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...
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.
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.
The cost of enhanced geothermal is roughly the exact same cost as nuclear today (if you exclude the very high cost of failed build attempts for nuclear), and it shares similar economics of a very very low OpEx to CapEx ratio. However the economics differ massively in that enhanced geothermal is getting cheaper as we build more, but nuclear tends to get more expensive as we build more. Geothermal is a technology, nuclear is a monument.
It can’t be both not quire and the same.
All else being equal, a five billion dollar geothermal plant running at 50% has the same problem as a five billion dollar nuclear plant running at 50%: where’s my profit?
Sure, load following is trivial with geothermal, but nuclear generally isn’t trying to compete in that space, so we can discount the difference there.
For nuclear, adding thermal storage for time shifting would be the most equivalent to what's happening with geothermal storage, but with geothermal there's no additional capex or engineering needed.
I don’t understand how you think capex works?
You outlay x on capital expenses to get the plant running, that’s all the plant and equipment. You run the plant at 50% it takes you twice as long to recoup your capex.
Always happy to be corrected.
Reducing the draw from the well at time X, leaves more available at time Y. In this way, the capital cost is reasonably preserved and your correction is offered.
--It's not exactly the same thing as flux ---I haven't verified the relative losses here of delaying utilizing the available heat, but rather am assuming the OP is correct about what I believe to be their point*
If the geothermal plant isn’t ran at or near capacity all the time, the capex takes longer to recoup.
You can’t just, say, run it at 50% for a while, and then at 150% later, because a) ya typically can’t run plant at 150%, and for power generators ya can only run them at whatever you’re contracted to supply, so you’d typically want to run geothermal at capacity all the time.
This is true of anything that requires capital expenditure.
The expensive bit is drilling and that gives you roughly X heat per month. You can use that at a constant rate or all in one week.
> They just let pressure build up higher than normal for 6-8 hours and then the turbine generates more power than normal until the pressure falls back to normal levels again.
So they can run at more than 100%.
Of course we can build something less efficient to allow "pressure build up", but that's another trade off.
Isn't this logic flawed?
> Sure, Metric A is better with Option A, but Option B is so bad in that space they are avoiding it, therefore we can discount the difference there.
Granted you then have to built of of those power-using-things and only run it when grid demand drops.
If you find a cheap solution to power storage, you can make a lot of money. This is the key enabler for a 100% renewable grid.
Although presumably if you set up one of these facilities you need it running 24/7 to be profitable not just when there is a lull in demand elsewhere.
That's done a lot in France, but there's a limited amount of pumped hydro available in the end.
Until recently, countries with lots of available nuclear energy didn't really need to produce fresh water, and non-gas-produced hydrogen is still a WIP.
Major footnote here that I'm wayyyy out of my wheelhouse on this stuff, so there may be reasons that this doesn't work. I invite correction if that's the case so we can all learn some stuff :)
David Roberts
Yeah, we have a lot of hills. And that's it. So, other than that, you could plop one of these down almost anywhere.
Erik Steimle
That's correct, yeah. You need some proximity, obviously, to transmission and load.
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...
I don't agree with the above comment:
> Fervo isn't just trying, they are succeeding
Or they simply ran into headwinds on a speculative project. I'll "take the under" when your PR is cagey about basic project attributes.
It will be interesting to see the results of the Cape project once they do multi-well laterals from a single pad power plant with larger diameter wells. That is really more a demonstration of power plant economics beyond the technical feasibility of creating a horizontally fracked reservoir that can be operated for a year.
Cape Station does look much more significant. [0] 400MW of power plant capacity with 2028 COD and mostly contracted with SoCal Edison? Good job.
[0] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/cape-station-enhanced-geoth...
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
I'm pro nuclear, but I don't think using hypotheticals and futures is how to convince people nuclear is good, it's good because it works and it doesn't poison the planet (Yes there have been accidents and they have been dramatised but count deaths and it becomes as irrational as being afraid of flying)
There were a lot more factors at play in the chain, but the burnoff of the xenon wasn't itself the proximal cause of the explosion.
Though due to the xenon poisoning, they apparently use the reactors which at the moment have the freshest fuel for the load following, as they have more excess reactivity available to overpower the xenon. They can ramp at something around 5% of rated capacity per minute between around 30-100% of full power.
Most other countries with nuclear power plants have a much lower share of nuclear in their grids, so they haven't needed to do it, as due to the economics of nuclear it makes the best sense to run flat out as much as possible in order to recoup capital costs.
Doesn't the ground itself act as an energy reservoir for geothermal? I haven't looked this one up, but it definitely seems like geothermal should be very dispatchable.
They don't because I fuel costs are so low that the power is essentially free when compared to idling.
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?
It's because unlike nuclear technology, drilling technology has advanced massively. It was spurred on by natural gas fracking, trying to get very hard to recover fossil fuels as the easy stuff ran out.
So there's an entire industry around this new technology that already exists but which has not yet been applied to geothermal. And for a long time there was little no no growth in electricity demand, which greatly suppresses the demand for new generation technology; basically everybody was competing to replace the natural gas, coal, and nuclear generation plants that were reaching their end of life.
Now, the hype of AI has made for a great excuse to build a bunch of new technology, which brings a flood of new investment money, political will at Pubic Utility Commissions, and end-users looking to sign PPAs to secure electricity which helps raise that money for new builds.
If you go based purely on when the technology was developed, sure, deep drilling is more difficult than nuclear fission, and in turn uses tons of new technologies at its base.
And until this new drilling technology was developed, fission was cheaper, but it won't be cheaper for long. Drilling is a technology with a learning curve which means that costs fall as we do more of it. Nuclear has not had a significant learning curve, and in fact in many cases it has gotten more expensive as construction labor gets more expensive over time.
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.
The economics of enhanced geothermal are vastly different in that geothermal has a learning curve where by merely drilling more wells, we make future geothermal cheaper by innovating technology. Nuclear reactors do not have a positive learning curve, and in fact are getting more expensive due to the ever increasing cost of construction labor (see Baumol's cost disease).
> insipid argument of Geothermal vs Nuclear.
First, expressing a preference for the future of one technology direction over the other is fundamental to discussing technology. It makes a huge difference in terms of getting better understanding of them, and is a core facet of any sort of planning. Sure, we should produce both, but we should also make predictions of what we think will happen in the future so that we can learn from the outcomes, and also do proper allocation of relative amounts of funding.
Nuclear has proven time and again to under deliver on all promises, results, and even ability to construct projects that have full regulatory approval. Geothermal is exactly the opposite. It has made realistic promises, overdelivered, and been fully transparent so far.
To not take into account these histories would itself be absolutely "insipid" and poor planning. That's not to say that nuclear should be fully excluded, but let's take into account the huge amount of risk with funding anything nuclear due to the inability of the industry to meet goals.
Any investment decision is a "vs." argument and must absolutely be looked at very very closely. And when we do that, every technology must be given a completely fair and honest assessment, we shouldn't put our thumb on the scale for nuclear just because we thought it wasn't given a fair shot in the past. We must look at it fully honestly without rose colored glasses, and I have yet to find somebody bullish on nuclear that doesn't wear extremely dark rose-colored glasses.
2. How can you say Nuclear has underdelivered? Have you ever looked at the amount of nuclear deployment globally - does geothermal even get up to 0.1%? The cost of new Nuclear is a large function of the regulatory burdens especially in North America.
Don't read me wrong -- I'm all for geothermal but it certainly hasn't delivered on its promises and has only really worked out in uniquely favorable conditions (i.e. Iceland).
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.
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.
Insofar as it relates to the commenter I'm replying to, they also seem not to be making a distinction about deep geothermal, but insisting that the difference between Iceland and the rest of the globe is an indictment of geothermal's viability deep or otherwise. Which doesn't follow.
See the first paragraph. [0] The reference explicitly gets into "deep geothermal" (i.e., EGS) and talks about power applications that are viable because of limited drilling (i.e., shallow).
> The more than 1 gigawatt of geothermal power currently produced globally — from California to Iceland to the Philippines — relies nearly exclusively on such natural outpourings of the earth’s heat.
The building heat comment is just a reference to another residential/C&I application with ground loops. They're not dismissing or not acknowledging the grid-scale power applications.
From my understanding, this is all the original comment says about shallow geothermal. Correct me if I am misunderstanding.
Moreover, I do not see the quote: "The more than 1 gigawatt of geothermal power currently produced globally — from California to Iceland to the Philippines — relies nearly exclusively on such natural outpourings of the earth’s heat" anywhere.
Are we referring to the same comment, or am I misunderstanding something?
Geothermal is currently deployed in 32 countries and is regarded as the most abundant source of renewable energy outside of solar, impressively ranking ahead of wind.
So I think the most charitable interpretation of Iceland's example is that it represents one of many regions where geothermal is viable.
https://www.edengeothermal.com/about/geothermal-energy/world...
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.
There is some R&D work going on though to do this reduction step without CO2 emissions using other electrode materials, see e.g ELYSIS.
AKA: "Smelting"
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.
I did not maintain that the aluminum was carbon free.
In the current situation Europe would profit immensely by sending excess renewable energy to Iceland's pumped hydro and Aluminium smelters while using their geothermal baseload capacity. But in 15 years that might no longer be the case and by then the investment would not have paid off and there might be regret that the money wasn't spent on a different HVDC line like another North Africa - Europe link or Bulgaria - Caucasus (which has a lot of undeveloped hydro potential).
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
Even if it's not the cheapest option, if it can provide some backup, that could be an option. Because solar panel and hurricanes are not best friends.
[0] that kills 30k people in 1902 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1902_eruption_of_Mount_Pel%C3%... [1] https://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake_information/earthquake....
Theory was that both wind and solar are too risky due to the frequent hurricanes. But maybe there's more local nuance? Too cheap diesel?
Iceland doesn’t have natural gas. (I also imagine the winds and high latitude make solar complicated.)
(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).
We said the same thing about solar and wind, also in 2008-2016. We found a way anyway
> The campus geothermal well offers a unique full scale research infrastructure of global relevance. This project will be the first geothermal system built including an extensive research infrastructure in the low-enthalpy energy range. Low-enthalpy (direct-use) geothermal systems produce water <100°C that can be used directly for domestic and horticultural heating. Equipped with a broad range of advanced technologies for monitoring and data acquisition, it will deliver essential information on processes affecting deep geothermal energy provision in sedimentary basins and give valuable insight into an operating geothermal system.
[0] https://www.tudelft.nl/citg/over-faculteit/afdelingen/geosci...
In typical HN form I'll say: "That's a bit of an oversimplication". Apologies, please don't hate me. Thanks for quoting all your sources though btw.
The wrong geology absolutely will create minor earthquakes. This is because any fluids injected into certain rocks layers provide "lubrication" and things start slipping. Pretty crazy how much pushing is happening down there and things remain at equilibrium most of the time!
However, all is not lost. Certain geologies absolutely can take external fluids no problem, because they previously contained fluids... yeah... I'm talking depleted oil wells. A bit ironic I guess. This happens all the time already in the midwest, depleted oil wells are turned into saltwater injection wells.
The problem is most of the time, you can't just plunk a depleted well down anywhere that happens to have the right geology underneath it, which the geothermal guys were hoping for. Pushing high pressure water into previously dry formations will likely cause problems. No free lunch, but it is possible in certain areas. A lot of said areas aren't likely near population centers unfortunately.
That hasn't stopped the fracking industry, so why would it be a bother for DEEP?
So, the same as nuclear, wind, solar, gas, and coal, all of which which largely don’t work without significant government support.
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.
It doesn't necessarily have to be anything nefarious about it, papers and YouTubers need stuff to write and talk about after all. But at the same time that can be very beneficial for e.g Quaise in this case. How does it work, I'm guessing a "publicist" is involved somehow? How much does it cost? Has anyone here done something similar?
- 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.>Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
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
- 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0
Pretty common PR for a company/organisation to reach out to various media to get coverage. There was probably a embargo of 1st March so everybody publishing right after that.
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.
Was that necessary? Did it contribute anything to your comment? (It did for me, but not in a good way.)
It just feels like I can't trust anything the videos say because they're completely unskeptical of everything they cover, which makes them feel way less informative.
... But it definitely smells like a guerrilla marketing campaign.
https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/drilling-finlands-deepest-wel...
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.
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.
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.
Of course they all are in some sense…
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!"
That's the problem, isn't it?
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
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.
They currently are efficient but still expensive because of a law that the pricing has to be similar to heating with would have been.
The city heating network operator is a monopoly, that is why the price is capped.
Even though city heating networks utilize 'waste heat', the capital cost of the network is significant. The price cap and the capital costs (especially now with higher interest rates) led to many proposed projects being cancelled in recent years.
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.
(note, the 6 to 8 feet is for a closed loop, horizontal system)
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.
I don't have a personal experience with vertical loops.
You can make faster ROI in energy plays by doing other things. Thats the sad truth: It required public finance models of ROI, expectations on energy supply markets, basically a different approach to funding and returns to make it work.
But it definitely can work, and is used e.g. in New Zealand where its vented closer to the surface. But, we have the hot rocks. we have the deep water. we have all the mechanistic requirements to do the rock splitting to make a two or ten or twenty hole thermal energy extraction method work, and we even routinely do the fracking for gas well optimisation: we know how to do this.
It's just that other things make money faster, and thats what motivated people to do things: making money, not fixing climate
There is real opportunity here.
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.
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.
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.
Google is showing me other figures like 25,000 terawatt hours of electricity consumption annually.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
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".
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
But I think the bigger issue is the second bucket: the cost of turning heat into electricity seems to still be too high to compete with solar and wind, even if the heat were free. The article doesn't mention this at all, but I think it's the crucial issue. I don't understand why heat engines are still so expensive 250 years after James Watt, but they do seem to be. In January I came across https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... which is an EIA-commissioned study of the capital cost of building different kinds of power plants, and I am hoping that studying it will give me the answer.
The article mentions the intermittency of wind and solar a few times as if it were a showstopper—as if no amount of solar and wind power generation capacity could be an adequate substitute for any amount of geothermal power, because you don't have solar power at night, for example. But actually that's just a question of how much it costs to store the energy until it's needed or transmit it from where it's still being produced. We have upper bounds on those storage costs from existing utility-scale storage facilities, and they already look pretty okay. We can expect that they will get cheaper over time.
I guess this depends on the region, at least to some extent. In Northern Europe we've had these periods during fall/winter in recent years where it's cold, essentially dark, and (worst) no wind. It's not really feasible to store ≈multiple days of consumption for tens of millions of people.
In three of the four Swedish price regions I think we are essentially in a situation now where wind power is "worthless" and can't be built out any more, at least not without major changes to consumption patterns. When the wind is blowing there is such high production that prices go almost to 0, and the operators earn ish nothing, and when prices go up there is no wind so no-one can produce.
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.
For example this solution would be sufficient and have no blackouts/brownouts per year in 99% of historical data....
Extreme weather events are what is important and we do have the data.
Predicting how willing Swedes will be 10 years from now to buy extra jeans and install phase-change energy storage in their houses, however, that's beyond anybody's ability.
Tradeoffs are indeed inherent in any human effort, but actual market prices are an imperfect reflection reflection of those inherent tradeoffs, and can indeed be distorted by subsidies, externalities, etc. And often tradeoffs cannot really be reduced to a single scalar the way costs do—not everything can be traded off against everything else.
Yet that observation does not mean there aren't any real tradeoffs, or real tradeoffs that can be reduced to a single number.
Also, while this god's-eye viewpoint of the options available for collective action by humanity as a whole is important, for most of us it isn't useful tactical or even strategic information about the possible courses of action we could undertake to affect the world, much less our own lives. It's most useful if you're a billionaire, a Central Committee member, or a Civ player. For the rest of us, even Bilderbergers and the like, those subsidy-distorted costs and the failures of collective action that produce them are merely facts about the world; we cannot make them evaporate in a puff of logic by pointing out their irrationality.
My intuition is that there are a number of big problems: 1) power that a power station could supply is limited to the thermal conduction within the earth's crust that the power plant has access to. Instantaneous power can be high, but it would cool down the rocks. I don't think rocks are good conductors. It seems one needs to somehow access a large surface area (facing down) of rocks but a drill hole is vertical.
2) getting heated steam from inside the crust to the surface for electricity conversion faces losses by way of heat conduction to the drill hole. What are the losses there per km, for instance? Does this make some depth infeasible?
Separately, has anyone done a calculation of the actual energy that is released from the inside of the earth through the surface? It seem extremely small for most parts of the world and so would need a massive surface area. I am sceptical that there are many areas which would provide consistent long term energy (over just cooling the rocks too far).
Below a certain depth, the earth gets 1º hotter per 40m of depth.
Horizontal directional drilling is a very established field, which is very technologically intensive and some of the things we can do in this area are nothing short of amazing. Basically any trajectory can be executed, including some smart things like underground loops. Couple this with electric submersible pumps (ESP), which help to increase the flow and potentially run water through several cycles to maximize the contact with hot payzone before getting it to surface and you can do many interesting things.
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...
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/03/i-was-wrong-about-...
https://www.youtube.com/live/kfOGKfEoPb0?t=7865s
If you want to join our team:
https://www.cosvig.it/geotermia/numeri-enel-toscana/
The main problem is, that especially in the Amiata areas, the steam that come out is full of heavy metals like mercury or boron that are very toxic for population and require expensive filtering.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/note-fracked-geothermal-energ...
Put some research dollars towards deep geothermal and piggy back on O&G research but don't distract from the needed current strategy.
All for improving drilling tech -- maybe let O&G bare most of the cost of research though if we need to compete for research dollars.
I'm interested in knowing if anyone here has gotten it installed and their experience with it.
https://www.builderonline.com/building/dandelion-raised-40-m...
From this, it sounds like the economics are dependent on Inflation Reduction Act incentives which face an uncertain future at a minimum.
Why not just use the DEEP ideas and tech for pumped solar energy storage?
It is quite hard to not be cynical .. we have lots of evidence that we should be cynical, that our politicians are scamming us etc.
But it does seem to me that we have geo-engineered our way into a warming climate - by burning Carbon fuels the last 150 years - and we will need to geo-engineer our way out of the mess.
I saw a statistic that said around 50% of people dont believe that climate warming is caused by human activity. It seems unpopular on HN to talk about climate change, but here goes :
We are nearing or at +1.5C now, currently at a long plateau of peak CO2 and CH4 emissions .. and we may be warming at around +0.3C per decade. That puts us near +2.1C by 2045 .. not so far in the future.
Lets say we electrify everything and reach "Net-Zero" by 2060 .. the accumulated CO2 will stay there for a long time until we remove it. Its the area under the graph that counts. Net Zero emissions == Peak CO2 == PEAK HEAT
Were headed for more ice melt, more energetic storms, more wildfires, more floods, crop failure, less stable food supply.
Id prefer if we could go back and stop burning carbon 30 years ago .. but here we are, soon heat itself will be its own problem.
Only a few crazy people seem to be willing to discuss the unthinkable option of _deliberately_ polluting the sky with Sulfur particulates to increase cloud cover over the ocean, so more light is reflected and less heat is absorbed by the sea .. but what other plan is there to survive peak heat ?
Given the urgency of the problem - the burning need to get away from Carbon fuels - I have to wonder why governments aren't underwriting large projects such as deep drilled geothermal ? If otoh, Small Modular Nuclear reactors are really the best solution.. why dont we have a whole coterie of them working by now ?
Why aren't rich ex-founders financing more of these hail-mary projects ? Drilling a 12-km hole in the ground and pouring a billion dollars into it, with 5% odds of getting a vast supply of free energy out of it seems an okay tradeoff to make, if I have 10Bn net worth and there is a chance that Ill be making the planet livable for my grand-kids.
If you want to understand the risks of doing vs. not doing SAI check out this recently published paper: https://climate.uchicago.edu/insights/comparing-the-benefits...
The next step is to redeploy the SO2 that has unintentionally cooled Earth and do it better in the stratosphere with a fractional amount that we've tolerated since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Here's an article I recently wrote if you want to understand from a macro-level: https://www.keepcool.co/p/no-one-is-coming-to-save-us-time-t...
The last point about "fossil fuels can continue" is also called moral hazard. Regardless of SAI or not, we're going to keep using whatever is the cheapest and accessible fuel we have available, and right now, it's hydrocarbons pulled from the ground. We've already gotten good at recklessly warming our planet and unintentionally cooling it, so we might as well get good at cooling intentionally.
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...
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 $/€ spent, you are achieving more CO2 reduction, much more quickly, by building renewables compared to building new nuclear.
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.
The US has long sabotaged, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally, nuclear development efforts of everyone but itself. Especially fuel recycling which scalably yield nuclear warhead materials. One could say call it a noble act, but the resultant "problems, delays, overruns" aren't indicative of true potential of the technology.
See where kragen had to find negative examples from, those are "enemy" states of the US. How convenient is that.
Just an estimate of the reactor cost based on the overall boat cost. If you have a better estimate feel free to share.
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 (Юрий Долгорукий), 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.
If you are talking about submarines, the US Navy hasn't had diesel submarines since 1990.
And not all Navy surface ships are nuclear or turbine powered. Many classes of US Navy surface ships are diesel-powered, including some of the newest ones. Ships with gas turbine engines typically feature diesel powerplants also.
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.
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.
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.).
You can buy 10x as much solar+battery as nuclear these days. Nuclear is simply too complex and dangerous to compete.
You are talking about a statistical value not a deterministic one.
So it is solar+battery which is sufficient for n% of typical years.
A Megapack 2XL can output ~2MW and has a capacity of ~4MWh for $1.39M.
A GE BWRX-300 is rated for 300MW and an 18-24 month refueling cycle and allegedly costs ~$1B.
You can build 150x Megapacks for $208M to match that 300MW output, but there is only enough energy stored to provide that output for two hours. If you want to provide 12 hours capacity (to run through the night), you need 900 units at a cost of $1.25B. That’s just for the storage though, you still need the source of electricity to charge the packs, overprovisioned to deal with the capacity factor issues that solar and wind have.
Will the nuclear plant go over budget? Almost certainly. Will it then provide a long-term baseline source of power? Also yes.
I’m pro-renewables and pro-storage, but there’s a mix needed here. Even with storage tech, there needs to be something else that can just sit there and run and produce reliable and controllable power output long-term.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/geothermal/geothermal-en...
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
Not only that, but Earth's internal heat is being renewed constantly via things like radioactive isotopes and tidal forces.
Radioactivity and tidal forces create a fixed amount a heat and that heat dissipates at a given rate, right? So what happens if we change that rate of dissipation/extraction?
The point is, it's all handwavy. Seems familiar to just about everything we've done before - fossil fuels, plastics, PFAS...
The biggest concerns are specific techniques for pumping water, which (sometimes) can cause small earthquakes.
One day humans will realize that their existence and energy use will always have an environmental impact.