[xcskier56]

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

[glenstein]

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.

[caminante]

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.

[stavros]

Perhaps, but "we can make a viable geothermal plant, as long as it's in Iceland" doesn't really help with widespread deployment.

[SkiFire13]

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.

[mirekrusin]

Are deepsea power cables from Iceland feasable or they'd have to store it as ie. hydrogen to send over?

[Reason077]

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

[thinkcontext]

Iceland exports carbon free electricity in the form of aluminum.

[thworp]

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).

[Galatians4_16]

US has quite a few hot springs, especially in southwestern states.

[abracadaniel]

SciShow did an interesting video on geothermal potential/drawbacks of Yellowstone. https://youtu.be/rqkJiMDAIpA