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Comment by erellsworth | Hacker News Reader

"The intent is to use this collaborative site for transformative science that will create a commercial pathway for large-scale, economically viable EGS."

So, public funding for commercial interests. Cool cool.

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Public funding of risky R&D has been a winning strategy since the space race of the 1960s.

Many industries would not exist today without this approach.

I don't disagree with the approach in general. I just think there's too much selective memory when it comes time for those industries to pay taxes, or be regulated in any way. Then suddenly it's all about the virtues of the mythical free market.

There should also be a general policy requirement that the government gets say 20% of the equity of any venture based on govt-funded R&D. Currently the govt gets all the downside and no (direct) upside to these things.

Any economic growth helps the government in innumerable ways, the government isn't meant to be a profitable industry with a huge upside.

It is not meant to be profitable but it is meant (we hope at least) to provide infrastructure for a society in domains that are not profitable for businesses while trying not to extract too much wealth from taxpayers. Maybe it would be a good thing as it would make the state less dependent on being able to get credit at a good rate and thus less dependent on financial institutions. Do you not agree ?

Current geothermal technology requires very favorable geological conditions which significantly limits where it can be deployed. If EGS turns out to be both safe and viable it will mean that geothermal power plants can be widely deployed across the globe. I believe this research is also in the public interest as we want clean highly-reliable power, and EGS is one of the few technologies that can potentially provide that.

Yes, it is cool. It's not like they're singling out an existing commercial entity and just showering tax dollars on them. They're getting the tech to the point where private companies can run with it.

You could chalk up a lot of what NASA had done over the past 50 years as "public funding for commercial interests". Are you against NASA too?

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