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

31–40 of 314 posts

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

#31

Post by ComradePhil »

a1371 wrote: post #24

A lot of people like to talk about nuclear as a climate solution. Geothermal is the most gargantuous nuclear plant we can fathom, all we have to do is to extend a pipe and harvest it. Here is the thing, a lot of that tech is coming from oil and gas. An industry with a track record of leaving the land they enter in terrible shape. I think we have to start over with geothermal and look at it more like hydro electricity…

> We should harvest the electricity on the way down, not the way up.

Could you please explain what you mean?

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

#32

Post by ComradePhil »

imgabe wrote: post #15

How much energy is in the core of the Earth? What happens if we cooled the core to the point that it became solid? I’m guessing that would be bad, but is it something that’s not conceivably possible on any human timescale?

We can pump heat into the core when it is hotter in the surface. So, it can also work as a battery.

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

#33

Post by russellbeattie »

I suggested an idea for a backyard geothermal generator in a comment a few months ago and got shut down because it would be too costly to drill the hole. But hey now! This microwave drill might do the trick!

Hmm. Are magnetrons and gyrotrons the same thing? Probably not. So we can't rip apart an old microwave oven and start drilling holes out back just yet. Damn.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27777665

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

#34

Post by TeeMassive »

I've always wondered, but geothermal plants are basically huge radiators. If Humanity taps into this energy in industrial scale for centuries, would we cool the planet's mantle and core enough to have repercussions on the magnetic field for example?

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

#35

Post by tschwimmer »

ComradePhil wrote: post #31
a1371 wrote: post #24

A lot of people like to talk about nuclear as a climate solution. Geothermal is the most gargantuous nuclear plant we can fathom, all we have to do is to extend a pipe and harvest it. Here is the thing, a lot of that tech is coming from oil and gas. An industry with a track record of leaving the land they enter in terrible shape. I think we have to start over with geothermal and look at it more like hydro electricity…

> We should harvest the electricity on the way down, not the way up. Could you please explain what you mean?

I have to assume GP means that we should extract the geothermal heat at the bottom of the well/borehole, not by bringing the oil back up to burn it.

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

#36

Post by sacrosancty »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #7

Assuming this works, tech still won't save us alone. Pure thermal (ie. just energy, no GHG) climate change is right around the corner if energy use keeps going up exponentially and we keep reducing earth's albedo. Ecosystems are still being obliterated for cattle and mining. All ghg free electricity will do is buy a few decades to end (and in the west, reverse) growth. Possibly the only thing that will give civilisat…

Data or it didn't happen. A statement as extreme as "a few decades to end growth" without a citation is best treated as a hysterical opinion than a fact.

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

#37

Post by a1371 »

tschwimmer wrote: post #35
ComradePhil wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should harvest the electricity on the way down, not the way up. Could you please explain what you mean?

I have to assume GP means that we should extract the geothermal heat at the bottom of the well/borehole, not by bringing the oil back up to burn it.

No, I mean we should use the motion of the water, not its heat. Like in hydroelectricity where water spins a turbine instead we are using a steam generator like gas fired plants

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

#38

Post by coolso »

Glawen wrote: post #10

Yeah right. They drilled in Strasbourg, France, to get this "free" energy. When they entered production, the city was experiencing an earthquake every month, waking the city at night. After a magnitude 4 earthquake, they finally shut down the plant. A town in Germany is devastated also due to geothermal power: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staufen_im_Breisgau

This is why pushback against climate change policies is, I believe, a healthy thing. Yes, protecting the environment is super important, but time and time again we are told to trust the science, trust the experts, everything is going to go exactly as planned. And time and time again, it turns out the experts didn't account for this, or for that, or were just flat out wrong, and then everyone pays for the "oops".

We see this with everything: social policy, monetary policy, tax policy, etc.

I think a public online resource that documents instances like this, where the experts, or the government, told us X, but it ended up being Y, would be a really powerful tool to fight back against folks who treat science like an infallible religion.

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

#39

Post by modeless »

Converting existing fossil fuel plants sounds awesome. But they haven't actually drilled any deep holes with this new technology yet, right? They're going to go from nothing to drilling almost twice as deep as the deepest hole ever drilled by humans, in four years?
Post reply on HN