Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

Every time I am "forced" to read TechCrunch, I feel like I am reading an LLM summary of a company PR release. Anyone else? This article is so short on facts.

Title of the article: "World’s first enhanced geothermal power plant completed..."

A quick Wiki search shows a page for "Enhanced geothermal system"[1]. There is a list of projects. There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here?

    > The power plant synchronized with the grid about a week ago, bringing online the first third of what will soon become a 100-megawatt power plant.

They brought 33MW online. Yay. Instead, you hide it behind "first third of 100MW".

What about cost? Nothing from TechCrunch. I found better analysis here[2]. Look at this savage quote:

    > At $7,000 per kW for Phase 1 against the $2,157 per kW Canary Media gives for a 2025 gas plant

Initial build cost is 7K USD per kW. Solar plus battery and a touch of wind wins by a long shot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_geothermal_system

[2] https://mgrid.org/2026/09/27/fervo-first-power-cape-station-...

This article also provides good analysis: https://powerstack.currence.ai/p/powerstack-post-ipo-fervo-c....

The tldr

> If we look at our Fastest MW analysis, the fastest way to get power to the grid right now is solar+BESS with existing interconnection agreements in ERCOT. This setup gives a 27-month or less time-to-COD, and can come in at $40/MWh PPAs, a price and speed Fervo can't catch. So, per the above, the right way to think about it is that Fervo competes for a different customer than the ones looking at solar+BESS. Are they required to procure geo? Are they in the West? Do they need fully baseload power? For sure, that’s a smaller niche. But if Fervo's anticipated 38GW resource base materializes even a little, the niche is huge.

A lot of geothermal energy investment happened after the California Public utilities commission issued procurement mandates for clean firm power after SB 100 passed.

Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else by such a wide margin it boggles my mind we’re even still talking about, or contemplating anything else.

By the time you finish reading this, solar panels got cheaper

> Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else

Except that they don't.

Why do you think new datacenters are using natgas turbines and not wind+solar?

Honestly a lot of different reasons. One they can put natgas on a private disconnected grid direct on the same property.

The other big ones is states ignoring the environmental rules of all the negative side effects of said generation.

DC's better be careful or any government change and their choices now will bite them in the ass.

Physical footprint fits in limited available space, well understood turnkey commercial off the shelf solution, and lack of grid scale flexibility/redundancy to best exploit available capacity at different times of day/year.

Because they don’t want to wait for a grid connection that can take years and they need backup generation capacity anyways.

You’ll see them all connecting to the grid in the following years simply because it’s cheaper

Indeed. And the problem with grid connections is that the grid can't carry arbitrary streams of energy. So you can't just connect a bunch of remote panels to the grid and YOLO it on the scale of the large datacenters.

This problem does not go away, though. It's still an issue for renewable generation, especially for northern areas.

Because behind-the-meter generation bypasses many municipal permitting processes and now also skips NEPA review. As diesel keeps climbing it'll get more expensive to truck fuel in and you'll start to see operators begging for the grid connections they scoffed at before.

Is there actually evidence of them scoffing at grid connections, or merely being realistic that the grid connection takes a lot of time to establish, so the jet turbines are the "right now" solution while they wait for the grid connection permitting bureaucracy to take its time.

Grid connection permits don't take as much time as, for instance, real natural gas turbines, which currently have a three to five year lead time. The jet turbines are the "right now" solution while they wait for those. While it's possible some jet-powered datacenters have some grid tie permits in process, I have so far found none. Permit applications are public record almost anywhere, so it's not tough to check

    > three to five year lead time

I didn't believe it, but you are right. Three years is probably generous. Several sources said 5-7 years.

I think this is a reasonable question -- not a simple deflection. To get more sustainable builds (that people/voters can accept), I think we need a compromise for new major data centers (~250MW+). If you want to build a new major data center, it needs to paired with power production that is near zero carbon. Example: Solar + battery + wind + nat-gas peaker (rarely used). If not possible to build the required solar farm near the data center, then electrical grid interconnect upgrades need to be "fairly" shared (how is debatable).

But the volume of solar panels you'd need and especially the volume of batteries you'd need don't exist, nor is the supply there for anything but a gradual build-out.

Only in some regions that’s enough. A lot of regions have winters where solar output is greatly diminished and wind can stop for days. Batteries are too expensive to store electricity for days to weeks. On top of that you have higher demand if you have electrified space heating.

In virtually all regions.

I’m in Canada in a tight valley with tons of snow. The 7.2kw on my roof will profit me $25k-$30k over their life.

It works very well, even here

PV making sense and PV+batteries being enough are two different things though. I have 10 kW on my roof as well here in Germany, in winter there’s not enough sun for heating with a heat pump though.

Only about 30% of all humans live farther from the equator than Germany.

Do you’re saying batteries + solar are great for about 70% of all people.

Great!

Utah and Southern California have insanely high PV energy per sqm, even in the winter.

Humanity actually has millennia of experience with solar energy, we just call it agriculture. Plants literally are natural solar panels. And you know what all this experience tells us? It varies from place to place, like, a lot. In some places it works nice and in some places it just doesn't.

And, traditionally, in California, the location in TFA, has this solar thing worked, or not worked?

It needs two things: sun and water. Water has been solved and California is doing pretty great, don't you think? Let's take a look at another example: I live in the Netherlands and I like having berries with breakfast. Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, all kinds of them. And you can buy them all year round in any supermarket, but just for a few months in summer they will have a proud label "made in the Netherlands". Plants had hundreds of millions of years of evolution, millennia of human selection, and still growing berries is not viable here for most of the year. Maybe we will start producing electricity in Morocco and shipping it here one day, just like berries, but producing it domestically using solar will never be effective

Hey berry lover: Cool post. When not local, where do they come from?

Places with a lot more sunshine. Morocco is a big one. The ones in my fridge right now are from South Africa and Peru

Wow, that is wild. Can you imagine the logistics required to pick a berry in South Africa or Peru, then deliver it (by air?) to the Netherlands? Unbelievable. It could make an amazing YouTube video/documentary. To be fair, I'm not here to point the finger at you. I also love to eat berries year-round, including when the are not in season. I am always blown away when I see from where they come!

> There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here?

First commercial operation with a grid connection. You'll notice that those 50+ are listed under the "research and development" section.

The last project in that table is this project! Really, we have no way of knowing that all those other projects were never connected to the grid, except some company PR.

Except this article telling you that.

Does the build cost matter? After you've built the gas plant you still need to buy gas in perpetuity.

The marginal cost of the energy from the geothermal plant must be very much less.

And yet, when the same argument is made about nuclear, all hell breaks lose

This plant became operational after 2 years and has started paying back the investment. If your project is going to take 20 years before it comes online, you are going to need much, much higher returns to justify the investment. There is also a lot more risk involved in keeping a project alive and viable over a 20 year period, again pumping the expected returns needed before investors will invest.

High level, you raise a good point. However:

    > This plant became operational after 2 years and has started paying back the investment.

Do we know if this project is currently cash-flow positive? One way that this project could be initially loss-making: the labour and maintenance costs exceed revenues from selling electricity.

I don't know. It could be profitable enough to fund the later stages of the build, or proof enough to bring in more risk adverse investors. I don't think we would be seeing press releases if the numbers show that continuing the build is economically doomed.

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