Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

treehugger.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 314 posts

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#121

Post by pm90 »

topspin wrote: post #53
pm90 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seismic disturbances are generally a concern for dense urban areas. It seems unlikely that agricultural areas would care that much.

Is there any conceivable burden urbanites don't imagine the people and land outside urban areas can tolerate? We don't live in grass yurts you know. Bridges and dams are a thing. Earthquakes are a problem. Deep fracking operations have demonstrated this already.

> We don't live in grass yurts you know. Bridges and dams are a thing. Earthquakes are a problem. Deep fracking operations have demonstrated this already.

What percentage of rural areas are situated in close proximity to large dams and bridges?

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#124

Post by NavinF »

hectormalot wrote: post #84
leoedin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could also have good use for ground source heat pumps - they're the most efficient, robust and consistent source of domestic heating we have, but require fairly deep (60m ish) boreholes. If digging could be quicker, easier or faster these heat pumps could be installed everywhere.

I have one of those. The well is 170m deep. Took 2 guys about half a day to drill it, so that actually doesn’t seem excessive in terms of time required (mostly sand, no rock below my house).

I assume you mean “2 guys and some heavy equipment”? As a kid it took me a whole summer of on-and-off digging to make a 1 meter deep hole for fun.

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#125

Post by usrusr »

ComradePhil wrote: post #27
anonporridge wrote: post #9

Something I've always wondered. Wouldn't massive scale geothermal end up pumping more heat into the atmosphere that otherwise wouldn't be there? In contrast, the energy collected by solar and wind generators is from the energy added to Earth by the sun and would be energy in our atmosphere regardless of whether or not we collect it. But it seems like the heat inside the Earth's core should be fairly well insulated by…

Solar is also trapping more energy than what would never be there. If the sun's rays just hit the ground, a portion of it would be reflected back. We're using dark material to aborb most of what would be reflected back and we end up trapping more energy than we should... Solar panels are around 15% efficient, which means 85% of this trapped energy is immediately converted to heat, heating the local environment... and…

If you've ever driven on a road approaching a hillside photovoltaics installation from the east at just the right time in the afternoon when it projects the sun right into traffic, you wouldn't be so sure to assume that 100% of incoming photons go either to electricity or to heat... but yeah, high albedo photovoltaic might be an interesting research topic. We have semi-translucent panels that seem to only sacrifice so much efficiency, some room for high albedo should exist (probably not much). Market would of course be people showing off that they can afford different looks, like those musk-shingles. But efficiency also dereases with temperature, so perhaps this might be another angle ? Invoking the impact on total earth albedo certainly won't drive any buying decisions, tragedy of the commons and all that...

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#126

Post by usrusr »

hackernewds wrote: post #119
Glawen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A conventional drill can be cemented as well, the technology is already existing but mishap happened anyway Another town near Strasbourg is devastated like staufen Im breigsbau: Lochwiller. With the same issue as staufen, except that in this case it was a family who drilled to heat their home.

are you telling me a family drilled to heat their home and caused earthquake? that sounds absurd

The really interesting question might sound even more absurd: did that earthquake release stress that would have been released sooner or (worse:) later anyways? Should people affected by the earthquake thank the family for releasing stress before more accumulate?

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#127

Post by YawningAngel »

anonporridge wrote: post #23
tinco wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct in that the earth core is really well insulated from the surface. So well that the light of the sun delivers an order of magnitude more energy per M2 to the Earth's surface. That information also answers your question, our problem isn't with the amount heat we produce, it's with how much of that solar radiation we trap in our atmosphere due to the green house effect of CO2 and similar gases. So yeah w…

I've had the thought for a while now that it might be a good idea to start changing the climate change narrative to a problem of planetary heat engineering, not simply a problem of GHG reduction. The current narrative is largely defeatist and regressive. It's largely about rolling back growth and the amount of energy civilization has harnessed. But if the narrative was altered to be a heat engineering problem, then i…

All the geoengineering we might do is totally unproven and untested. If the alternative is a calamity then yes, of course we'll do it. As things stand, it seems like we should be putting as much effort as we can into the thing we know works (reducing greenhouse gas emissions).

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#128

Post by wffurr »

ComradePhil wrote: post #27
anonporridge wrote: post #9

Something I've always wondered. Wouldn't massive scale geothermal end up pumping more heat into the atmosphere that otherwise wouldn't be there? In contrast, the energy collected by solar and wind generators is from the energy added to Earth by the sun and would be energy in our atmosphere regardless of whether or not we collect it. But it seems like the heat inside the Earth's core should be fairly well insulated by…

Solar is also trapping more energy than what would never be there. If the sun's rays just hit the ground, a portion of it would be reflected back. We're using dark material to aborb most of what would be reflected back and we end up trapping more energy than we should... Solar panels are around 15% efficient, which means 85% of this trapped energy is immediately converted to heat, heating the local environment... and…

Both wind and hydro convert kinetic energy into electricity and heat. The heat is from the moving parts in the turbines and the power conversion electronics. Heat is a product of just about every energy conversion you can imagine.

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#129

Post by throwaway0332 »

> True geothermal energy is truly green

Reminder: few energy sources do not add heating to the atmosphere during the whole energy lifecycle!

It's the ones that *subtract* energy from the environment in the first place: solar, wind, dams, tidal energy.

Other sources (including geothermal, nuclear, oil ...), even if we could produce a 100% efficient power plant, are still extracting energy that would otherwise stayed "locked-in" somewhere.

Keep in mind that virtually all electrical energy produced turns into heat released in the atmosphere.

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#130

Post by alex_smart »

throwaway0332 wrote: post #129

> True geothermal energy is truly green Reminder: few energy sources do not add heating to the atmosphere during the whole energy lifecycle! It's the ones that *subtract* energy from the environment in the first place: solar, wind, dams, tidal energy. Other sources (including geothermal, nuclear, oil ...), even if we could produce a 100% efficient power plant, are still extracting energy that would otherwise stayed "…

I think one relevant question is: how does that amount of energy compare to the energy that the earth is bombarded with by the sun anyways? If it is miniscule (say less than 1%) in comparison, will that have a significant impact on global warming?

https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026

>A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use.

So even if we get all of our current energy needs from these sources, that is less than 0.01% of the energy earth gets from the sun. Is that going to have a significant effect on the temperature of the earth?

Post reply on HN