I don’t understand how you think capex works?
You outlay x on capital expenses to get the plant running, that’s all the plant and equipment. You run the plant at 50% it takes you twice as long to recoup your capex.
Always happy to be corrected.
Reducing the draw from the well at time X, leaves more available at time Y. In this way, the capital cost is reasonably preserved and your correction is offered.
--It's not exactly the same thing as flux ---I haven't verified the relative losses here of delaying utilizing the available heat, but rather am assuming the OP is correct about what I believe to be their point*
If the geothermal plant isn’t ran at or near capacity all the time, the capex takes longer to recoup.
You can’t just, say, run it at 50% for a while, and then at 150% later, because a) ya typically can’t run plant at 150%, and for power generators ya can only run them at whatever you’re contracted to supply, so you’d typically want to run geothermal at capacity all the time.
This is true of anything that requires capital expenditure.
The expensive bit is drilling and that gives you roughly X heat per month. You can use that at a constant rate or all in one week.
> They just let pressure build up higher than normal for 6-8 hours and then the turbine generates more power than normal until the pressure falls back to normal levels again.
So they can run at more than 100%.
Of course we can build something less efficient to allow "pressure build up", but that's another trade off.