Title of the article: "World’s first enhanced geothermal power plant completed..."
A quick Wiki search shows a page for "Enhanced geothermal system"[1]. There is a list of projects. There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here?
> The power plant synchronized with the grid about a week ago, bringing online the first third of what will soon become a 100-megawatt power plant.
What about cost? Nothing from TechCrunch. I found better analysis here[2]. Look at this savage quote:
> At $7,000 per kW for Phase 1 against the $2,157 per kW Canary Media gives for a 2025 gas plant
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_geothermal_system
[2] https://mgrid.org/2026/09/27/fervo-first-power-cape-station-...
The tldr
> If we look at our Fastest MW analysis, the fastest way to get power to the grid right now is solar+BESS with existing interconnection agreements in ERCOT. This setup gives a 27-month or less time-to-COD, and can come in at $40/MWh PPAs, a price and speed Fervo can't catch. So, per the above, the right way to think about it is that Fervo competes for a different customer than the ones looking at solar+BESS. Are they required to procure geo? Are they in the West? Do they need fully baseload power? For sure, that’s a smaller niche. But if Fervo's anticipated 38GW resource base materializes even a little, the niche is huge.
By the time you finish reading this, solar panels got cheaper
Op is really just describing a core breakeven metric on the energy source. In the same way you measure an oil well with half-life of useful output, this is basically saying "EGS can prove to be useful if they can make sure they extract more economically useful heat than the economic costs of constantly drilling new wells."
Since no one has really made EGS widespread yet, that suggests no one has yet cracked this nut.
That seems like a fallacy.
It is premised on a belief that a significant number of smart motivated professionals have been trying to solve the same problem with substantially the same budgets and technologies for many years and that experience has led them to an informed belief that more practical solutions exist.
You might say it is a stronger belief in engineering practice and economic efficiency than in press releases.
[note: I agree it would not be “everywhere” because the practicality of drilling into bedrock varies significantly between locations. But that is not a point in favor of scaling the proposed technique]
"If the internet was useful, everyone would use it" is something that wouldn't stand the test of time, right?
And at the time I write this, it breaks the world record for HN comments by the world’s first brudgers.
The internet expanded as the result of semi-conductor break throughs made by thousands of engineers with access to semi-conductor break throughs. There was a ‘virtuous’ cycle.
That is not the same thing as a press release. ‘World’s first,’ ‘New Record,’ and ‘Scientists’ correlate with press releases. Press releases make for easy news content and news sites are attracted to them.
There's a geothermal project at the Newberry Volcano in Oregon that also looks interesting (different people doing that).
It happens to be right next to the DOE sponsored Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE [1]) site that established the temperature and ability to create permeability at depth using EGS.
Theoretically, a leak into groundwater aquifers would make keeping the system pressurized harder or would dillute the amount of heat they're extracting, so seems like a stronger commercial incentive not to f up the groundwater.
In oil fracking they're just trying to pull the oily goo up from underground. And in theory you could do heat extraction using just water instead of shale goo solvents so any contamination would be less impactful?
I dunno, I'm just internet armchair quarterbacking this until a real geologist chimes in, but I can see how this is a somewhat different beast that shale fracking wells.
Some good info about what's different in there.