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...
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.
> 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.
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...
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 an exiting fault for hundreds of thousands of years 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.
Sure. Exposing these situational constraints and free benefits (third-party sunk costs) aligns with my stance.
I don't agree with the above comment:
> Fervo isn't just trying, they are succeeding
I think as a tech demonstration project it was successful because they were a bit conservative in some ways that will make the economics look worse. I agree it's far from "geothermal everywhere" which seems to be the hype. You can't extrapolate that from one successful EGS well literally right next to an existing geothermal power plant.
> they were a bit conservative in some ways that will make the economics look worse
Or they simply ran into headwinds on a speculative project. I'll "take the under" when your PR is cagey about basic project attributes.
They do a good job of publishing their results in technical industry publications (advancing the field overall in a surprisingly open way) but I agree can be misleading in their marketing.
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.
Ah!
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...
Not quite, with geothermal the storage is built into the system by simply limiting the intake, which builds pressure and can shift energy production throughout the day.
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.
> Not quite … The cost of enhanced geothermal is roughly the exact same cost as nuclear … shares similar economics of a very very low OpEx to CapEx ratio.
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.
Unlike nuclear, that time running at 50% isn't thrown away capital expense, it is merely delayed power output that can be utilized with slightly higher turbine capacity, which is the cheaper part of the capex, and would be needed for higher power output anyway.
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.
> that time running at 50% isn't thrown away capital expense
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.
Geothermal is limited by the flux* of what you can pull from the ground, which sort of scales with capital costs.
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*
I still don’t follow.
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.
Drilling the well is the expensive part. It heats at a relatively constant rate depending on the geometry. You could size the plant to be exactly matched to the well output--but the generators and such are relatively cheap. So instead you make that part of the plant slightly oversized, so you can run at over the well's capacity when electricity is expensive, and under the capacity when it's cheap. The thermal mass of the rocks allows you to average this out over time.
So there are two capacities, that of the well and that of generation (oversized with respect to the well). On average this varying scheme utilizes the well at 100% of capacity (the expensive part to increase), and the turbine generation at less than 100% capacity (not expensive to oversize).
Like someone below said:
> 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%.
You can run it at 400% by building more generators and heat pumps. They aren't the expensive bit.
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.
Everyone is overthinking this. 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. This would not take 50% and make it 100% again, but it does give you something.
Many turbine are running in extreme high pressure (for efficiency). There are no much margin for "build up higher than normal".
Of course we can build something less efficient to allow "pressure build up", but that's another trade off.
It's not pressure on the turbine that builds up, it's pressure at the well head.
> 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.
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.
My understanding of that most nuclear power plants currently operating can already scale up and down to match demand.
They don't because I fuel costs are so low that the power is essentially free when compared to idling.
That's correct. There's nothing technically special about the French nuclear plants that load follow. It's just that France has so much nuclear power in the grid that some of their nuclear plants do load following.
Have you heard about xenon poisoning? Load following with a nuclear power plant is much more complex than it seems
This already makes a large assumption about the type of reactor you are using. For example, a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) does not suffer from the xenon poisoning issue, as do many other designs.
I don’t believe there are any commercial LFTR plants?
It's an interesting thing that pro-nuclear people always talk about "Gen X" power plats with no issues and just a big fat gogo stamp on them, but when you ask about any commercial examples they all come up short.
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)
It takes decades to turn on a new plant which is why you won't see the latest and greatest commercially deployed anytime soon.
Molten Salt reactors are designs from the 60s-70s and afaik no one ever built on commercially. No one was willing to take a gamble on building a new design when we had working reactors already and approval for those was already difficult enough.
AFAIU the corrosion problems are still not solved from a commercial PoV. Ie, without having to shut down and replace piping too often for it too be viable.
Complex or not, it's doable as the nuclear power plants in France are doing. Germany used to do it as well, until they shut down all their nuclear plants.
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.
The LWR is a difficult case for xenon poisoning (compared to other reactors) because of the thermal spectrum and the lack of homogenization (it's not just a temporal problem but a spatial problem) but if you add reactivity swing it can be managed. It's a problem for going from 0-100% quickly but not a problem for following loads across the day, see
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
I had not, but TIL about xenon poisoning and that it was a major contributing factor in the Chernobyl accident (the tl;dr is they did a test where they reduced the fission rate; there was a buildup of Xenon 135 because of that, which caused the reaction to not start back up as fast as the operators thought it should. They removed the control rods almost completely, and when the Xenon stopped doing its thing they had a runaway reaction on their hands.
The xenon poisoning is why they took the control rods all the way out, but the runaway reaction was probably caused by the graphite tips on the ends of the control rods. As the control rods were scrammed these tips passed through areas of high neuton flux and caused a spike in power which probably caused the explosion.
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.
Can't you just burn up the power, e.g. with water->hydrogen conversion, water desalination, pumped hydro, etc. Whenever the grid isn't demanding 100% for your power you throw it at some other profit-generating venture.
Granted you then have to built of of those power-using-things and only run it when grid demand drops.
> e.g. with [...] pumped hydro
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.
> Can't you just [store the power]
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.
you'd be the first trillionaire.
We already do electricity -> hydrogen generation, the hydrogen is then stored in underground pumped storage (empty gas wells), and can be used in place of natural gas.
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.
Relatedly, I've read a couple of neat articles on using mine shafts as gravity batteries: https://bigthink.com/the-future/coal-mines-gravity-battery-e...
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 :)
Gravity batteries have horribly low energy densities. There's usually a better option.
I'd say that there is always a better option. Can someone point to a case where a gravity battery would definitely be better than all the alternatives?
Pumped hydro is a form of gravity battery. It doesn't have great energy density, but it has fantastic power density and responsiveness. That's where its strength lies. We have also probably already built most of the ones that could possibly be built.
Closed loop pumped hydro can be built anywhere there's a hill, there's tons of available expansion capacity there
There are 86 large pumped storage sites in the world. It does work, but you need the right geography. You need two good reservoir sites at considerably different levels close to one another. That's somewhat hard to find.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-deal-with-pumped-hydro
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.
>Geothermal has similar economics.
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.
Nuclear reactors can indeed be made to adjust their power level very quickly, but this typically requires the use of highly enriched uranium which introduces new costs and problems.
> 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?
It is quite expensive, the heating reserves are finite and when you look closely at the details there are a lot of challenges. It isn't quite as easy as putting a pipe in the planet and pumping heat up (even though that is how it is portrayed).
> Why didn't it become the default way to generate power?
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 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.
> 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.
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.
1. No it shouldn't be - it should be a look at Natural Gas/Coal generating facilities vs other technology.
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).
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.
> Iceland has profitable geothermal, no?
Iceland doesn’t have natural gas. (I also imagine the winds and high latitude make solar complicated.)
They do have some solar PV. Looks pretty weird seeing panels at like 60°.
In the summer you can make tons of power with the almost 24/7 sunlight. Cruising in Finland and Sweden in summer we did more solar power than in the Canaries during the fall
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
Are deepsea power cables from Iceland feasable or they'd have to store it as ie. hydrogen to send over?
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
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.
power cables are a lot less vulnerable than fiber since cutting a cable carrying 500kv DC will do nasty things to whatever you're trying to cut with
Estlink 2 (650MW, 450 kV) has been cut twice in a year, with months-long outages in both cases.
Iceland exports carbon free electricity in the form of aluminum.
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.
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.
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.
It's actually the reducing of the alumina (aluminum oxide) to metallic aluminum that takes huge amounts of electricity. And as mentioned, that is done with carbon electrodes which are consumed in the process, leading to relatively high CO2 emissions. Though yes, if that electricity would be produced by burning fossil fuels the emissions would be even higher. So it's not like there aren't big benefits to doing aluminum refining in Iceland, or other places with low-emission electricity.
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.
> "It's actually the reducing of the alumina (aluminum oxide) to metallic aluminum that takes huge amounts of electricity."
AKA: "Smelting"
Depends on the source of that carbon
Good point about releasing co2 from the reservoir, thanks for the correction.
I did not maintain that the aluminum was carbon free.
We do have the technology to build HVDC cables from Iceland to Britain / Norway and we can expect the loss of this grid-to-grid interconnect to be < 5%. It's a different question entirely if it is feasible. It would be the longest sub-sea power cable ever, and the projected cost of $4 billion might be much too low.
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).
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.
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.
Here's a link to a map of geothermal hotspots comparable to Iceland. There seems to be a lot in the same category.
https://www.edengeothermal.com/about/geothermal-energy/world...
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.
The original comment stated that shallow geothermal can be useful for heating, but did not say anything about shallow geothermal electricity generation.
No.
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43234465
"Shallow geothermal for building heat works fine, but it takes a lot of drilling just to get some heat."
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?
You're right that that nuance got lost and I'm sorry I overlooked it.
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.
Perhaps, but "we can make a viable geothermal plant, as long as it's in Iceland" doesn't really help with widespread deployment.
Iceland is one of several geothermal "high temperature zones", other zones include effectively the entire West Coast of all of North and South America, including Alaska, as well as a zone stretching from the Mediterranean through the Red Sea that encompasses basically every European country with Mediterranean coastline. There's a major zone stretching from India through Southeast Asia and a separate independent one basically going along the whole western perimeter of the Pacific Ocean.
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.
US has quite a few hot springs, especially in southwestern states.
SciShow did an interesting video on geothermal potential/drawbacks of Yellowstone. https://youtu.be/rqkJiMDAIpA
They also have volcanic eruptions every few years.
https://www.visiticeland.com/eruption/
Iceland sits on an active volcano.
So do many populated places.
And often those places are islands, meaning their grid are isolated.
well, java is island but the island have BIG populations
Great for them, I guess. I live thousands of miles away from Java. You? The point isn’t “there are 1500 active volcanoes on the planet”, the point is is “there are many places not in the proximity of one of 1500 active volcanoes”.
I live in Martinique, in the Caribbean and there is a somewhat inactive [0] volcano. To generate electricity, we are importing oil/biogaz from Europe. Solar is ramping up but it makes sense to use volcano heat if: - the associated risks are low (earthquakes, just got a 4.8 30 minutes ago [1]) - tropical climate does not make maintenance too costly
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....
I'm currently in the Caribbean with our sailboat. We spent almost a month on Martinique (St. Anne, Anse Mitan, St. Pierre), and were wondering a bit about the low amount of renewables being used.
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 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
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.
Ormat (NYSE ORA) is a publicly traded geothermal company and they are profitable.
If the full cost of carbon technologies was paid instead of so much being externalized, how competitive would these geothermal solutions be?
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).
> 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.
We said the same thing about solar and wind, also in 2008-2016. We found a way anyway
At Delft University in the Netherlands they started a geothermal research project [0] on-campus.
> 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...
> deep geothermal with fracking technology.... this creates small earthquakes as a side effect.
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.
Another one: https://x.com/joelhedwards/status/1886497604344943007
But the lots of drilling gets way cheaper with the microwave evaporation method of the article? It goes from exponential to linear or at least thats the promise? And instead of fracking between two places, they want to just drill deeper and then have one pipe- with outside water inject and supercritical steam turbine lowered in on the inside .. alternative would be two parallel cheap drills - connected via fracking again and then perpetual geysir?
https://www.quaise.energy/ is working on the drilling cost problem.
> 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.
That hasn't stopped the fracking industry, so why would it be a bother for DEEP?
> cost of delivering the electricity that was produced to a market was just greater than the revenue stream that we could create."
So, the same as nuclear, wind, solar, gas, and coal, all of which which largely don’t work without significant government support.
Does nuclear need large amounts of government support? I was under the impression that it was much cheaper on the margin than other forms of electricity. I can easily imagine the needed support for the initial cost to build.
Does storage of used fuel rods need government support too? Or are those calculated in the cost and the market can bear it?
It'd be interesting to see if fossil fuels would be considered profitable if we took into account the entire cost-benefit analysis of using them.
In fact we already know they wouldn’t.
Man, it's so unfortunate that saving the planet just isn't profitable.