What is the point of building energy outside of solar farms? I'm sincerely asking
Some people don't really want the planet covered in solar panels. Others are cool with it so long as they don't have to see it.
America's Geothermal Breakthrough
161–170 of 183 posts
Re: America's Geothermal Breakthrough
#162The Casa Diablo geothermal facility in the eastern Sierra Nevada of California has been a success. I also remember reading years back about ideas surrounding how to extract energy from Yellowstone both to provide clean energy but also to decrease risk of another massive explosion. If I recall they were proposing digging a massive horizontal tunnel to come in deep and extract heat without compromising the roof.
Long Valley Caldera Geothermal Area | Open Energy Information https://share.google/5DvljMhL3EVMDeIAL
Re: America's Geothermal Breakthrough
#163According to google, this would be almost 30% of total US energy production (135gw-150gw) and nearly 5% of total US energy consumption. But what is the "breakthrough" if there is one? The article doesn't really suggest any breakthrough that is unlocking this potential energy? Or maybe I'm looking for a technological breakthrough where there isn't one.
They're adapting fracking techniques to use for geothermal, which opens up many more sites. Historically geothermal has had limited potential, and the best sites have already been developed. So geothermal + fracking creates a lot more viable land.
Traditional geothermal is you dig a really deep well and get a geyser of hot water or steam to come up.
Fervo is doing "Enhanced" or "Engineered" geothermal where you dig two wells: an injection and an extraction well. You frack the rock in between, creating lots of small channels for water to flow between them. The water absorbs the heat from the rocks as its circulating from the injection well to the extraction well.
The kind of rock that's good at this heat transfer is different from shale rock that oil & gas frackers have experience with... it's harder, less porous, not partial-dino-juice. So they're taking a lot of the same core concepts from the oil & gas industry (horizontal drilling, geology simulations, etc), but their IP is in adopting the techniques to work with geothermal-favorable rock.
Another interesting concept I heard Fervo researching: this kind of geothermal is not "baseload" style power, so there's a few tricks they can do to get better cost efficiency and peaker-like or battery-like behavior. Remember the two wells that form the circulation loop: injection and extraction? Well, you need pumps on both sides (remember, this isn't "geyser-style" geothermal where natural pressure and geology do all the work). Pumps take energy to run, something like 20-30% of the overall extraction output (you put a unit of energy in to run the pumps and you get 3-5 units of energy back out the other end). Not great, not terrible either... it's an energy return comparable to solar and wind. But what you can do is run the injection pump when power prices are low (ie when there's an excess of solar on the grid), pressurize all your fracked channels underground (the reservoir), and then when grid prices rise in the evening you run just the extraction pump to pull out the pre-heated, pre-pressurized water. You're still at a 3-5x energy return, but the time-shifting has made the cost multiplier more favorable.
My understanding is it's still in research phase, but Fervo is piloting this technique. Like another thread said, they're pre-IPO now, so they've been flooding the renewables media with all these stories. They filed an S-1 recently, but always read the eventual S-3 before considering your investment options blahblahblah.
Re: America's Geothermal Breakthrough
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heat pumps require a specific temperate differential to work. So they work in zones with are a bit hotter or colder than you would like and so require moderate amounts of heating or cooling. They don't work in temperate zones nor in very hot or cold places. So Santa Fe or Minneapolis for example they work but Mexico City or San Francisco they don't. If you are in a place where they work and that isn't too dense or ha…
> 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
Solar is surprisingly useful in the UK since it is anti-correlated with wind power, the UK's largest electricity source.
Solar peaked at 42% of UK electricity generation the other day:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...
Re: America's Geothermal Breakthrough
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water. That's deeper than most oil wells. That’s going to be very dependant on location. Here in NZ there are regions where water is boiling at surface level. According to the below, 18% of our power is produced with it. https://www.eeca.govt.nz/insights/energy-in-new-zealand/rene...
"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 to…
>no promising locations for more.
Isn't there a super volcano in the middle of the country? Maybe there are some adjacent hot spots outside of the national park?
Re: America's Geothermal Breakthrough
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that similar to how neighborhood heat pumps work? https://www.araner.com/blog/district-heating-in-sweden-effic...
Heat pumps require a specific temperate differential to work. So they work in zones with are a bit hotter or colder than you would like and so require moderate amounts of heating or cooling. They don't work in temperate zones nor in very hot or cold places. So Santa Fe or Minneapolis for example they work but Mexico City or San Francisco they don't. If you are in a place where they work and that isn't too dense or ha…
This is nonsense, heat pumps are more efficient at smaller temperature differentials. I suspect we don't see them much in San Francisco only because there is so little need for heating and cooling the potential savings are smaller.
Re: America's Geothermal Breakthrough
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the problems with the data center boom is its use of fresh water. How does geo-thermal plants use water and how much?
The water at these temperature / depths has a lot of dissolved salts and minerals so it's not (human / ag) usable. Modern designs are closed loop systems where production wells bringing the hot water to the surface go through a heat exchanger to a different working fluid to drive the turbine and then is re-injected back into the reservoir. There is consumptive water use for fracking the reservoirs in these types of e…
> The water at these temperature / depths has a lot of dissolved salts and minerals so it's not (human / ag) usable.
To clarify, our 400' water source is the same aquifer that supplies drinking water to the state.
The water management districts will rubber-stamp permits for these wells. No one else gets off that easy.
Re: America's Geothermal Breakthrough
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the problems with the data center boom is its use of fresh water. How does geo-thermal plants use water and how much?
I dont know why this keeps coming up? It is a closed loop system. The water aren't used at all.
> It is a closed loop system. The water aren't used at all.
Our method is open on both ends. It draws from one layer of the aquifer and then returns the water to an adjacent layer.
Re: America's Geothermal Breakthrough
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how economical that is, but just as an anecdote - the town I'm from in Poland has district heating to all single family homes, town of about 20k people. And coincidentally, I now live in the UK and a new estate near me has district heating to all the houses they are building, not apartment blocks. So it must make some sense to someone, or they wouldn't be outfitting 100+ houses this way.
It’s uneconomical in an already built out area or a non central planned economy, and also the US is special case since we have dirt cheap natural gas that is used for heating. Digging up streets to run distribution lines, running service drops to every existing house, installing a heat exchanger and valves in every house is astronomically expensive given the amount of energy used by a single residence. If you’re buil…
> It’s uneconomical in an already built out area or a non central planned economy
I mean, true. But it was new developments I had in mind for a neighborhood geo install.
Re: America's Geothermal Breakthrough
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whisper Valley in Austin Texas is one example of a neighborhood geothermal installation: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/texas-whispe... Maybe not quite exactly what you envision.
> Maybe not quite exactly what you envision. I'm too zonked to pick out the method from the article - but I'll offer that geo methods can be region specific. What I described fits the SE US, with our 13 month summers and abundant underground water.
13 month summers lol :) Yeah, definitely if your interested neighborhood geothermal Whisper Valley seems to be the largest by far in the US, you might check it out.