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

The time has finally come for geothermal energy

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 282 posts

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#171

Post by frankus »

anotherevan wrote: post #132

Purely as an aside, I had the pleasure of visiting Iceland in August and it was great. Truly beautiful, rugged land. Another way they've utilised geothermal energy is with large, sophisticated greenhouses which allow growing of many produce they would otherwise import. I only had the opportunity for a brief visit but a lot of it looked hydroponic with really interesting monitoring and control technology. (Plus the bi…

My favorite memory is following a map to a small isolated hot spring off of some random gravel road in the middle of nowhere. It consisted of a hot-tub-sized pool and a shower.

Whoever was there before had left the shower running. We were the only people there, and hadn't seen anyone pass us on the (dead end) road, so it must have been on for quite a while.

Only when I went to for my pre-soak shower did I realize that it didn't actually have any kind of user-accessible way to turn it off.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#172

Post by tim333 »

yawaramin wrote: post #19

It's nuclear fission. It's always been nuclear fission (well, at least since the '50s) and it will continue to be until we commercialize fusion reactors. Everything else is nice to have but it's like NIH syndrome.

Solar + wind is being installed at about 100x the rate of fission because it's so expensive. And the differential is only increasing.

installs: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/13/the-fastest-energy-ch...

costs: https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/11q58pe/price_trend...

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#173

Post by hvb2 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #97
jmward01 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right answer is 'yes to all the above'. Yes, we need solar. Yes, we need wind. Yes, we need batteries and, yes, we should be looking at geothermal. Solar has shown us, again, how artificially holding back a technology for decades has massive costs. Investing a few billion into geothermal right now is cheap and can only lead to a more durable energy infrastructure in the future. There are all sorts of benefits to…

> Solar and batteries may be amazing but global supply chains can be disrupted. Solar and batteries aren't consumables, so they're not particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruption. If we lose our supply of batteries, we'll have ~10 years or so to find an alternate supply. We won't be able to do new installations during the disruption, but existing installations don't stop working. Unlike a fossil plant when the…

You may need small amounts of rare earth elements. Those are definitely a supply chain nightmare.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#174

Post by hvb2 »

senectus1 wrote: post #166
jmward01 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right answer is 'yes to all the above'. Yes, we need solar. Yes, we need wind. Yes, we need batteries and, yes, we should be looking at geothermal. Solar has shown us, again, how artificially holding back a technology for decades has massive costs. Investing a few billion into geothermal right now is cheap and can only lead to a more durable energy infrastructure in the future. There are all sorts of benefits to…

nobody ever seems to recognize the benefits of Modularising your grid as well. Ukraine is an excellent example of why centralizing your grid energy source is a bad plan... but not just for war situations. If you have an agile, adaptable modular grid you can recover for any form of disaster (natural or man made) very quickly and cheaply. I really feel this is an under valued aspect of electrification and greening of t…

This feels a bit like talking in hindsight.

With fossil power plants, the bigger plants were more efficient. This lead to centralization. We now find ourselves in a situation where you can end up with a lot of small/local generation.

What happened in Ukraine can probably happen in almost every developed country today as this was all built/planned in a different time.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#175

Post by senectus1 »

hvb2 wrote: post #174
senectus1 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nobody ever seems to recognize the benefits of Modularising your grid as well. Ukraine is an excellent example of why centralizing your grid energy source is a bad plan... but not just for war situations. If you have an agile, adaptable modular grid you can recover for any form of disaster (natural or man made) very quickly and cheaply. I really feel this is an under valued aspect of electrification and greening of t…

This feels a bit like talking in hindsight. With fossil power plants, the bigger plants were more efficient. This lead to centralization. We now find ourselves in a situation where you can end up with a lot of small/local generation. What happened in Ukraine can probably happen in almost every developed country today as this was all built/planned in a different time.

yeah I'm not saying that they messed up, I'm saying that we dont appear to be taking note from the situation. Doing better based one the world as it is now and how history has played out.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#176

Post by hvb2 »

aloha2436 wrote: post #161
testing22321 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two nukes that recently came on line in the US were so over budget and timeline that all customers now pay a “surcharge” on their bill to pay for it. Western counties building nukes is so expensive it makes the cost of electricity go up.

France is a western country with its own economic and labour troubles. The enormous expense of building nukes in the US is entirely its own making and much more complicated than just "western" inefficiency.

You might want to look up flammanville. They built a new reactor there and that also took 20 years or so and was way over budget.

We've built a lot of nuclear in the last century and then largely stopped. A lot of the know how is gone which is what we're paying for now.

Also, in France, all those reactors were largely the same leading to economies of scale when building them. Everything we build today is essentially a one of so you don't get to spread that cost over multiple.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#177

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

garbageoverflow wrote: post #107

I was wondering how feasible it would be to reuse abandoned oil pumps for geothermal energy. A closed loop system [1] would probably be the most appropriate, with energy generation by spinning of a turbine by steam that gets recycled. I don't have the expertise and was wondering if someone can share a bit of knowledge with the rest of us. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-loop_geothermal

I don't have knowledge, but my understanding based on a conversation I had on the topic with a friend of mine is that the "let's use hydraulic fracturing to make geothermal energy feasible in North America" idea involves drilling very far down. Oil is on [average][1] about a mile down, while [one of Fervo's wells][2] is three times deeper.

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_enr_welldep_s1_a.htm

[2]: https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-pushes-envelope/

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#178

Post by dalyons »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #170
robocat wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pumped hydro for long term storage. You are using long-term in an extremely vague way. Pumped hydro is not a solution for seasonal storage or yearly storage. Seasonal variation can be a problem in higher latitudes. For example we have a serious problem in New Zealand where our existing "green" hydro lakes are sometimes low and our economy is affected: creating national power crises during dry years. We use coal-bur…

Long term storage is definitely the weak point of moving to 100% carbon free electricity. Unfortunately geothermal does not cover this need. If we want to cover a dankelflaute with geothermal, we basically need enough geothermal to cover ~100% of our power needs. Pumped hydro is the best answer we have at the moment, even if it isn't a great answer. What will likely happen is that people will decide that "99% is good…

Which is honestly fine, we would be in such an amazing place if we got to 99%

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#179

Post by NedF »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #170
robocat wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pumped hydro for long term storage. You are using long-term in an extremely vague way. Pumped hydro is not a solution for seasonal storage or yearly storage. Seasonal variation can be a problem in higher latitudes. For example we have a serious problem in New Zealand where our existing "green" hydro lakes are sometimes low and our economy is affected: creating national power crises during dry years. We use coal-bur…

Long term storage is definitely the weak point of moving to 100% carbon free electricity. Unfortunately geothermal does not cover this need. If we want to cover a dankelflaute with geothermal, we basically need enough geothermal to cover ~100% of our power needs. Pumped hydro is the best answer we have at the moment, even if it isn't a great answer. What will likely happen is that people will decide that "99% is good…

[dead]

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#180

Post by Archelaos »

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…

Nuclear produces very dangerous substances. The long term cost to guard us from them for a million years and the risk that something gets out of control are extemly high.
Post reply on HN