Baseload generation is useless in 2025. It's in the name; it's called "base load", not "base generation".
Base generation was a cost optimization. Planners noticed that load never dropped below a specific level, and that cheapest power was from a plant designed to run 100% of the time rather than one designed to turn on and off frequently. So they could reduce cost by building a mix of base and peaker generation plants.
In 2025, that's no longer the case. The cheapest power is solar & wind, which produces power intermittently. And the next cheapest power is dispatchable.
To take advantage of this cheap intermittent power, we need a way to provide power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Which is provided by storage and/or peaker plants.
That's what we need. If added non-dispatchable power to that mix than we're displacing cheap solar/wind with more expensive mix, and still not eliminating the need for further storage/peaker plants.
If non-dispatchable power is significantly cheaper than storage and/or peaker power than it's useful in a modern grid. That's not the case in 2025. The next cheapest power is natural gas, and it's dispatchable. If you restrict to clean options, storage & geographical diversity is cheaper than other options. Batteries for short term storage and pumped hydro for long term storage.
The right answer is 'yes to all the above'. Yes, we need solar. Yes, we need wind. Yes, we need batteries and, yes, we should be looking at geothermal. Solar has shown us, again, how artificially holding back a technology for decades has massive costs. Investing a few billion into geothermal right now is cheap and can only lead to a more durable energy infrastructure in the future. There are all sorts of benefits to a rich ecosystem of power generation. Solar and batteries may be amazing but global supply chains can be disrupted. Similarly, having multiple solutions means that niche use cases have more options and a larger likelihood of finding an acceptable solution. So, yes to all of the above. We are big enough to try them all.
This "there is no base load" idea is a ridiculous myth trivially disproven: every grid on the planet has continuous demands on it and they're quite significant (5 GW is about 50% the day time peaks).
It doesn't matter what the cost is, because later this evening or tomorrow morning I can guarantee you the same thing: my state will need at least 5GW of power to literally keep the lights on.
You are using long-term in an extremely vague way.
Pumped hydro is not a solution for seasonal storage or yearly storage. Seasonal variation can be a problem in higher latitudes.
For example we have a serious problem in New Zealand where our existing "green" hydro lakes are sometimes low and our economy is affected: creating national power crises during dry years. We use coal-burning Huntley and peakers to somewhat cover occasional low hydro generation.
Unfortunately our existing generators also have regulatory capture, and they prevent generating competition (e.g. new solar farms) through rather dirty tactics (according to the insider I spoke with).
Apparently much of our hydro generation is equivalent to “run-of-river” which requires the river to flow. Although the lakes themselves are large, they don't have enough capacity to cover a dry year.
NZ had planned a pumped hydro, but it was expensive: planned cost of 16 billion compared against total NZ export income of ~100 billion. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/503816/govt-confirms-it-... So completely uneconomic risk (plus other problems like NIMBY).
Suitable locations for pumped hydro are very limited, it is a comparably rare resource.
A lot of mountainous places are dry, and a lot of wet places are flat.
Of the remaining places, some are so unique that they cannot be destroyed by industrial construction (National Parks etc.)
For example, the main ridge of Krkonoše (Riesengebirge) on the Polish-Czech border has a lot of wind and rain and deep valleys, but it is the only place south of Scandinavia with a Scandinavia-like tundra and many endemites surviving from the last Ice Age. Any attempt to construct pumped hydro there would result in a national uproar on both sides of the border.
I've always been curious why a cost-effective widespread implementation of geothermal energy has never been considered a holy grail of energy production, at least not in the public debate. Much of the discussion is so focussed on nuclear fusion, which seems so much harder and less likely to be reliable.
Since you're comparing it to nuclear, I'm assuming you mean electricity production here, not energy production?
It's always worth remembering that electricity only accounts for ~20% of global energy consumption (in the US it's closer to 33%).
I suspect people confuse these two because in a residential context electricity plays a huge part of our energy usage, but as a whole it's a smaller part of total energy usage than most people imagine.
But any serious discussion of renewable energy should be careful not to make this very significant error.
Drilling is one of those things which used to be extremely expensive but has very gradually come down in price. Thanks, ironically, to the oil industry. It's unsexy because there's no "silver bullet" waiting in the wings.
It's also quite hard to find suitably hot rocks suitably close to the surface.
Focusing on fusion .. I think that's a legacy of 60s SF, when the fission revolution was still promising "energy too cheap to meter".
The problems are that rock isn't a good conductor of heat, so once you've cooled a bit down, you have to wait for it to warm up. Warming only happens very slowly at the rate of < 50mW / m² which limits the amount of power you can get out.
Probably because not everywhere on earth has the same easy access that Iceland has. The article mentions this:
> There aren’t gates of Hell just anywhere. A kilometre below ground in Kamchatka is considerably hotter than a kilometre below ground in Kansas. There is also readily accessible geothermal energy in Kenya (where it provides almost fifty per cent of the country’s energy), New Zealand (about twenty per cent), and the Philippines (about fifteen per cent)—all volcanic areas along tectonic rifts. But in less Hadean landscapes the costs and uncertainties of drilling deep in search of sufficient heat have curtailed development.
Until recently, the geographical locations where geothermal is feasible and economic was very limited. Ironically it is tech from fracking/shale gas that is starting to open up a far wider range of possible sites at lower cost.
Because unless you sit on top of a volcano, amount of renewable geothermal energy is minuscule. In most places on Earth it's somewhere around 40 mW/m2 (i.e. accounting for conversion losses you need to capture heat from ~500 m2 to renewably power one LED light bulb!). In other words, in most places geothermal plant acts more like a limited battery powered by hot rock, so unless drilling is extremely cheap, it does not make economic sense compared to other energy sources.
I think it mainly depends on how easy it is to access that energy. I went to Tuscany last year and to my surprise there were geothermal plants everywhere. I have never heard about these plants beforehand, but here they are in Italy quietly powering the countryside and heating greenhouses to grow basil all year around.
There is a crazy amount of energy available everywhere but it is not in the interest of the very powerful very wealthy existing players. This isn't some grand CONSPIRACY. For example oil companies may construct energy investment portfolios that would quite sensibly acquire promising energy related research. They do a simple cost benefit analysis then chose to modestly further research it or shelve it. They turn it into valuable pieces of paper that accumulate value over time. What is there for them not to like about it?
I like how David Hamel put it: We live in this thin sliver on the surface of the planet where it is reasonably peaceful. This is the tranquility! It's a good thing! If you go up or down by a mere few miles there is so much energy it kills you.
Instead of drilling deep, there is also an intersting case for storing cheap solar energy as hat in piles of dirts in the summer to power turbines in the winter: https://austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html
Iceland's hot water was a culture shock to me in 2 ways:
1. The host at our apartment encouraged us to leave the windows cracked and the heat on for good air circulation.
2. The hot water (at the taps) has a sulfer smell, because it's (also) piped geothermal water. My host explained they also had a water heater upstairs in their home because they preferred "heated cold water" over "hot water", which is a funny distinction to those of us who do not have the latter.
Note though that the sulfur smell from hot water in Iceland is only a thing in certain areas in Reykjavik, and perhaps some locations around the island.
This is due to the hot water in those regions literally being pumped out of the ground and into homes, and on a completely separate plumbing system. Majority of other areas use heat exchangers with pristine cold water, thus no smell nor taste is transferred.
So if you are staying in any other municipality in the capitol, you can use the hot water in cooking directly without boiling cold water. It's the same.
When heating is dirt (heh) cheap, it doesn't cost much to do things like put big hot tubs and heated pools outdoors, like they do in Reykjaviks swim halls. It's really nice.
Purely as an aside, I had the pleasure of visiting Iceland in August and it was great. Truly beautiful, rugged land.
Another way they've utilised geothermal energy is with large, sophisticated greenhouses which allow growing of many produce they would otherwise import. I only had the opportunity for a brief visit but a lot of it looked hydroponic with really interesting monitoring and control technology. (Plus the biggest bees this Antipodean has ever seen! These suckers were so big they didn't buzz, they rang the doorbell.)
My favorite memory is following a map to a small isolated hot spring off of some random gravel road in the middle of nowhere. It consisted of a hot-tub-sized pool and a shower.
Whoever was there before had left the shower running. We were the only people there, and hadn't seen anyone pass us on the (dead end) road, so it must have been on for quite a while.
Only when I went to for my pre-soak shower did I realize that it didn't actually have any kind of user-accessible way to turn it off.
To me the most important fact to keep in mind about geothermal is that the energy flow across the crust is ~0.1W/m^2. Compare that to the sun which has >100W/m^2 even at high latitudes. Of course this does not mean geothermal is useless (in particular heat pumps, if you count those, are great), but it goes a long way to explaining why geothermal isn't seeing the same explosion as solar.
One underappreciated challenge in geothermal is simply the distribution of usable rock formations — low-prevalence resources. Better drilling reduces the rarity penalty by making more sites viable. Similar structure to many screening problems: improve detection and you can shift what counts as "reachable."
I was wondering how feasible it would be to reuse abandoned oil pumps for geothermal energy. A closed loop system [1] would probably be the most appropriate, with energy generation by spinning of a turbine by steam that gets recycled. I don't have the expertise and was wondering if someone can share a bit of knowledge with the rest of us.
I don't have knowledge, but my understanding based on a conversation I had on the topic with a friend of mine is that the "let's use hydraulic fracturing to make geothermal energy feasible in North America" idea involves drilling very far down. Oil is on [average][1] about a mile down, while [one of Fervo's wells][2] is three times deeper.
People across the road from have geothermal, driven by a 1.5m-deep pond right near their house. Their heat never costs more than $100 a month in the winter.
That's a different "geothermal" - the correct name is "ground source heat pump" or in your neighbor's case, a pond-source heat pump. Those exploit the temperature stability that occurs some small numbers or meters subsurface for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer.
"Geothermal energy" involves drilling down to hot rock to tap intense heat to run a turbine that produces electricity.
There are scifi stories that have that kind of premise. Here's one, about electric power: "Damned if you don't" by Randall Garrett (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24064/pg24064-images.ht...). I think there was also one about teleportation, although I can't remember where I read it.
Well, heat pumps are awesome, but ground-source is overkill for many places where the air temps don't fall too low (and it's a lot harder to drill holes behind your house).
I hadn't realized that the IDDP had hit magma! That's very exciting! Obviously I'm very out of date, since that was in 02008.
However, I'm skeptical that geothermal energy can be economically competitive with solar without major innovations in heat engines, no matter how abundant the energy is and how easily you can get that energy to the surface.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... outlines the estimated costs (five years ago) of a 650MW peak ultra-supercritical coal power plant without carbon capture; the total capital cost estimate comes out to US$2.4 billion, which is US$3.70 per peak watt. Of that, I think the only line item that wouldn't be the same in a 650MW peak ultra-supercritical geothermal plant is "Mechanical – Boiler Plant", which is US$905 million, leaving US$1.5 billion, US$2.30 per peak watt. (I'm not even sure you could eliminate even all of that US$905 million in a geothermal plant; some of it might be plumbing you'd also need to pass heat from your downhole heat exchange fluid with the ultra-pure deionized water you use to drive the delicate steam turbine. But let's suppose you could.) Of that US$1.5 billion, US$155.2 million is "Mechanical – Turbine Plant", so the turbine alone costs 24¢/Wp.
But SEIA last year published https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight.... They have a set of cost breakdowns for “turnkey installed price” for power plants, coming in at 98¢ per watt for “utility-scale fixed-tilt”, slightly higher than the previous year and almost half due to about 40¢ for the PV module itself. Residential is at 325¢, with about 20¢ for the PV module. That's even in the US, where the EIA report's estimates were sited, despite the US's prohibitive import tariffs on solar panels from China, which makes most of the world's solar panels.
Mainstream PV modules are now 12.3¢ per peak watt https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... (except in the US), which would drop SEIA's cost estimates from 98¢/Wp to 70¢/Wp, even in the absence of any other cost optimizations in solar farm design.
Now, utility-scale fixed-tilt solar farms typically have a capacity factor of around 20%, depending on latitude, because the sun is below the horizon half the time and somewhat slanted and/or clouded most of the rest of the time, so 70¢/Wp is really about US$3.50 per watt, not counting the batteries. But geothermal typically only has a capacity factor of around 74% in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto... so US$2.30/Wp is really US$3.10 per watt.
That leaves you 30¢/Wp (74% × ($3.50 - $3.10)) for geothermal exploration and drilling. And if you can reduce the 82% of the solar 70¢/Wp represented by the non-PV-module costs by a little bit, or if you're equatorial enough that your PV capacity factor is 23% or above, that's going to zero or negative. I think the average PV capacity factor in California is something like 29%, though that isn't fixed-tilt and therefore has slightly higher costs.
Also note that the PVXchange page I linked above lists "low-cost" solar panels as having fallen to €0.050/Wp this month, a new historic low, which is 5.9¢/Wp. That's a 50% price decline from two years ago.
Fundamentally I think it's just going to be very hard for 24¢/Wp steam engines to compete against 5.9¢/Wp solar panels. The steam engines have the additional disadvantage that, to get the price even that low, you need enormous degrees of centralization—on the order of a few thousand power plants for the whole population of the US. This requires long-distance electrical transmission lines as well as local distribution lines, which are both substantial costs of their own as well as wasting a double-digit percentage of the energy. Local electrical generation eliminates those costs; you can charge your cellphone or your angle-grinder battery directly from a 5.9¢/Wp solar panel with no more electronics than a couple of protection diodes, not requiring the rest of the 70¢/Wp in the utility-scale solar plant.
This cost analysis is completely indifferent to where the heat to boil the water comes from, so it applies equally well to nuclear power, except for Helion.
The exceptions would be in places where geothermal energy is available and solar energy is either unavailable or very marginal: the surface of Venus, the ocean floor, Antarctica, Svalbard, etc.
Does anyone have a trustworthy estimate of the costs of drilling? Even drilling into cold rocks (for oil) would be a good start, even if hot rocks are more expensive to drill into. The article says that Fervo has raised US$800 million in capital and drilled three appraisal and demonstration wells with it so far, which gives us a ballpark of US$200 million per well. This does not offer much hope that drilling costs will be a minor fraction of the costs of a geothermal plant.
The article unfortunately doesn't enter into this analysis at all.
I am somewhat skeptical of this figure:
> Geothermal energy production in the U.S. at that time [i.e., 02005] was around three or four thousand megawatts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit... says that geothermal energy production in the US in 02022 was 16.09 billion kWh per year, which is 1825 megawatts. Does that mean that geothermal energy production fell by about half between 02005 and 02022? More likely Rivka Galchen got confused.
It's unfortunate that the article also confuses ground-source heat pumps (thermal energy storage) with geothermal energy sources. It's a common confusion, and it makes conversations about geothermal energy unnecessarily difficult.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but is there any downside to harvesting heat from the planet? Would we slow convections by cooling it and then cause some weird ass problem?
It probably also depends on where you are and how deep you need to drill. It seems to be working out for Munich in Germany, there are a couple of city districts (including mine) that are heated by geothermal, and they invested in this since the early 2000s. Can't really find an english page for the whole project though: https://www.swm.de/unternehmen/geothermie
It's nuclear fission. It's always been nuclear fission (well, at least since the '50s) and it will continue to be until we commercialize fusion reactors. Everything else is nice to have but it's like NIH syndrome.
Geothermal is fission, and wind, solar, and batteries are fusion at a distance. In both cases, the failure scenarios are benign vs traditional fission generation. It's fine to keep striving for fusion humans control, but the problem (global electrification and transition to low carbon generation) is already solved with the tech we have today. It took the world 68 years to achieve the first 1TW of solar PV. The next 1TW took 2 years. Globally, ~760GW of solar PV is deployed per year (as of this comment), and will at some point hit ~1TW/year of deployment between now and 2030.
Geothermal is a great fit for dispatchable power to replace coal and fossil gas today (where able); batteries are almost cheaper than the cost to ship them, but geothermal would also help solve for seasonal deltas in demand vs supply ("diurnal storage").
It could be but the US and EU have so far been unable to build commercial fission reactors without going 2x+ over budget in time and money. China is having success but even they are not projected to have nuclear account for more than single digit percentages of their generation.
Maybe SMR's, thorium, 4th gen, etc will work out, but maybe not.
Ive been very pro nuclear my whole life, but a part of me is disheartened by the mega projects that commercial fission deployments have become (even if the reasons are bad) that’s a problem that nerfs traditional fission. If nuclear remains both political, extremely bureaucratic and requires public investment, it just won’t be the solution, and not because the tech or physics is bad, but the decision makers & investors can no longer organize large infrastructure projects effectively (except maybe China). This is not unique to nuclear.
Having smaller scale local power generation, whether it’s SMRs, solar, wind or geothermal, there’s a huge advantage in terms of economy, investment, and politics.
It always has been. Our problem is switching over existing infrastructure without asinine complainers ruining the revolution. We can't even declare total victory with LED bulbs over incandescent. The war to have solar plants over more coal is falling back to coal thanks mostly to AI. Pushback on geothermal will arrive, I guarantee it.
> We can't even declare total victory with LED bulbs over incandescent.
The LED bulbs I have access to (whatever's in the aisles at Home Depot, Costco, etc.) fail much more frequently than the incandescent bulbs I used to buy, and produce an uglier light that is less warm even on the softest/warmest color settings.
My suspicion is that incandescents were at the "end" of their product lifecycle (high quality available for cheap) and LEDs are nearing the middle (medium quality available for cheap), and that I should buy more expensive LED bulbs, but I still think that there are valid "complaints" against the state of widespread LED lighting. I hope these complaints become invalid within a decade, but for now I still miss the experience of buildings lit by incandescent light.
The other thing with AI--the LED revolution was led on this idea that we all need to work as hard as we can to save energy, but now apparently with AI that's no longer the case, and while I understand that this is just due to which political cabals have control of the regulatory machinery at any given time, it's still frustrating.
> The war to have solar plants over more coal is falling back to coal thanks mostly to AI.
Also, due to solar not panning out at scale.[1]
More seriously, coal is just cheaper and, with incentives being removed for green energy, it's the cheapest and fastest option to deploy. It's dead simple and well understood reliable power.
at some point we will figure out that because we took some much energy out of earths core that it stops spinning and causes the magnetic field to collapse ;-)
Not really how that works. Also earths core is being heated from nuclear decay and tidal effects. It’s getting 10’s or TW worth of heat until the sun expands and eats the earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_internal_heat_budget
bryanlarsen|3 months ago
Base generation was a cost optimization. Planners noticed that load never dropped below a specific level, and that cheapest power was from a plant designed to run 100% of the time rather than one designed to turn on and off frequently. So they could reduce cost by building a mix of base and peaker generation plants.
In 2025, that's no longer the case. The cheapest power is solar & wind, which produces power intermittently. And the next cheapest power is dispatchable.
To take advantage of this cheap intermittent power, we need a way to provide power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Which is provided by storage and/or peaker plants.
That's what we need. If added non-dispatchable power to that mix than we're displacing cheap solar/wind with more expensive mix, and still not eliminating the need for further storage/peaker plants.
If non-dispatchable power is significantly cheaper than storage and/or peaker power than it's useful in a modern grid. That's not the case in 2025. The next cheapest power is natural gas, and it's dispatchable. If you restrict to clean options, storage & geographical diversity is cheaper than other options. Batteries for short term storage and pumped hydro for long term storage.
jmward01|3 months ago
masterj|3 months ago
XorNot|3 months ago
This "there is no base load" idea is a ridiculous myth trivially disproven: every grid on the planet has continuous demands on it and they're quite significant (5 GW is about 50% the day time peaks).
It doesn't matter what the cost is, because later this evening or tomorrow morning I can guarantee you the same thing: my state will need at least 5GW of power to literally keep the lights on.
robocat|3 months ago
You are using long-term in an extremely vague way.
Pumped hydro is not a solution for seasonal storage or yearly storage. Seasonal variation can be a problem in higher latitudes.
For example we have a serious problem in New Zealand where our existing "green" hydro lakes are sometimes low and our economy is affected: creating national power crises during dry years. We use coal-burning Huntley and peakers to somewhat cover occasional low hydro generation.
Unfortunately our existing generators also have regulatory capture, and they prevent generating competition (e.g. new solar farms) through rather dirty tactics (according to the insider I spoke with).
Apparently much of our hydro generation is equivalent to “run-of-river” which requires the river to flow. Although the lakes themselves are large, they don't have enough capacity to cover a dry year.
NZ had planned a pumped hydro, but it was expensive: planned cost of 16 billion compared against total NZ export income of ~100 billion. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/503816/govt-confirms-it-... So completely uneconomic risk (plus other problems like NIMBY).
cbmuser|3 months ago
https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...
inglor_cz|3 months ago
A lot of mountainous places are dry, and a lot of wet places are flat.
Of the remaining places, some are so unique that they cannot be destroyed by industrial construction (National Parks etc.)
For example, the main ridge of Krkonoše (Riesengebirge) on the Polish-Czech border has a lot of wind and rain and deep valleys, but it is the only place south of Scandinavia with a Scandinavia-like tundra and many endemites surviving from the last Ice Age. Any attempt to construct pumped hydro there would result in a national uproar on both sides of the border.
bryanlarsen|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
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thedrbrian|3 months ago
hodgehog11|3 months ago
roadside_picnic|3 months ago
Since you're comparing it to nuclear, I'm assuming you mean electricity production here, not energy production?
It's always worth remembering that electricity only accounts for ~20% of global energy consumption (in the US it's closer to 33%).
I suspect people confuse these two because in a residential context electricity plays a huge part of our energy usage, but as a whole it's a smaller part of total energy usage than most people imagine.
But any serious discussion of renewable energy should be careful not to make this very significant error.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory publishes a great diagram of US energy use: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/e...
pjc50|3 months ago
It's also quite hard to find suitably hot rocks suitably close to the surface.
Focusing on fusion .. I think that's a legacy of 60s SF, when the fission revolution was still promising "energy too cheap to meter".
nickcw|3 months ago
https://www.withouthotair.com/c16/page_96.shtml
The problems are that rock isn't a good conductor of heat, so once you've cooled a bit down, you have to wait for it to warm up. Warming only happens very slowly at the rate of < 50mW / m² which limits the amount of power you can get out.
xienze|3 months ago
> There aren’t gates of Hell just anywhere. A kilometre below ground in Kamchatka is considerably hotter than a kilometre below ground in Kansas. There is also readily accessible geothermal energy in Kenya (where it provides almost fifty per cent of the country’s energy), New Zealand (about twenty per cent), and the Philippines (about fifteen per cent)—all volcanic areas along tectonic rifts. But in less Hadean landscapes the costs and uncertainties of drilling deep in search of sufficient heat have curtailed development.
jamescrowley|3 months ago
fuoqi|3 months ago
polotics|3 months ago
hackeraccount|3 months ago
If economically viable fusion was "cracked" what would the nature of it's unreliability even be?
__turbobrew__|3 months ago
Iwan-Zotow|3 months ago
6510|3 months ago
I like how David Hamel put it: We live in this thin sliver on the surface of the planet where it is reasonably peaceful. This is the tranquility! It's a good thing! If you go up or down by a mere few miles there is so much energy it kills you.
flowingfocus|3 months ago
patall|3 months ago
We have to see if and when any of them goes into production, but the technology seems very interesting
unknown|3 months ago
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toomuchtodo|3 months ago
rconti|3 months ago
1. The host at our apartment encouraged us to leave the windows cracked and the heat on for good air circulation.
2. The hot water (at the taps) has a sulfer smell, because it's (also) piped geothermal water. My host explained they also had a water heater upstairs in their home because they preferred "heated cold water" over "hot water", which is a funny distinction to those of us who do not have the latter.
MrDresden|3 months ago
This is due to the hot water in those regions literally being pumped out of the ground and into homes, and on a completely separate plumbing system. Majority of other areas use heat exchangers with pristine cold water, thus no smell nor taste is transferred.
So if you are staying in any other municipality in the capitol, you can use the hot water in cooking directly without boiling cold water. It's the same.
euroderf|3 months ago
anotherevan|3 months ago
Another way they've utilised geothermal energy is with large, sophisticated greenhouses which allow growing of many produce they would otherwise import. I only had the opportunity for a brief visit but a lot of it looked hydroponic with really interesting monitoring and control technology. (Plus the biggest bees this Antipodean has ever seen! These suckers were so big they didn't buzz, they rang the doorbell.)
frankus|3 months ago
Whoever was there before had left the shower running. We were the only people there, and hadn't seen anyone pass us on the (dead end) road, so it must have been on for quite a while.
Only when I went to for my pre-soak shower did I realize that it didn't actually have any kind of user-accessible way to turn it off.
phreeza|3 months ago
Vera_Wilde|3 months ago
garbageoverflow|3 months ago
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-loop_geothermal
MathMonkeyMan|3 months ago
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_enr_welldep_s1_a.htm
[2]: https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-pushes-envelope/
trollbridge|3 months ago
danans|3 months ago
"Geothermal energy" involves drilling down to hot rock to tap intense heat to run a turbine that produces electricity.
dwa3592|3 months ago
mcswell|3 months ago
adverbly|3 months ago
Seriously this would be such a dream!
Turns out that the best battery is literally 10 feet away* - and you don't even need to charge it!
*if you want to make steam its a few thousand, but for heating and cooling its literally just 10 feet!
blacksmith_tb|3 months ago
kragen|3 months ago
However, I'm skeptical that geothermal energy can be economically competitive with solar without major innovations in heat engines, no matter how abundant the energy is and how easily you can get that energy to the surface.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... outlines the estimated costs (five years ago) of a 650MW peak ultra-supercritical coal power plant without carbon capture; the total capital cost estimate comes out to US$2.4 billion, which is US$3.70 per peak watt. Of that, I think the only line item that wouldn't be the same in a 650MW peak ultra-supercritical geothermal plant is "Mechanical – Boiler Plant", which is US$905 million, leaving US$1.5 billion, US$2.30 per peak watt. (I'm not even sure you could eliminate even all of that US$905 million in a geothermal plant; some of it might be plumbing you'd also need to pass heat from your downhole heat exchange fluid with the ultra-pure deionized water you use to drive the delicate steam turbine. But let's suppose you could.) Of that US$1.5 billion, US$155.2 million is "Mechanical – Turbine Plant", so the turbine alone costs 24¢/Wp.
But SEIA last year published https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight.... They have a set of cost breakdowns for “turnkey installed price” for power plants, coming in at 98¢ per watt for “utility-scale fixed-tilt”, slightly higher than the previous year and almost half due to about 40¢ for the PV module itself. Residential is at 325¢, with about 20¢ for the PV module. That's even in the US, where the EIA report's estimates were sited, despite the US's prohibitive import tariffs on solar panels from China, which makes most of the world's solar panels.
Mainstream PV modules are now 12.3¢ per peak watt https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... (except in the US), which would drop SEIA's cost estimates from 98¢/Wp to 70¢/Wp, even in the absence of any other cost optimizations in solar farm design.
Now, utility-scale fixed-tilt solar farms typically have a capacity factor of around 20%, depending on latitude, because the sun is below the horizon half the time and somewhat slanted and/or clouded most of the rest of the time, so 70¢/Wp is really about US$3.50 per watt, not counting the batteries. But geothermal typically only has a capacity factor of around 74% in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto... so US$2.30/Wp is really US$3.10 per watt.
That leaves you 30¢/Wp (74% × ($3.50 - $3.10)) for geothermal exploration and drilling. And if you can reduce the 82% of the solar 70¢/Wp represented by the non-PV-module costs by a little bit, or if you're equatorial enough that your PV capacity factor is 23% or above, that's going to zero or negative. I think the average PV capacity factor in California is something like 29%, though that isn't fixed-tilt and therefore has slightly higher costs.
Also note that the PVXchange page I linked above lists "low-cost" solar panels as having fallen to €0.050/Wp this month, a new historic low, which is 5.9¢/Wp. That's a 50% price decline from two years ago.
Fundamentally I think it's just going to be very hard for 24¢/Wp steam engines to compete against 5.9¢/Wp solar panels. The steam engines have the additional disadvantage that, to get the price even that low, you need enormous degrees of centralization—on the order of a few thousand power plants for the whole population of the US. This requires long-distance electrical transmission lines as well as local distribution lines, which are both substantial costs of their own as well as wasting a double-digit percentage of the energy. Local electrical generation eliminates those costs; you can charge your cellphone or your angle-grinder battery directly from a 5.9¢/Wp solar panel with no more electronics than a couple of protection diodes, not requiring the rest of the 70¢/Wp in the utility-scale solar plant.
This cost analysis is completely indifferent to where the heat to boil the water comes from, so it applies equally well to nuclear power, except for Helion.
The exceptions would be in places where geothermal energy is available and solar energy is either unavailable or very marginal: the surface of Venus, the ocean floor, Antarctica, Svalbard, etc.
Does anyone have a trustworthy estimate of the costs of drilling? Even drilling into cold rocks (for oil) would be a good start, even if hot rocks are more expensive to drill into. The article says that Fervo has raised US$800 million in capital and drilled three appraisal and demonstration wells with it so far, which gives us a ballpark of US$200 million per well. This does not offer much hope that drilling costs will be a minor fraction of the costs of a geothermal plant.
The article unfortunately doesn't enter into this analysis at all.
I am somewhat skeptical of this figure:
> Geothermal energy production in the U.S. at that time [i.e., 02005] was around three or four thousand megawatts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit... says that geothermal energy production in the US in 02022 was 16.09 billion kWh per year, which is 1825 megawatts. Does that mean that geothermal energy production fell by about half between 02005 and 02022? More likely Rivka Galchen got confused.
It's unfortunate that the article also confuses ground-source heat pumps (thermal energy storage) with geothermal energy sources. It's a common confusion, and it makes conversations about geothermal energy unnecessarily difficult.
camgunz|3 months ago
davidw|3 months ago
boringg|3 months ago
mns|3 months ago
yawaramin|3 months ago
toomuchtodo|3 months ago
Geothermal is a great fit for dispatchable power to replace coal and fossil gas today (where able); batteries are almost cheaper than the cost to ship them, but geothermal would also help solve for seasonal deltas in demand vs supply ("diurnal storage").
https://reneweconomy.com.au/it-took-68-years-for-the-world-t...
https://ember-energy.org/data/2030-global-renewable-target-t...
I also love geothermal for district heating in latitudes that call for it; flooded legacy mines appear to be a potential solution for that use case.
Flooded UK coalmines could provide low-carbon cheap heat 'for generations' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860049 - November 2025
thinkcontext|3 months ago
Maybe SMR's, thorium, 4th gen, etc will work out, but maybe not.
klabb3|3 months ago
Having smaller scale local power generation, whether it’s SMRs, solar, wind or geothermal, there’s a huge advantage in terms of economy, investment, and politics.
tim333|3 months ago
installs: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/13/the-fastest-energy-ch...
costs: https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/11q58pe/price_trend...
unknown|3 months ago
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amanaplanacanal|3 months ago
The renewables are so cheap and quick to provision it's hard to see how fission can compete.
jeremyken708|3 months ago
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jeremyken708|3 months ago
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1970-01-01|3 months ago
quacked|3 months ago
The LED bulbs I have access to (whatever's in the aisles at Home Depot, Costco, etc.) fail much more frequently than the incandescent bulbs I used to buy, and produce an uglier light that is less warm even on the softest/warmest color settings.
My suspicion is that incandescents were at the "end" of their product lifecycle (high quality available for cheap) and LEDs are nearing the middle (medium quality available for cheap), and that I should buy more expensive LED bulbs, but I still think that there are valid "complaints" against the state of widespread LED lighting. I hope these complaints become invalid within a decade, but for now I still miss the experience of buildings lit by incandescent light.
The other thing with AI--the LED revolution was led on this idea that we all need to work as hard as we can to save energy, but now apparently with AI that's no longer the case, and while I understand that this is just due to which political cabals have control of the regulatory machinery at any given time, it's still frustrating.
velcrovan|3 months ago
citation needed
parineum|3 months ago
Also, due to solar not panning out at scale.[1]
More seriously, coal is just cheaper and, with incentives being removed for green energy, it's the cheapest and fastest option to deploy. It's dead simple and well understood reliable power.
[1]https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-b...
rspoerri|3 months ago
anotherevan|3 months ago
Retric|3 months ago