, or they could write puts for low-demand times, write futures contracts for high-demand times, and make up the shortfall on the spot market. This might produce major changes in consumption patterns, but, more likely, would enable continued investment to minimize those changes.

Deep geothermal promises to provide what is usually considered high-grade heat (800+°), but what I'm trying to understand is how cheaply you can convert that high-grade heat into electricity, because the answer seems to be "far too expensively to be competitive with wind and solar".

Cost describes tradeoffs. Environmentalists ignoring costs and generating a backlash that completely undoes their work shouldn’t be a lesson needing relearning twice a generation.