America's Geothermal Breakthrough

It's expensive. A relative has one in the northern Great Lakes, they wouldn't have installed it if their house had access to natural gas.

There's a pretty significant upfront cost in getting them drilled, and many homes need the vertical drilling if they don't have sufficient yard space for a horizontal system. It gets harder if you have your own septic drain field too, as that will complete for yard space.

The cost difference is pretty massive- 3-10x for a vertical system. If you live in a city or a suburb with tiny lots, that's your only option though.

Nat gas and central AC are way cheaper.

"New Zealand has an abundant supply of geothermal energy because we are located on the boundary between two tectonic plates. ... Total geothermal electricity capacity in New Zealand stands at over 900 MW, making us the fifth largest generator of geothermal in the world. It has been estimated that there is sufficient geothermal resource for another 1,000 MW of electricity generation."

That's not all that much. That total would be about equal to the 75th largest nuclear plant in the world.

Good sites where high temperatures are near the surface are rare. California has a few, but no promising locations for more.

You brought the conversation in a circle, since the point of this new technology is the geology you speak of is rare.

But the energy in boiling isopentane would be less right?

At least in parts of Eastern Europe (especially the former GDR) district heating systems were introduced as a response to the oil crises of the 70s, resulting price shocks and the transport of coal to households being very labor and resource incentive [1].

[1] https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Windkraft-und-Erd...

"I don't know how economical that is"

Sure you do. Think about it. Its just drilling a hole and making electricity from the heat. We have been able to do this for a very long time. So if people aren't really doing it much, its not economical. If it was now becoming economical, the article would describe some new way of doing it that makes it economical. The article doesn't, so you "know" it isn't.

PS This has been tried many time, it only works in very specific situations, usually places where building a full PP doesn't make sense or where you are making a lot of electricity for some other purpose (mining usually).

I’ve never heard a claim that heat pumps won’t work well in a climate like San Francisco and, from looking at the annual temperature patterns, it seems like both air source and ground source heat pumps should work extremely well as they do in the “shoulder seasons” here in New England.

> pv in the UK doesn't work

tell that to 6% of UK electric production https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz947djd3d3o (up from 5% in 2024

Wait Minneapolis is definitely very cold for about half the year.

> There's no reason why this shouldn't work. But they've been at it for 9 years, with considerable funding, and it doesn't really work yet. That's a concern.

It does work. They've had a pilot project producing 3 megawatts since 2023. But scaling takes a lot of time and money, particularly when it's something new and you have to go through a lot of operational learning.

Shale took something like 30 years to become a thing. 9 years is nothing in the energy space.

"There's no reason why this shouldn't work."

Geothermal has had the same problem for its entire history. That problem is that the water being heated goes through the ground (not in a pipe) to "gather" more energy. But this means that when the water comes back up, it has a lot of weird salts in it (and other things). Those salts cause corrosion, lots and lots of corrosion, far more than even a maritime environment. So the plant needs to be shutdown a lot of the time for repairs. And that's what makes it uneconomical. Also, the salts often contain things that require special handling which also increases costs.

PS This is why geothermal works in Iceland where there is so much geothermal heat they can use pipes. In CA, they can't so it doesn't work there.

In traditional fault hosted (not magmatic) geothermal the convection of the water up the fault brings the thermal energy closer to the surface where drilling depths are economical. This convection heats the surrounding rock and over hundred thousand - million of years brings the background temperature around a large volume at depth surrounding these systems considerably above traditional background geothermal gradients. By drilling into a much larger volume of impermeable hot rock surrounding a very small permeable fault hosted section you can considerably enhance the power potential of a traditional fault hosted geothermal system (the E in EGS). That is what Fervo is doing and why their projects are situated right next to traditional geothermal power plants.

The assumption is that if you can increase drilling efficiencies enough then you don't even need a fault hosted or similar system to bring that energy close to the surface, you can just drill down deep enough to get at similar temperatures. That is a big assumption in the economics.

No. Current geothermal projects need very specific geology to work, its very rare which is why geothermal is such a small blip in the overall energy picture. Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), the technique Fervo is using, can create the conditions to be able to generate electricity. The hope is this will greatly expand the number of projects that can be developed.

Doesn't that sound useful to you?

These are typically representative of cost performance per watt of one part of a more complex deployed energy system. Things like the aluminum / steal for the container / framing, copper / aluminum for the transmission and wiring, land and labor for installation decline at much less aggressive rates or increase over time.

In almost all pareto optimal least cost energy system models that I've seen, high penetration of solar, wind, batteries plus some minority amount of (clean) baseload power is the most capital efficient energy system.

As far as I can tell, every president in the US since the Clinton administration has been in favor of nuclear power.

Is there something important that I am missing?

They have spent immense effort blocking huge amounts of domestic solar and wind production, even paying off developers to simply not build planned power plants.

When you have a supply chain failure on solar or wind power, you stop adding capacity. When you have a supply chain failure on oil and gas, you stop generating power. These are not the same problem.

We can build capacity to manufacturer renewable power domestically. But I suspect this administration is more interested in protecting the business interest of those that gave them the largest campaign donations than they are in long term energy sustainability.

They're interested in protecting the profits of industries that line their pockets. It's the most corrupt administration in US history and it isn't even close. Theres some far right ideology mixed in. Particularly from Stephen Miller, but mostly it's grift and graft

Saying solar power is dependent on China because panels come from China is like saying fracking is dependent on China because some pumps and drilling equipment come from China.

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So do Renewables.

It expires in 2036