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The time has finally come for geothermal energy

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Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#141

Post by foota »

jimbokun wrote: post #84
roadside_picnic wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a holy grail of energy production 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…

What does "Rejected Energy" mean in that graph? Great chart, by the way.

It would be nice if before each box where rejected energy is an output, the inputs were split by rejected and non-rejected inputs.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#142

Post by klabb3 »

yawaramin wrote: post #53
klabb3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 & investo…

Nuclear has broad bipartisan support, and the Trump administration is heavily into it, so I wouldn't count it out just yet. If the various Green parties of the Western world ever come into power though, we are cooked.

But that illustrates the point. Most investors don’t want to put money towards something that may be put on indefinite hold depending on political winds. These projects are often much longer than presidential terms.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#143

Post by Melatonic »

quickthrowman wrote: post #29
quacked wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. LED lamps work just fine, you just need to pay more attention when you’re buying them. Philips makes decent LED lamps. Make sure you’re buying lamps with 90+ CRI, that will…

Yup - CRI is most important. Indoor house plants also like high CRI lights much more as well!

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#144

Post by thedrbrian »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #57

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 plan…

Its so easy that you can’t name me a single city of more than 10000 people that runs entirely off renewables.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#145

Post by psunavy03 »

pjc50 wrote: post #140
psunavy03 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully understand that waste management of fission reactors is a Very Big Deal. But I still stand behind the argument that opposing nuclear power in the 70s and onward is possibly the biggest own goal the environmental movement has ever achieved. At worst, nuclear waste contaminates a discrete section of the Earth. Climate change affects literally everywhere. The correct answer would have been to aggressively roll o…

Back then, it affected everyone in two ways, which were the things Greenpeace campaigned against: nuclear weapons, especially overland testing, and dumping waste at sea. Chernobyl took out Welsh farming for years, and in a few places decades, because it spread a thin layer of bioaccumulative poison over the whole of Europe.

Neither of these have anything to do with running a well-regulated nuclear power program. Chernobyl happened because of the apathy and incompetence endemic to any Marxist-Leninist system, not because a modern democratic state is incapable of regulating the nuclear power industry.

Know what else spreads a thin layer of poison over the whole of the world? Coal power.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#146

Post by ZeroGravitas »

XorNot wrote: post #79
bryanlarsen wrote: post #57

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 plan…

In 2025 the power consumption of my state (NSW, Australia) on any given day will be greater then 5 GW. https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-... 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 thi…

That's the current load when the pricing structure actively encourages people to use power at night, because that was when it was cheapest to produce in the last century.

What does it look like if you actively encourage people to use power when it is cheapest to produce now?

I guess we'll find out when 3 hours of free electricity at noon becomes a standard offer next year.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#147

Post by dalyons »

cbmuser wrote: post #110
bryanlarsen wrote: post #57

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 plan…

Or just build out nuclear like France and pay just 20 Cents per kWh. https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...

State subsided construction and maintenance doesn’t pass straight through to consumer prices.

Also, France can’t build new nuclear for cheap/fast anymore either. They have a program for new reactors, even if they go ahead the first one won’t come online till 2038 by the earliest. We can’t wait that long.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#148

Post by dalyons »

cbmuser wrote: post #109
jamescrowley wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baseload is traditionally about generation, not consumption. And baseload generation only makes sense when it is the cheapest option. When solar and wind produce at near-zero marginal cost, running inflexible baseload beside them just forces cheaper generation to switch off, driving up system costs. What the grid needs is dispatchable capacity - batteries, hydro, gas peakers (if we must) and demand shifting - that ca…

It sounds great in theory but doesn’t work in practice. Just compare Germany to France.

This is such a tired trope. The differences between the two countries present day energy situation doesn’t tell you anything about how the world should proceed tomorrow.

Unless you have a time machine that you can use to get every country to build state subsided nuclear 50 years ago.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#149

Post by cogman10 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #74
masterj wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern geothermal is dispatchable. It's a really good compliment to wind and solar https://climateinstitute.ca/safe-bets-wild-cards/advanced-ge...

But is it usefully dispatchable? Nuclear can be made dispatchable but it's not usefully dispatchable because the costs are fairly similar whether the plant is on or off. Like nuclear, I believe geothermal has high capital cost and low running costs, suggesting that it isn't usefully dispatchable. But that's too simplistic. A big limitation of geothermal is that rock has poor thermal conductivity. So once you remove h…

> I believe geothermal has high capital cost and low running costs

Higher capital costs, but not nuclear high capital costs.

> That means it's competing against batteries, which are also great for smoothing out daily cycles, and are very inexpensive.

It likely would supplement batteries rather than compete against them. A battery buffer would allow a geothermal plant to slowly rise to load and fall as that load goes away.

A very large battery can store 200MWh worth of energy. The largest geothermal plant produces 1.5GW. (A lot of the large plants look like they are in the range of 100->200MW). Presumably those plants can run for more than a few hours which ultimately decreases the amount of batteries needed to smooth out the demand curve.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#150

Post by jamescrowley »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #3

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.

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.
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