In Iceland, well diggers seek to tap a volcano’s magma
science.org
science.org
Her son lives near Madison, WI, and he actually looked seriously into installing it for his house. It sounds cool, to get all your energy, 24x7x365, but the reality was that it was just not cost-effective right now. Maybe soon.
https://oregontechsfstatic.azureedge.net/sitefinity-producti...
Water source heat pumps work everywhere, and they seek to use ground-water temperature anti-freeze in a closed loop as the output from a heat pump. So rather than having an AC dump heat outside (or cold for outside for reversible systems), heat is extracted from or dumped into the ground. Expensive to install ($30k seems a common mark), but very efficient and viable everywhere.
It's effective because the fissures make it easier to implement this process.
Source: I went to Iceland in 2017 and toured their geothermal plant on Christmas Eve.
One might imagine that if we figure out how to build geothermal wells not just near geologically active sites, but anywhere on the earths surface, then suddenly thermal energy will become much cheaper, and projects like heating entire cities and farms become feasible. Cooling entire cities will likewise happen with air conditioners powered by these wells.
Overall, far more watts of energy will be transferred from deep under the earths crust to the bit of earth we live on... What will the side effects be?
The Sun hits the Earth with more than 100 petawatts of radiation, all the time.
Goethermal energy radiates outward from Earth as it is anyway. The net radiatiative flow is low, about 0.087 W/m^2 (about 47 TW total).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_energy_budget#/search
A "geothermal site" is a place where that net emissivity is much higher than the average. In Yellowstone that can be 100W/m^2 (and I suspect far higher though in smaller concentrations).
https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/questions-about-h...
A principle effect is that though it might be possible to extract heat more rapidly from a caldera, that caldera itself needs to recharge, and the thermal flux through the Earth's crust, magma, and mantle is itself finite. Pump out a sufficient amount of heat and you'll end up cooling the rock in the vicinity of your geothermal plant.
There's also effects of groundwater extraction (which usually accompanies geothermal generation), and potential contamination (minerals, possibly heavy metals) from the geothermal source.
And there are all but certainly other unintended consequences. Though we do have 50+ years of experience with industrial-scale commercial geothermal generation in the US, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, and Philippines. A surprisingly large percentage of the active geothermal potential is already utilised (Indonesia and Kenya are two of the larger remaining opportunities).
My read is that geothermal won't solve our energy demand on its own, but could contribute quite considerably to the mix. In Africa especially it has the potential to make a major impact, with a potential that's many times present generation capacity in the region.
Experience with low-grade geothermal power is far less promising. Drilling is expensive, even trials have proved dangerous and vastly underperformed expectations (see Australia's Habenero project as one such failure). Geothermal as an adjunct to local heating and cooling loads (district thermal energy storage) seems a more viable option.
And every gigajoule you take from Yellowstone is one less gigajoule for the next supervolcano eruption.
There are approximately twenty supervolcanoes around the world, so I wouldn't worry to much. There is an almost supervulcano in Italy that is also much closer to where power is needed [0].
Remoteness is not that much of a problem though: (ultra) high-voltage direct-current ("(U)HVDC") power lines have losses in the order of 3% per 1000km (that's 620mi) which is very acceptable. China has power lines that move the power equivalent of several nuclear power plants over thousands of kilometers for example.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlegraean_Fields
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
And the Mediterranean can provide a lot of water for cooling at the same time the extra heat can easily be used for desalination.
Edit, as reply to child comment: here is the NASA report that concludes that it is possible to cool supervolcanoes:
https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file...
Multiply any activity by a non trivial fraction of humanity and you get non trivial side effects.
We don't need to make a mess in Yellowstone, but 'massive energy loss by resistance' is just wrong.
The majority of generating losses (about 60% of input thermal energy) is due to Carnot efficiency losses, not transmission inefficiencies. There's also some loss in transformers (ramping voltages up or down), and rectifiers (converting AC to DC and vice versa).
But the biggest losses are in going from thermal to mechanical energy itself.
Keep in mind that the same general region is a major coal-producing zone presently, and much of that coal is burned locally for generation: it's cheaper to move the electricity than the coal used to generate it.
This also means that a substantial amount of the transmission infrastructure is already in place.
What if it disturbs whatever equilibrium the caldera's maintained and causes it to erupt sooner than it would have?
This is a genuine question, I know next to nothing about this.
We are not good enough in vulcanology yet to tickle the sleeping Yellowstone giant.
If we could take enough energy out of Yellowstone to make it less supervolcanic, we’d have a hard problem dealing with whatever waste heat would be left after consuming that much energy.
If a lot of extraction is done, geysers and other surface geothermal activity reduce or stop. Rotorua, New Zealand had these issues back in the 1980s when everyone had a private bore. Blocking them up helped a lot.
https://www.geothermal-energy.org/pdf/IGAstandard/Japan/1997...
You might poke a hole and get something hot and nasty gushing out but that would only ruin some machinery and perhaps the day for a few people.
However there are ways to mitigate the uncertainty. You can start small, observe, and if still stable, expand. I believe that is how most new geothermal plants are done today in Iceland.
Maybe increasing automation means that we can build more factories and data centers near these sources of massive renewable energy potential without struggling to convince workers to live in these remote locations (although that might not be a huge challenge for a beautiful place like Yellowstone).
It's far less expensive to build one high-capacity line than many low-capacity lines (e.g., serving wind farms or solar farms).
Geothermal has the added benefit that it's dispatchable power. It can be extracted on demand, when the need arises. As a complement to wind and solar, it's actually a great fit.
The grid doesn't simply want megawatts. It wants a balance of supply and demand, and a minimisation of outages.
Wind and solar cannot be spun up on demand. Hydro can be, and in general is (much lower-capacity hydro is grid smoothing). Hydro will even suck capacity off the grid where possible (pumped storage).
Geo which can load-match, disable when grid is oversupplied, and fill in for cloudy & windless days, makes all kinds of sense at the grid level.
With geothermal, though, you don't actually want to run flat-out all the time, as the geothermal reservoir does require time to recover, whether that's groundwater refresh or heating up after a period of high generation which extracts heat faster than it is transmitted through surrounding rock (most cases) or magma (not yet a major utilisation mode).
Soaking up excess generating capacity through interruptable heavy loads is somewhat better suited to wind or solar. If you have a task you can divert electricity that will be generated anyway to, so much the better. That's what pumped-hydro, desalination, grid-scale battery banks, or fuel synthesis represent.
I suspect the amount of energy involved in a volcano eruption can't possibly be compared to the energy you extract as geothermal.
Tree roots mess with the piping, and you have to be careful to not drive or set anything over it (much like a septic drain field, though not as fragile).
Not really:)
Clarification: I mean of course if you create a volcano in the wrong spot that would be bad, but like if you're drilling for thermally heated ground water can stuff go wrong?
A sibling comment posted a link on this and I just submitted a similar article myself. The twist seems to be to extract the heat/energy from the side or from below the magma chamber to not destabilize the ceiling of the chamber. That's because rock becomes more brittle when cooling down. Triggering a supervolcano eruption instead of preventing it would be a very unfortunate outcome ;)
I'm just an internet rando, but I think that if they could identify spots that were remote enough to not impact the park features, and to design it from the start to address all other concerns (like handling waste water etc), disrupting nature, it could be done.
A brief moment of optimism from someone pessimistic about the future.
The cause for this geological change has been identified as a drilling operation conducted in the summer and autumn of 2007 to provide geothermal heating to the city hall. The drilling perforated an anhydrite layer and caused high-pressure groundwater to come into contact with the anhydrite, which then began to expand.
By 2010, some sections of town had risen by 30 centimetres (12 in). In July 2013, no end to the rising process was in sight.
Quite the woopsie
https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/city-of-freiburg-germany-endo...
Not to say, cheap, plentiful energy greatly increases water usage by itself.
In Pakistan, every farmer now has powerful immersible pumps with which they suck groundwater dry because of cheap solar panels availability.
Do you need a constant stream fresh water, or just a big initial injection?
> How much loss happens in the system?
For an open cycle system it is 100% obviously.
If it's dangerous for us to drink, it's probably damaging to wherever we dump it.
You will have to condense it from steam. Doable, but not without cost. It's also highly mineralised, and you will have to acid wash hardware frequently.
The reason for the closed loop is to keep mineralisation of the water to a minimum, as otherwise steam tubes and turbines are rapidly fouled.
The open loop loses a significant amount of the initial water load, either through drainage or evaporative losses.
Plants such as The Geysers, north of San Francisco in California, have had output reduced to about 40% of initial generation largely due to groundwater losses.
And if you have freshwater nearby, it will always be more economical.