Geothermal's Time Has Come
economist.com
economist.com
The time has finally come for geothermal energy (newyorker.com)
2 days ago | 268 comments
Previously, the New Yorker with near identical headline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953568
If money is being spent on this instead of adtech, so be it. Fake it til you make it, energy folks.
We need less e-gold. We need less Facebook and Google and streaming services.
We need less ai scrapers and cloudflare in front of everything.
We are burning up the planet for bits.
It's insane.
Go ahead and look it up, you might be overstating the problem by a bit.
Not to mention all the brainwaves that could be devoted to something that matters instead of being occupied by a screen full of attention grabbers.
Remember though, most of HN users are funded from ad revenue
Deal with the reality that is here: those things will keep chugging along, finding sources of energy that are abundant while not burning fossil fuels is our best bet for the near/mid-term future... It's probably much easier than amassing enough political capital to destroy huge money-making machines with extreme power behind them.
No, I don't like the waste from Bitcoin mining, exploding AI bubble, etc. either but it is what it is.
I am counting dozens of social media comments a day now proclaiming the "AI Bubble Burst" will "save us all". Save us from what, exactly? Do people need a new villain character? Does this one just happen to be something the media can easily caricature and create a mystical scare over?
The sun is going to consume the earth. Life won't last here forever. I'd rather we build cool shit and pull our species (or its descendants) off-world sometime in the next two thousand years. (Given that we don't know the nature of dark matter and energy, that our instruments are quite primitive, and that our civilization is quite new, I'll forego prognostications about the end of the universe.)
Life on earth is a third the age of the universe. We're ancient. By our present understanding, intelligent technological life is shockingly rare in the galaxy. There are at least a few hundred "hard steps" from abiotic soup to us now. (Just a few: if we'd been stuck in the ocean, we wouldn't have scientists able to conduct chemistry in an aqueous environment. If we'd had decomposers during the carboniferous, we wouldn't have vast reserves of easily accessible fuel for industrialization. If we didn't have a Jupiter configuration, Earth would be bombarded with asteroids. If we had a different Jupiter configuration, the dinosaurs might not have gone extinct and we might not have gotten water at all.)
Life here will end. There's nothing to "preserve" apart from our biosphere's species diversity and carrying capacity. We can do that and build data centers.
There are far worse evils to concern yourself with than AI. This is a manufactured distraction.
It's sort of similar to somebody saying "hey, you're bleeding really bad, maybe we should get you to a hospital," and them rejoining with "nobody lives forever." Cool if you think you're action movie star, but stupid in real life.
Materialist nihilism is so passe.
To me the most important fact to keep in mind about geothermal is that the energy flow across the crust is ~0.1W/m^2. Compare that to the sun which has >100W/m^2 even at high latitudes. Of course this does not mean geothermal is useless (in particular heat pumps, if you count those, are great), but it goes a long way to explaining why geothermal isn't seeing the same explosion as solar.
It's a misleading comparison. This is only the average amount of heat that diffuses through an ordinary patch of surface, and has more or less nothing to do with how a geothermal plant works, since they don't harvest heat by covering a large area of surface with conducting material.
The surface heat flow is low because rock acts as an insulator. If you drill down to where it's hot and draw the heat up you obviously get orders of magnitude larger flows of energy to the surface.
Back of the envelope calculation is drawing 1 GW from a cubic Kilometer of rock would lower the temperature by 1 degree C every 25 days. So I think you'd deplete a typical borehole quite quickly?
As I understand it, that's how many geothermal plants work, effectively mining the heat underneath them, but at a rate of extraction that means they would become uneconomical over a span of decades rather than months.
Some places are covered with snow and get under 8 hours of sun a day, but your point still stands.
You know it's pretty compelling when there are several concurrent multi-billion dollar projects to transmit solar power from Africa, by undersea cable, to mainland Europe.
Iceland and Australia would become new powers imho.
On the other hand the estimate for a propane heater upgrade from the oil boiler was only $20,000 (I imagine it was an underestimate though). And window units for the 20-odd rooms would be less than $500 each. Or a lot of split systems for $2-4k a room.
this is already what the earth is doing, but at least now we can direct that energy where we want.