Geothermal's Time Has Come
economist.comRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953568
The time has finally come for geothermal energy (newyorker.com)
2 days ago | 268 comments
Must be some PR firm issuing talking points right now.
Previously, the New Yorker with near identical headline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953568
Submarine articles for the win: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, covered this in a 2008 book. He called it Churnalism.
Ordinarily I would be down on this, but we need energy.
If money is being spent on this instead of adtech, so be it. Fake it til you make it, energy folks.
We don't need more energy, we need fewer data centers. We're firing up a nuclear plant that already failed just for Microsoft.
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.
What percentage of the world's power grid do you figure is being used by all datacenters right now?
Go ahead and look it up, you might be overstating the problem by a bit.
DCs altogether are about 1.5% according to https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/executive-summary .
I know zero percent of that percent needs to go to bitcoin, ads, and surveillance.
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.
Absolutely, however that's not really going to significantly change the global energy demand. It may well eventually free up a decent amount of brainpower to more worthwhile things.
Remember though, most of HN users are funded from ad revenue
It's insane but your tirade is also insane, it's the reality, datacenters will exist, Facebook and Google will exist. Electricity is needed and if we find ways to overproduce it with minimal enviromental impact while electrifying as much as possible our energy usage it will get humanity to a much better place.
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.
This anti-tech, anti-AI attitude is the new anti-nuclear. And I am so tired of seeing it every single day.
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.
There's a lot of difference between the planet ending in 4 billion years, and widespread famine in the next 100 years.
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.
All that diatribe and I'm sure you're vaccinated.
Materialist nihilism is so passe.
Why wouldn't he be? It's one of the best inventions of the modern age. This is what his post is all about.
Pasting a comment here I made on the previous article:
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.
> the energy flow across the crust is ~0.1W/m^2
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.
Are you suggesting to basically harvest the thermal energy in the rock in a non-renewable fashion? I don't think that is very promising, the heat capacity of rock is not that huge.
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?
> Are you suggesting to basically harvest the thermal energy in the rock in a non-renewable fashion?
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.
Doesn't that deep down rock reach equilibrium with the system and is then limited by the flow rate?
Exactly. The only exception to this are very rare sites like the one in Iceland where you can get close to a magma cell which has a much higher thermal gradient and possibly magma convection replenishing it.
> Compare that to the sun which has >100W/m^2 even at high latitudes.
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.
Should the technologies mentioned in the article can be perfected for large scale use, we would see a boom in geothermal, even larger than that of solar, as intermittency is automatically resolved.
Iceland and Australia would become new powers imho.
I was recently quoted over $1.2M for a geothermal heat pump for around 800,000 BTUs in upstate NE NY. The property is not even worth that. This used three wells drilled about 600 feet.
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.
seems simpler to use solar to heat up rock and insulate it for use during the winter than to drill, but i'm not an engineer.
this is already what the earth is doing, but at least now we can direct that energy where we want.
thermal sand batteries might be interesting to you, if you haven't seen them before