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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

#151

Post by quickthrowman »

quacked wrote: post #102
1970-01-01 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[CITATION NEEDED] They do not. If you take the mean, median, and mode of the failure lifetime for LED bulbs sold at these stores and compare them to the failure times of incandescent bulbs, I also guarantee you are empirically wrong here.

I believe this is true for the LED technology compared to the incandescent technology as a whole, but I'm simply turning over bulbs at a far higher rate than I did in the incandescent days. Often the LED bulbs are failing within a year under normal usage patterns. It's possible that using modern LEDs in old fixtures is causing some kind of issue.

Are your LED lamps failing in enclosed fixtures? You need to buy special lamps for enclosed fixtures, regular LED lamps will heat up too much for enclosed fixtures.

Look for ‘enclosed fixture rated’ LED lamps for enclosed fixtures.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#152

Post by bronson »

cbmuser wrote: post #119
nagisa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The options in the '70s were much different from those of today. And for France specifically what they have underground (lots of uranium, no oil, no gas & no coal) strongly suggested exactly one way forward.

Wind and solar existed in the 70s as well. Plus, Germany invested 500 billion Euros in its energy transition and is STILL heavily dependent on coal.

> Wind and solar existed in the 70s as well.

Not really. Solar has gone down in price almost 500X since 1975.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

Wind has gone down significantly too.

https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/54526.pdf

Meanwhile, the graph for nuclear waste disposal is going rapidly in the opposite direction.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-6587/us-spent-fuel-liabilit...

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2024/ph240/kendall1/

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#153

Post by Spooky23 »

yawaramin wrote: post #49
Spooky23 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is great, but it does require wheelbarrows of cash, and we don’t have a solution for waste products.

Things are more expensive when we keep reinventing the wheel and trying to do new things instead of just reusing proven designs. Remember that solar power also used to cost wheelbarrows of cash back in the day. When you do something repeatedly, it becomes less expensive over time. Nuclear is actually the leader in waste management. No other energy source has as complete a story. Eg what happens to solar panels when t…

A nuclear plant about 50 miles from my house was closed 15 years ago. The spent fuel rods will be stored there indefinitely until a federal facility is built.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#154

Post by dalyons »

cbmuser wrote: post #119
nagisa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The options in the '70s were much different from those of today. And for France specifically what they have underground (lots of uranium, no oil, no gas & no coal) strongly suggested exactly one way forward.

Wind and solar existed in the 70s as well. Plus, Germany invested 500 billion Euros in its energy transition and is STILL heavily dependent on coal.

They’re at ~60% total power from renewables in 2025, and increasing every quarter. I’d say they’re doing pretty well! The coal is unfortunate, but was due to the Ukraine war and gas situation.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#155

Post by dalyons »

cbmuser wrote: post #122
thinkcontext wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

»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.« The EU also forgot how to build airports and train stations on budget and on time. Should we stop building airports and train stations? As for nuclear power plants: Germany and France built most of their reactors on budget and on time.

50+ years ago, not relevant.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#156

Post by pfdietz »

inglor_cz wrote: post #137
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…

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…

Suitable locations for on river pumped hydro are limited.

But off river? The possibilities are vast.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#157

Post by pfdietz »

dalyons wrote: post #148
cbmuser wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not even France can replicate their nuclear construction of decades ago.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#158

Post by pfdietz »

hackeraccount wrote: post #60
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.

Harder absolutely but "less likely to be reliable"? If economically viable fusion was "cracked" what would the nature of it's unreliability even be?

The reactor breaking and taking a very long time to repair because the repairs would have to be done remotely, with robots. The structure becomes too activated for people to go inside, even after the reactor is shut off.

The reactor breaks because it's a large device operated at high stresses (power/area, neutron loading). There are many components and joints that can fail.

BTW, this means fusion will be expensive, because getting all those components to be reliable right off the bat becomes expensive. No tiny cracks in the welds means expensive quality control.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#159

Post by colechristensen »

euroderf wrote: post #113
rconti wrote: post #66

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 distin…

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.

One of the benefits of over-provisioning solar is that fun "wasteful" things that use a lot of energy become practical and non-harmful.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#160

Post by bryanlarsen »

thedrbrian wrote: post #144
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.

Norway and British Columbia are 99% renewable energy and they have many cities larger than that.
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