US Dept of Energy estimates geothermal power's untapped potential | Hacker News Reader

US Dept of Energy estimates geothermal power's untapped potential

arstechnica.com

11 pointsmimixco4 comments

I worked on a laboratory building in a cold climate recently. Labs typically consume a ton of energy (relative to offices/residences) due to the energy spent on conditioning and forcing air for fumehoods.

We investigated a couple of different ways of reducing energy: PV, wind, efficient HVAC systems, and Ground Source Heat pumps (GSHP). The GSHP reduced the energy consumption of our building by over 50%, where the rest were barely hitting 10%.

I haven't personally seen it installed at a residential level, but if it's affordable (which, given cheapness of natural gas may not be) could be huge in cold climates.

Not to be too crazy but, geothermal scares the hell out of me. How many works of fiction involve something like tapping Yellowstone Calderra and bye bye life as we know it when it is weakened too much and kaboom!

Mind you it is survival/disaster 'porn' but Bobby Akart has a book series where exactly this happens. Some joint government-private entity power plant drills into the calderra, and like some companies are known to do cuts corners and drills much deeper than all the experts recommended, it compromises everything just enough that Yellowstone starts erupting.

Sure, there are safe places/ways to do this (hello Iceland) but something about it just seems crazy. Nuclear, sure it's something you can easily control the reaction and with a proper setup can even safely 'shut down' but drilling holes relatively deep into the earth to take advantage of geothermal heat, eeesh that (mostly irrationally) bugs me a lot.

The new potential of geothermal comes from the fact that you don't have to drill very deep anymore. Instead of water, it uses fluids with a lower boiling point. In some places, like Boulder, Colorado, you can even install geothermal in your own backyard and use it to heat your house. It's actually a common solution there.

Geothermal is about using buried hoses to keep one side of a heat pump close to 55 degrees. I'm not a scientist, but I think this is unlikely to destroy life on Earth.

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