Could Geothermal Power Revolutionize US Energy Consumption? (msn.com) 49
That
massive geothermal energy project in Utah gets a closer look from the Washington Post, which calls it "a significant advance for a climate-friendly technology that is gaining momentum in the United States."
Once fully operational, the project could generate up to 2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power more than 2 million homes. In addition, the BLM proposed Thursday to speed up the permitting process for geothermal projects on public lands across the country. Earlier this month, the agency also hosted the biggest lease sale for geothermal developers in more than 15 years...
White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in an interview Thursday, "Enhanced geothermal technology has the opportunity to deliver something in the range of 65 million homes' worth of clean power — power that can be generated without putting any pollution in the sky. So we see it as a really meaningful contributor to our technology tool kit...."
The developments Thursday come as tech companies race to find new sources of zero-emission power for data centers that can use as much energy as entire cities. With major backing from Google parent Alphabet, Fervo recently got its first project up and running in the northern Nevada desert... The advanced geothermal technology that Fervo is trying to scale up is an attractive option for tech firms. Enhanced geothermal plants do not pose all the safety concerns that come with nuclear power, but they have the potential to provide the round-the-clock energy that data centers need. The challenge Fervo faces is whether it can bring this technology online quickly enough.
Fervo (a seven-year-old start-up) was co-founded by Tim Latimer, who previously worked as a drilling engineer, according to the article. But "Early in my career I got passionate about climate change. I started looking at where could a drilling engineer from the oil and gas industry make a difference," Latimer said during a Washington Post Live event in September. "And I realized that geothermal had been so overlooked ... even though the primary technical challenge to making geothermal work is dropping drilling costs."
White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in an interview Thursday, "Enhanced geothermal technology has the opportunity to deliver something in the range of 65 million homes' worth of clean power — power that can be generated without putting any pollution in the sky. So we see it as a really meaningful contributor to our technology tool kit...."
The developments Thursday come as tech companies race to find new sources of zero-emission power for data centers that can use as much energy as entire cities. With major backing from Google parent Alphabet, Fervo recently got its first project up and running in the northern Nevada desert... The advanced geothermal technology that Fervo is trying to scale up is an attractive option for tech firms. Enhanced geothermal plants do not pose all the safety concerns that come with nuclear power, but they have the potential to provide the round-the-clock energy that data centers need. The challenge Fervo faces is whether it can bring this technology online quickly enough.
Fervo (a seven-year-old start-up) was co-founded by Tim Latimer, who previously worked as a drilling engineer, according to the article. But "Early in my career I got passionate about climate change. I started looking at where could a drilling engineer from the oil and gas industry make a difference," Latimer said during a Washington Post Live event in September. "And I realized that geothermal had been so overlooked ... even though the primary technical challenge to making geothermal work is dropping drilling costs."
Good thing of course (Score:3)
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Meanwhile in China...
Meanwhile in China they are building nuclear power plants that are capable of using thorium for fuel.
I'll see opponents to nuclear power claim how nuclear fission power plants take "too long" to build and require scarce uranium fuel. China seems to have figured out how to address both issues. Why can't nations like Germany and the USA figure this out? I believe they will in time.
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I think that will be built by 2030 right? And will produce 1-200MW -- or about the same as 10 large wind turbines?
The "too long" issue still seems to be there. Of course, it is still worth trying new technology because who knows; it might turn out to be competitive.
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Meanwhile in China they are building nuclear power plants that are capable of using thorium for fuel.
Sure, like we did in 1964, and the Indians did in 1996. Granted those were experimental reactors, but the reason we didn't go further down that path wasn't that we didn't know *how*. It's that it wasn't economical given the price of uranium.
I'll see opponents to nuclear power claim how nuclear fission power plants take "too long" to build and require scarce uranium fuel. China seems to have figured out how to address both issues. Why can't nations like Germany and the USA figure this out? I believe they will in time.
Don't count those j before they hatch. China has a long history of doing economically dubious megaprojects for political glory. It is true that thorium is potentially a solution to uranium depletion in a future, mainly fission-powered economy, but that's not a probl
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https://www.gem.wiki/Terra-Gen... [gem.wiki]
https://www.gem.wiki/Beowawe_g... [gem.wiki]
That's the good news, the bad news is the environmentalists don't like geothermal power either, when you actually go to build it.
https://www.rgj.com/story/news... [rgj.com]
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" environmentalists don't like geothermal power either"
Environmentalists don't like anything that advantages the USA. It has long been suspected that they are mostly led by US adversaries, with hordes of "useful idiots" found on places like Tic Toc ready to go protest this or protest that at their beck and call.
I can't think of a more deserving group to ignore than "environmentalists" that are out to stop something.
don't get too excited (Score:1)
Their is a cost to the environment.
You can't dump an infinite amount of heat energy into the environment without consquences.
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You're not technically wrong here, but can you provide any actual examples of this happening? Usually operators are bound by environmental regs and are on top of that kinda of thing. Usually.
> You can't dump an infinite amount of heat energy into the environment without consquences.
Well nobody's proposing an infinite amount of anything so we're good there at least.
=Smidge=
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My personal takeaways were thus. Open systems always lose efficiency over a number of years.. bascially the pressure inside the open system drops and the electricity outputs therefore also drop over a period of time. So the "answer" was to create closed systems, ie. put stuff in tubes, then circulate the stuff, almost exactly like a heat pump
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Well nobody's proposing an infinite amount of anything so we're good there at least.
That's not quite true. Either there's an infinite amount of human stupidity, or we can harness energy from Albert Einstein spinning in his grave.
Historical open circuit (Score:3)
Much of the downtown had hot-water heat from the power plant of the Chatham, Wallaceburg & Lake Erie Electric Railway.
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>> Closed systems don't have the same problem
You didn't bother to read the links? This system reportedly is closed loop (also known as enhanced geothermal), so you can relax.
But it will take at least another 4 years to build it so I don't know why this article is interesting.
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From the linked article;
"The BLM on Thursday proposed to exempt many geothermal projects from lengthy environmental analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act — part of a broader, controversial push to accelerate the permitting process for energy projects nationwide."
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You’re not wrong, of course, but problems with waste heat are hardly limited to geothermal power - any power plant using heat transfer has similar issues to a greater or lesser degree, including coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. Even solar power systems that rely on solar energy to heat up a furnace will have to get rid of the heat somehow.
Geothermal also has the potential for producing waste water contaminated with sulphur, metals, or other pollutants that get brought up with the heat transfer
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"You can't dump an infinite amount of heat energy into the environment without consquences."
You can't? The sun does it every day...
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Seven-year-old startup? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not So Much about Age (Score:2)
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I feel like until it makes money.
It's a start up as long as people are willing to fund it on the promise of one day being profitable.
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How many years before a startup become no longer a startup?
Is Microsoft a 49-year-old startup? Is Shell a 117-year-old startup?
Is Kongo Gumi a 1400-year-old startup?
Being a startup is not defined by age. I have encountered ten year old startups. Most investors are not that patient. They require an exit within a reasonable time usually an IPO or by being acquired by a larger company. It gets murky when companies get big without going public. SpaceX is 22 years old and valued near $200B but is still private. Is it still a startup?
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How many years before a startup become no longer a startup?
It's not a time based title.
https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
Wait! What? (Score:2)
2 gigawatts of electricity â" enough to power more than 2 million homes
That's 1kW per home. That might be a valid number if people haven't converted from gas heating/hot water/clothes drying/cooking.
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Yeah, that seems low, but they're probably thinking mostly apartments/small homes. Still, 1kWh average is a lot. If your electricity+delivery cost was 12 cents per kWh, your bill would have to be upward of $88+fees (most likely around $200) if you used an average of 1kW/hour. But most people who live in apartments' cost is less than $200
Now that I've put my usage in numbers, I'm really wondering what I'm doing that's using 3.5kWh/hour. I guess it's time to get back to my panel sensor project ...
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I'm doing that's using 3.5kWh/hour.
Save yourself some typing, just say kW rather than kWh/hour.
It is also 1 kW average, not kWh in this case. Power vs energy.
1 kW * 30 days * 24 hours = 720 kWh/month, $86.40@$0.12/kWh.
I know in my area SFDs average closer to 1k kWh/month.
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The average electricity consumption of US households is 10.2 MWh in a year (data for 2023 https://shrinkthatfootprint.co... [shrinkthatfootprint.com] ). A continuous production of 2 GW makes 17.5 TWh in a year, which covers the spending of 1.7 million of such average households.
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We don't really understand the effects of cooling earth Crust & Magma.
I believe you don't really understand the scale of the planet.
The Earth is quite large. Much of the heating in the core is from the decay of heavy elements buried in very deep. Maybe we end up poking in a few holes that lower the resistance of this heat escaping into space but that's not likely to make any changes that are detectable beyond the local area.
With abundance of Sun & Wind plus battery technology and fusion in the horizon.
We shouldn't get so much excited, like it was with fossil fuels in the last century.
Fusion on the horizon? That's been a trope of future energy since at least Leonard Nemoy was an actor on Star Trek and the host of In Search of.... Wh
Hasn't this been considered before? (Score:2)
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Cost.
Coal and gas were so cheap that the cost of drilling for, building, and operating a geothermal plant rarely mad much sense. That said, the US has for decades had several times the installed and operating geothermal power than that of Iceland, so it's definitely nothing new either.
But I guess someone's trying to bring sexy back...
=Smidge=
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I can see a potential drawback to this, though: what if the heat source they tap into dies out over time, especially if it does so prematurely? Much investment in a power plant that then would have to be shuttered.
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> I can see a potential drawback to this, though: what if the heat source they tap into dies out over time, especially if it does so prematurely?
If the Earth's mantel cools to the point that we can't extract usable energy from it anymore, I propose there would be FAR bigger concerns than keeping the power plant open for business.
=Smidge=
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Not likely. (Score:1)
The answer to the question on if geothermal power is able to revolutionize the energy supply the answer is not likely.
There's been many people that did the math on what every energy source we know of consumes in resources and provides in useful energy. Geothermal does not rank well. The problem is that the power production is too diffuse. The global average on geothermal power has been approximated as 0.1 watt per square meter. In a nation as large as the USA we can expect to get something close to the
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Are you dividing the total geothermal output by the surface area of the earth?
The point of this is that it's deeper, hotter and, they reckon, should last longer and should cost less. It's the last two that we really need to know.
Geothermal more viable then nuclear (Score:2)
Not the most expeditious. (Score:2)
Isn't this about full employment for drillers? (Score:2)
Nothing wrong with full employment, but the cost of geothermal is not competitive with wind or solar. I guess the same could be said for nuclear power and the need to keep those workers employed.
"That illustrates another reason why geothermal could help the U.S. chart a path to a cleaner energy future, said CEO Tim Latimer. A lot of fossil fuel operations will be phased out to fight climate change. And a lot of oil and gas workers will need a landing spot"
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A few years ago, solar and wind were not cost competitive with geothermal. Things change. If they can get the cost down to within 2 or 3 times that of solar or wind, and show that it can be done with a wide geographical distribution, then it will have a place.
Iceland is the place to watch (Score:2)
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In fact, the massive potential of geothermal power in Iceland is why I've personally suggested that Iceland should be the location of Artificial Intelligence server farms. And the server farms in Iceland can be connected back to North America and Europe using multiple high-capacity fiber optic undersea cables.
Priorities, priorities... (Score:2)
Yellowstone (Score:2)
Yellowstone sit atop of a supervolcano. Would that not make a great location to tap into geothermal power? Im not saying do it smack dab in the middle of the park but surely there are some places they could section off to produce power.