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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> At this rate, the energy of the next eruption would be drained after about 16,000 years, and in less than 50,000 years the magma chamber would be cooled completely.

Iceland's event is much smaller, but we're not talking about the sort of thing that you can implement in a year.

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half jokingly I thought "so we just need 160 power plants to bring it down to 100 years"

hehe, or drilling down into the magma chamber 160 times causes it to erupt prematurely.

In the article it's said the proposal already included 160 plants in a big ring around yellowstone, resulting in the 16,000 years figure.

So to get it down to 100 years you'd need 160^2 = 25,600 geothermal plants.

Perfectly reasonable, let's do it.

Plus you’d take a great step towards solving our energy problems.

We'll except the fact that deep geothermal plants are completely theoretic as a means of production - the final cost of power is a big ???.

Most people want cheap power. Anything over around 20 cents a kWh makes it uncompetitive to fossile equivalents (e.g. wood / oil / gas heating).

California is 50c/kwh…

According to https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/archive/2021/ the average retail price for California was 20..

sounds great but anyone living downtown is paying over $0.50/kWh

Solar must be damn attractive

Hm? I live in SF and it's considerably below that on average? https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyp... says the area averages ~0.35$

Downtown where?

LADWP switched to time of use scheduling, so my rates are anywhere from 0.16/kwh to 0.21/kwh ( https://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/faces/ladwp/residential/r-custom... )

SCE is a little more expensive with their tiered plans ranging from 0.32/kwh to 0.42/kwh

For context, downtown LA should be all on LADWP

Downtown San Jose is around $0.75/kWh if you use power to heat/cool your 2BR unit.

> We'll except the fact that deep geothermal plants are completely theoretic as a means of production

Not theoretical at all:

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/americas-fir...

In theory the cost of the whole thing blowing up should offset this investment costs but Don't Look Up (2021) convincing the folk about potential natural disasters.

Not only does it already exist, it's cheap enough that Kenya has some and wants more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_Kenya

Judging by the price tag of 9.1 Ksh/kWh listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Kenya (and looking up historical exchange rates because of the date of the link and their persistent inflation), that's about 0.085-0.090 USD/kWh.

iirc it works well in Kenya because the thermal gradient is really steep and the heat is right near the surface. I don't think that's common around the world. Local expenses (labor, etc...) are also cheaper than in many parts of the world.

Geothermal is however one of the electricity sources with the fewest negative externalities so definitely should be pursued where possible.

Touring the geothermal at Hell's Gate Park in Kenya is wild. If you've seen The Lion King, it's the inspiration for "the shadowy place over there" where the hyenas live.

Extract enough heat from Earth and Earth loses its magnetic field and then its atmosphere and oceans (from the effects of the solar wind) which sounds like a negative externality to me.

We'll (and humanity itself) be long dead by then

If you haven't done a calculation incorporating an estimate of the heat content of the Earth's interior, then you cannot know whether humanity will be dead by then.

While it's true we would die first, I bet we'd transition to other power sources even earlier. If we ever get fusion working reliably, that will probably be more convenient than geothermal, and at that point the geothermal plants will start slowly going defunct with no replacements.

Extracting enough energy to do that, would probably meltdown the earth crust.

"Anything over around 20 cents a kWh makes it uncompetitive"

Cries in European

Don't mistake price of production and selling price. When it takes times to construct additional production, you can sell the electricity at very high cost but have a low production cost.

This is more like insurance. If you move to the mountains, you have to pay for special fire insurance because mountains have forest fires.

The U.S. is an extremely productive economy with at least one enormous cyclical natural catastrophe attached to it. If this natural catastrophe is preventable, and the costs of prevention are outweighed by the costs of losing the US economy, then it's probably worth doing.

I just assumed that it was one of those things that isn't economically or technically feasible.

The Factorio method of problem solving, I like it.

If plate tectonics stops, ocean life is over, then the following year, land life will also be also be over.

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