Google's new geothermal energy project is up and running

Geothermal heat reservoirs are renewable but not unlimited: heat is taken out of the rock by the working fluid and results in "thermal drawdown" until heat is conducted from adjacent areas. I would assume this is worse for hot dry rock enhanced geothermal systems like this one, where you don't have hydrothermal circulation moving hot water through the reservoir. Just for some graphs: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/888907 . So perhaps only running your geothermal plant at night extends the lifespan of your well.

I believe wind/solar are still cheaper than geothermal. They'll be priorities #1 and #2, with geothermal to make up any difference.

edit: and when the sun isn't shining and wind isn't blowing

Base load is an obsolete concept that nobody needs at all. It applies to some coal and nuclear power plants that take days to startup and cannot throttle back. You accepted this because they are very cheap to run.

Renewables have their issues, but they are different than base load.

IIRC there have been some experiments with using geothermal plants as peaker plants since you can pump more water down and cap the output so you can ramp output up quickly later. This could work well with the variability of renewables to help balance out the grid, a role traditionally held by coal / gas.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally

> Why would they need solar/wind to get a renewable base load? I know solar/wind can't provide that base load by themselves (at least not in one region), but I expected that geothermal would basically be constant, or at least fluctuate by only small percentages throughout a day? Does solar/wind really bring anything to the table in terms of base load here, or is it just that geothermal would provide the base load and solar/wind could be used for seasonal usage on top?

Think of geothermal as being a drop-in replacement for natural gas turbines today. On wind/solar heavy grids, natural gas turbines spin up when wind/solar go down. The most reliable returns on investment in geothermal will come from targeting gas turbines, because that will result in maximizing the utilization of the geothermal system. Building geothermal capacity to meet variable demand is very expensive. Relatively to that, building solar/wind is not.

Utility solar and onshore wind on the other hand are incredibly cheap, especially when you don't have to store the energy. At this moment (~09:45 PDT on November 28, 2023), solar and wind are providing 61% of electric demand in California, with no storage involved [1].

In the case that geothermal starts taking over baseload from natural gas and nuclear, wind and solar will continue their downward price trend and still be favored when their supply and demand are time-correlated, and will also be used for very dispatchable end-uses (i.e. EV charging, water heating).

They will also be coupled with storage to provide demand-following peaker resources (since batteries can respond extremely quickly to demand spikes).

If geothermal gets so cheap that there is little difference in price between it and solar/wind+storage, then it will probably indeed take over a lot of current wind/solar demand, but ever increasing demand from variable loads will continue to soak up wind/solar supply, especially as the transition away from fossil fuels accelerates.

Finally, geothermal has much higher upfront/fixed costs (due to the necessity of drilling and the machinery for the turbine), so while better than nuclear, it's still harder to use for distributed generation than solar. Distributed generation (especially behind the meter) provides resilience to distribution outages.

1. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx

And it's not just the inconvenience of disruption. The reason oil companies are putting up resistance against clean energy isn't that they hate the environment. It's that they love money. They don't want someone to declare their goose's golden eggs obsolete.

If someone came along and said "we can teach your golden goose to lay a different type of egg which is also golden", they might get behind that. And they might tell the politicians that they pay for to get behind it too.

Transitioning the entire world's energy infrastructure is still going to be very challenging and very expensive, but it would be less difficult if we could at least get all sides to agree that it's something we want to do.

Fervo are oil guys. Their wells have additional features. Like sensor packs every 100m (?).

1. And if I win the lottery my financial needs are taken care of but I'm not planning on that 2. You are overestimating solar, wind, and energy storage and underestimating our energy needs, doubly so with transportation moving to electricity. Renewables still arent replacing fossil fuels despite all the hype. [1]. Moving off fossil fuels is going to require getting energy from whatever we can and having a constant consistent energy source is really important. People keep mentioning how cheap wind and solar is now but the true cost wont be realized until governments quit subsidizing them and start taxing [2].

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-doubles-renewable...

I think it depends on what our goals are. If we are just trying to replace current electricity capacity with renewables, the I think solar/wind/etc. + batteries are fine and can be done relatively quickly (though keep in mind new coal plants are still being built!). If our goal is to completely replace all fossil fuels, then I think it will take a lot longer (I think like 100 years) and requires serious investment in battery production such as described in Tesla Master Plan Part 3. However if the goal is all of the above, but also start removing CO2 from the air, I think only something like a fusion breakthrough will make it work. We will need to generate like and order of magnitude more energy to do this. Also we have to realize that while renewables are growing, so are fossil fuels! See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s... our total energy usage is increasing, so in order to replace all fossil fuels, you have to not only take up the new demand, you have to eat into the existing, almost like a double exponential! (not sure if the right term)

Regarding (1), it's not that simple. It depends on what form fusion takes. Fission was once thought to be the future of energy generation, unlimited clean energy for all, but now we realize the (justified) regulatory, maintenance, safety, and build costs are so incredible it is usually more economical to build gas/coal plants or solar/wind.

If we achieve fusion production in the form of modern tokamaks with insane regulatory, maintenance, and build costs similar or worse than fission, we will be in the same situation so the real goal is to achieve fusion without all of those added costs. Only then could fusion realize the result we all dream of and that seems unlikely for many decades.

The best hope we have atm is one of the fusion startups working on alternative methods of fusion has a breakthrough. Some have made claims of breakthroughs and also claim net energy gain in a few years, but as history has taught us, that's unlikely to occur.

As much as I want and hope for the unlimited, clean fusion energy we all dream of, the realist in me recognizes the challenges we face and that we probably still have a long way to go. In which case, it's probably good to put money in other efforts like geothermal and not put all our eggs in one basket.

They also got $90 million from the Canadian government https://betakit.com/canada-growth-fund-injection-tops-eavors...

1/2 of the energy we consume ends up as heat. 1/2 of that is for industrial use.

In our glorious renewable energy future, heat from data centers will be harnessed to recharge thermal batteries, run district heat (homes, buildings, pools), supply industrial heat, etc.

I think the geothermal people would have built more by now if they weren't blocked by CEQA/NEPA etc. It took them decades to build generators near Mammoth Lakes, just to grind through all the lawsuits.

> the big tech companies have billions just sitting around

They do?