I worked on geothermal control systems a decade or so back. There are some less obvious applications for geothermal that reduce electric use (as opposed to generating electricity).
The systems I worked on were for cooling larger structures like commercial greenhouses, gov installations and mansions. 64° degree water would be pumped up from 400' down, run thru a series of chillers (for a/c) and then returned underground - about 20° or 25° warmer.
I always thought this method could be used to provide a/c for neighborhoods, operated as a neighborhood utility. I've not seen it done tho. I've seen neighborhood owned water supplies and sewer systems; it tells me the ownership part seems feasible.
In the nordics it is common to have ground source heat pumps (brine in closed circuit pipe or bore hole) that are run backwards in summer to cool the house while actually assisting in storing heat back in the ground to extract in the winter. It’s a bit like regenerative breaking on electric cars.
No it's not. It exists but it's certainly not common for individual dwelling to use ground source heat pumps, at least in Norway. It is more common in Sweden[1] but still far less common than air source and over 90% of heat pump installations in Norway are air source[2].
The only ground source installations I can think of in Norway serve large office buildings and similar. The largest heat pump installation I know of in Norway is actually a third kind: water source[3]. It takes heat from the Drammen river to provide heat for a district heating system and for keeping the town centre clear of ice in the winter as well as supplying the new hospital with heat.
I imagine that the rest of the Nordic region is similar.
There was a new in 1988 house in Champaign, Illinois, USA that used the same system, and i mention that because it was a normal modern house, and it's the only one i've heard of with that system.
Shallow geothermal works fine for heating. And you can use the ground as a heat sink. But if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water. That's deeper than most oil wells. Fervo Energy claims to have found 270C at 3350 meters well depth. That's progress.
> But if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water.
Why is that the case? Can't you go down to where it's like 70-80 deg C and close the gap using heat pumps? Yes, you need to put some energy in, but I would expect that the whole process would still be energy-positive at some temperature that's lower than 100C?
Nope. To efficiently tap geothermal energy, you need to boil something but not necessarily water. Isopentane, for example, boils at 28º at standard pressure, so they pressurize the secondary loop to raise the boiling point close to whatever the primary loop temperature is.
The idea that geothermal only works well at steam temperatures is outdated 20th-century thinking.
I think this looks interesting, but still very early stage. The “150 GW revolution” sounds more like theoretical potential, not something we will see soon in real deployment.
Main problems: drilling is still expensive, managing induced seismic activity is not trivial, permitting can take long time, and you also need transmission infrastructure. Also not yet proven that companies like Fervo can scale this in reliable and low-cost way.
There are so many ways around this - for a start, you can use some other working fluid that boils at a lower temperature. Or you can choose a different thermodynamic cycle that doesn't involve phase change.
> The systems I worked on were for cooling larger structures like commercial greenhouses, gov installations and mansions. 64° degree water would be pumped up from 400' down, run thru a series of chillers (for a/c) and then returned underground - about 20° or 25° warmer.
I read this several times in the context of _geothermal_ energy, and had no clue what you were talking about.
Then I realised, you must be an American and use 'freedom units', coupled with a misunderstanding of what geothermal means.
I'm too zonked to pick out the method from the article - but I'll offer that geo methods can be region specific. What I described fits the SE US, with our 13 month summers and abundant underground water.
Heat pumps require a specific temperate differential to work. So they work in zones with are a bit hotter or colder than you would like and so require moderate amounts of heating or cooling. They don't work in temperate zones nor in very hot or cold places. So Santa Fe or Minneapolis for example they work but Mexico City or San Francisco they don't. If you are in a place where they work and that isn't too dense or has earthquakes, go for it. If not, don't. There are businesses that will help you understand when they do and don't make sense. Those businesses don't sell heat pumps though (the businesses that sell things will almost always tell you it works, even when it doesn't, for example PV in the UK doesn't work).
> I always thought this method could be used to provide a/c for neighborhoods, operated as a neighborhood utility. I've not seen it done tho. I've seen neighborhood owned water supplies and sewer systems; it tells me the ownership part seems feasible.
I keep thinking this would be a great municipal code change: any time the roads are being built or ripped up for water/sewer maintenance, put in a ground loop and subsidize household connections for heat pumps so instead of having to deal with the marginal difference between 20℉ winter air you'd be working with 50-60℉ ground temperatures.
I don't know how economical that is, but just as an anecdote - the town I'm from in Poland has district heating to all single family homes, town of about 20k people. And coincidentally, I now live in the UK and a new estate near me has district heating to all the houses they are building, not apartment blocks. So it must make some sense to someone, or they wouldn't be outfitting 100+ houses this way.
The water at these temperature / depths has a lot of dissolved salts and minerals so it's not (human / ag) usable. Modern designs are closed loop systems where production wells bringing the hot water to the surface go through a heat exchanger to a different working fluid to drive the turbine and then is re-injected back into the reservoir. There is consumptive water use for fracking the reservoirs in these types of enhanced geothermal systems, but beyond that it's more water redistribution in the area around the well systems where re-injection and production lead to different pressurization from pumping / natural ground water replenishment rates.
> One of the problems with the data center boom is its use of fresh water. How does geo-thermal plants use water and how much?
Baring leaks, ground source heat pump geo will consume no water at all. Water is pumped from one layer of the aquifer and is returned to a slightly higher layer.
Oh, Fervo Energy again. They're trying to IPO, hence the hype.
Wikipedia's warning: This article reads like a press release or a news article and may be largely based on routine coverage. (February 2026)
This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments, a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view.
This isn’t really an evaluation of the company, just explaining how they had to use different financing approaches as they grew and derisked their technology (which makes sense).
Compared to some other new approaches for getting clean base load power, it seems like they’ve been pretty grounded and methodical.
They're way ahead of the microwave drilling people.
There's no reason why this shouldn't work. But they've been at it for 9 years, with considerable funding, and it doesn't really work yet. That's a concern.
According to google, this would be almost 30% of total US energy production (135gw-150gw) and nearly 5% of total US energy consumption.
But what is the "breakthrough" if there is one? The article doesn't really suggest any breakthrough that is unlocking this potential energy? Or maybe I'm looking for a technological breakthrough where there isn't one.
There isn't one. They are trying to politically pressure a utility to build some geothermal plant. But utilities have engineers who will tell their bosses that this plan doesn't work. So the companies selling the geothermal plant are trying to politically pressure the utility to do yet another thing that they know won't work. PG&E for example has several geothermal plants which have been economic disasters and were and are being shutdown.
The core breakthroughs were working with partners to develop PDC bits that enable high rates of penetration in drilling out these horizontal wells in high temp granitic rock and then demonstrating plug / perf fracture networks that have a high engineered permeability in these source rocks to support economical flow rates and heat transfer. These were considerable advances over previous efforts.
There will be other learning by doing advances in how you structure your power plant design to take advantage of these to make practical long term power production possible (well spacing and injection / production placement / flow rate and temperature decline management).
They're adapting fracking techniques to use for geothermal, which opens up many more sites. Historically geothermal has had limited potential, and the best sites have already been developed. So geothermal + fracking creates a lot more viable land.
Traditional geothermal is you dig a really deep well and get a geyser of hot water or steam to come up.
Fervo is doing "Enhanced" or "Engineered" geothermal where you dig two wells: an injection and an extraction well. You frack the rock in between, creating lots of small channels for water to flow between them. The water absorbs the heat from the rocks as its circulating from the injection well to the extraction well.
The kind of rock that's good at this heat transfer is different from shale rock that oil & gas frackers have experience with... it's harder, less porous, not partial-dino-juice. So they're taking a lot of the same core concepts from the oil & gas industry (horizontal drilling, geology simulations, etc), but their IP is in adopting the techniques to work with geothermal-favorable rock.
Another interesting concept I heard Fervo researching: this kind of geothermal is not "baseload" style power, so there's a few tricks they can do to get better cost efficiency and peaker-like or battery-like behavior. Remember the two wells that form the circulation loop: injection and extraction? Well, you need pumps on both sides (remember, this isn't "geyser-style" geothermal where natural pressure and geology do all the work). Pumps take energy to run, something like 20-30% of the overall extraction output (you put a unit of energy in to run the pumps and you get 3-5 units of energy back out the other end). Not great, not terrible either... it's an energy return comparable to solar and wind. But what you can do is run the injection pump when power prices are low (ie when there's an excess of solar on the grid), pressurize all your fracked channels underground (the reservoir), and then when grid prices rise in the evening you run just the extraction pump to pull out the pre-heated, pre-pressurized water. You're still at a 3-5x energy return, but the time-shifting has made the cost multiplier more favorable.
My understanding is it's still in research phase, but Fervo is piloting this technique. Like another thread said, they're pre-IPO now, so they've been flooding the renewables media with all these stories. They filed an S-1 recently, but always read the eventual S-3 before considering your investment options blahblahblah.
> Several companies are now building upon existing techniques for accessing geothermal resources by integrating enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) into operations. While conventional geothermal systems produce energy using hot water or steam, pumped from naturally occurring hydrothermal reservoirs trapped in rock formations underground, EGS use innovative drilling technologies, such as those used in fracking operations, to drill horizontally and create hydrothermal reservoirs where they don’t currently exist.
Drilling horizontally doesn’t magically reduce the depth, nor the problem that drilling in to hot rock is like drilling in to plasticine, at least for temperatures worth working with.
EGS has been around for at least 15 years. See AltaRock Energy as an example (I’m sure there are others). They started almost 20 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaRock_Energy
My understanding is that it's due to better drilling techniques. The industry learned a fair bit from fracking and they're learning more from experience as they apply it to geothermal.
No particular breakthrough, but there's a learning curve and they learn more as they do more. Other industries sometimes work that way, too.
It’s a stupid ploy by oil drillers to try and expand their existing capex to something more future proof. Their theory is to randomly frack the ground and hope superheated water shows up there. It’s probably just going to end up ruining existing groundwater sources.
The Casa Diablo geothermal facility in the eastern Sierra Nevada of California has been a success. I also remember reading years back about ideas surrounding how to extract energy from Yellowstone both to provide clean energy but also to decrease risk of another massive explosion. If I recall they were proposing digging a massive horizontal tunnel to come in deep and extract heat without compromising the roof.
Here is an article that is a bit old but discusses the start of things [1]. It would be a bit ironic if fracking tech helped get us further from using natural gas. I think the reality will be if this gets established we will see rapid improvement as scale comes on line so if it is remotely economical now it will be massively better in 5-10 years. Of course the 'if' applies.
Newberry Volcano is too good to be true in that there are few (outside of Yellowstone) equivalent sources of geothermal awesomeness at similar depths in the USA. Good for research bad for generalization of drilling costs to hit similar temperatures. There are federal protections for geothermal drilling anywhere near Yellowstone.
With all the exotic drilling tech making fracking work, it seems like geothermal is a natural pivot since much of the challenge is controlling the cost of drilling deeply.
this looks like a search for fluffy money durring an energy crisis.
Turbines are completly mature, and nothing dealing with some new deap drilling breakthrough or heat exhanger advancement, or more efficient and durable pumps, crittical CO², or H²O ?, not yet.
Existing geothermal plants use the same generation technology as a coal plant, but use near surface heat assosiated with volcanoes and hot springs, and there is a distinct limit on more of that.
Cost is like 90-99% of what matters. Last year, China installed 300GW of new renewables and 0GW of geothermal, despite geothermal being "an inexhaustible 24/7 production capable".
Geothermal will compete with solar if they can get the cost low enough. I hope they succeed!
Solar and wind, with battery storage, can get you to say 90%, and then you only need 10% from other sources like geothermal and nuclear to fully decarbonize.
It has exclusivity which might be enough, you can't own the sun (modulo Simpsons episode) but you might be able to "own" geological hotspots for this purpose, the same way you can "own" a coal mine or an oil well. Remember the goal here is to create poverty. I mean, obviously you say you want to create "wealth" but only in a relative sense.
Pretty sure they’re interested in collapsing the cost of domestic energy production in a way that’s resilient to adversarial supply chain risk since energy production is the base of the economic pyramid - energy availability is upstream of nearly all economic output.
"It really is off-brand for this administration. They are only interested in energy sources you pull out of the ground, burn, and turn into CO2/pollution."
They are pro nuclear and that alone means their energy policy is more environmentally friendly than the previous one. Renewables are a dodge for those who either don't look at industry numbers or are scientifically illiterate. It isn't an accident that the last 2 governors of CA came from very big oil money and spoke a lot about renewables.
You know how the United Arab Emirates are known as the Emirates, how the United Mexican Sates are known as Mexico and how the United States of America is known as America? Are you unfamiliar with what synecdoche is?
I worked on geothermal control systems a decade or so back. There are some less obvious applications for geothermal that reduce electric use (as opposed to generating electricity).
The systems I worked on were for cooling larger structures like commercial greenhouses, gov installations and mansions. 64° degree water would be pumped up from 400' down, run thru a series of chillers (for a/c) and then returned underground - about 20° or 25° warmer.
I always thought this method could be used to provide a/c for neighborhoods, operated as a neighborhood utility. I've not seen it done tho. I've seen neighborhood owned water supplies and sewer systems; it tells me the ownership part seems feasible.
In the nordics it is common to have ground source heat pumps (brine in closed circuit pipe or bore hole) that are run backwards in summer to cool the house while actually assisting in storing heat back in the ground to extract in the winter. It’s a bit like regenerative breaking on electric cars.
No it's not. It exists but it's certainly not common for individual dwelling to use ground source heat pumps, at least in Norway. It is more common in Sweden[1] but still far less common than air source and over 90% of heat pump installations in Norway are air source[2].
The only ground source installations I can think of in Norway serve large office buildings and similar. The largest heat pump installation I know of in Norway is actually a third kind: water source[3]. It takes heat from the Drammen river to provide heat for a district heating system and for keeping the town centre clear of ice in the winter as well as supplying the new hospital with heat.
I imagine that the rest of the Nordic region is similar.
See:
[1] http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JR...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221313882...
[3] https://energiteknikk.net/2023/11/drammen-fjernvarme-storst-...
4 replies →
There was a new in 1988 house in Champaign, Illinois, USA that used the same system, and i mention that because it was a normal modern house, and it's the only one i've heard of with that system.
It seems so smart.
15 replies →
Shallow geothermal works fine for heating. And you can use the ground as a heat sink. But if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water. That's deeper than most oil wells. Fervo Energy claims to have found 270C at 3350 meters well depth. That's progress.
> if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water. That's deeper than most oil wells.
That’s going to be very dependant on location.
Here in NZ there are regions where water is boiling at surface level.
According to the below, 18% of our power is produced with it.
https://www.eeca.govt.nz/insights/energy-in-new-zealand/rene...
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> But if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water.
Why is that the case? Can't you go down to where it's like 70-80 deg C and close the gap using heat pumps? Yes, you need to put some energy in, but I would expect that the whole process would still be energy-positive at some temperature that's lower than 100C?
Nope. To efficiently tap geothermal energy, you need to boil something but not necessarily water. Isopentane, for example, boils at 28º at standard pressure, so they pressurize the secondary loop to raise the boiling point close to whatever the primary loop temperature is.
The idea that geothermal only works well at steam temperatures is outdated 20th-century thinking.
3 replies →
I think this looks interesting, but still very early stage. The “150 GW revolution” sounds more like theoretical potential, not something we will see soon in real deployment.
Main problems: drilling is still expensive, managing induced seismic activity is not trivial, permitting can take long time, and you also need transmission infrastructure. Also not yet proven that companies like Fervo can scale this in reliable and low-cost way.
There are so many ways around this - for a start, you can use some other working fluid that boils at a lower temperature. Or you can choose a different thermodynamic cycle that doesn't involve phase change.
> The systems I worked on were for cooling larger structures like commercial greenhouses, gov installations and mansions. 64° degree water would be pumped up from 400' down, run thru a series of chillers (for a/c) and then returned underground - about 20° or 25° warmer.
I read this several times in the context of _geothermal_ energy, and had no clue what you were talking about.
Then I realised, you must be an American and use 'freedom units', coupled with a misunderstanding of what geothermal means.
Framingham, MA has a geothermal system using ground source heat pumps like what you are describing
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/first-networked-geother...
I think you're describing what is known as "district energy" systems.
Whisper Valley in Austin Texas is one example of a neighborhood geothermal installation: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/texas-whispe...
Maybe not quite exactly what you envision.
> Maybe not quite exactly what you envision.
I'm too zonked to pick out the method from the article - but I'll offer that geo methods can be region specific. What I described fits the SE US, with our 13 month summers and abundant underground water.
1 reply →
Isn't that similar to how neighborhood heat pumps work?
https://www.araner.com/blog/district-heating-in-sweden-effic...
Heat pumps require a specific temperate differential to work. So they work in zones with are a bit hotter or colder than you would like and so require moderate amounts of heating or cooling. They don't work in temperate zones nor in very hot or cold places. So Santa Fe or Minneapolis for example they work but Mexico City or San Francisco they don't. If you are in a place where they work and that isn't too dense or has earthquakes, go for it. If not, don't. There are businesses that will help you understand when they do and don't make sense. Those businesses don't sell heat pumps though (the businesses that sell things will almost always tell you it works, even when it doesn't, for example PV in the UK doesn't work).
6 replies →
> I always thought this method could be used to provide a/c for neighborhoods, operated as a neighborhood utility. I've not seen it done tho. I've seen neighborhood owned water supplies and sewer systems; it tells me the ownership part seems feasible.
I keep thinking this would be a great municipal code change: any time the roads are being built or ripped up for water/sewer maintenance, put in a ground loop and subsidize household connections for heat pumps so instead of having to deal with the marginal difference between 20℉ winter air you'd be working with 50-60℉ ground temperatures.
District heating and chilled water is uneconomical for single-family homes. It does work well in medium to high density areas.
I don't know how economical that is, but just as an anecdote - the town I'm from in Poland has district heating to all single family homes, town of about 20k people. And coincidentally, I now live in the UK and a new estate near me has district heating to all the houses they are building, not apartment blocks. So it must make some sense to someone, or they wouldn't be outfitting 100+ houses this way.
10 replies →
One of the problems with the data center boom is its use of fresh water. How does geo-thermal plants use water and how much?
The water at these temperature / depths has a lot of dissolved salts and minerals so it's not (human / ag) usable. Modern designs are closed loop systems where production wells bringing the hot water to the surface go through a heat exchanger to a different working fluid to drive the turbine and then is re-injected back into the reservoir. There is consumptive water use for fracking the reservoirs in these types of enhanced geothermal systems, but beyond that it's more water redistribution in the area around the well systems where re-injection and production lead to different pressurization from pumping / natural ground water replenishment rates.
1 reply →
> One of the problems with the data center boom is its use of fresh water. How does geo-thermal plants use water and how much?
Baring leaks, ground source heat pump geo will consume no water at all. Water is pumped from one layer of the aquifer and is returned to a slightly higher layer.
I dont know why this keeps coming up? It is a closed loop system. The water aren't used at all.
4 replies →
Oh, Fervo Energy again. They're trying to IPO, hence the hype. Wikipedia's warning: This article reads like a press release or a news article and may be largely based on routine coverage. (February 2026) This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments, a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view.
Here's a more realistic evaluation of Fervo.[1]
[1] https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/what-fervos-approach-says...
That's Wikipedia warning about the quality of the Wikipedia page, not about the company.
This isn’t really an evaluation of the company, just explaining how they had to use different financing approaches as they grew and derisked their technology (which makes sense).
Compared to some other new approaches for getting clean base load power, it seems like they’ve been pretty grounded and methodical.
They're way ahead of the microwave drilling people.
There's no reason why this shouldn't work. But they've been at it for 9 years, with considerable funding, and it doesn't really work yet. That's a concern.
4 replies →
According to google, this would be almost 30% of total US energy production (135gw-150gw) and nearly 5% of total US energy consumption.
But what is the "breakthrough" if there is one? The article doesn't really suggest any breakthrough that is unlocking this potential energy? Or maybe I'm looking for a technological breakthrough where there isn't one.
There isn't one. They are trying to politically pressure a utility to build some geothermal plant. But utilities have engineers who will tell their bosses that this plan doesn't work. So the companies selling the geothermal plant are trying to politically pressure the utility to do yet another thing that they know won't work. PG&E for example has several geothermal plants which have been economic disasters and were and are being shutdown.
The core breakthroughs were working with partners to develop PDC bits that enable high rates of penetration in drilling out these horizontal wells in high temp granitic rock and then demonstrating plug / perf fracture networks that have a high engineered permeability in these source rocks to support economical flow rates and heat transfer. These were considerable advances over previous efforts.
There will be other learning by doing advances in how you structure your power plant design to take advantage of these to make practical long term power production possible (well spacing and injection / production placement / flow rate and temperature decline management).
> PG&E for example has several geothermal plants which have been economic disasters and were and are being shutdown.
Those are very different from EGS
They're adapting fracking techniques to use for geothermal, which opens up many more sites. Historically geothermal has had limited potential, and the best sites have already been developed. So geothermal + fracking creates a lot more viable land.
Traditional geothermal is you dig a really deep well and get a geyser of hot water or steam to come up.
Fervo is doing "Enhanced" or "Engineered" geothermal where you dig two wells: an injection and an extraction well. You frack the rock in between, creating lots of small channels for water to flow between them. The water absorbs the heat from the rocks as its circulating from the injection well to the extraction well.
The kind of rock that's good at this heat transfer is different from shale rock that oil & gas frackers have experience with... it's harder, less porous, not partial-dino-juice. So they're taking a lot of the same core concepts from the oil & gas industry (horizontal drilling, geology simulations, etc), but their IP is in adopting the techniques to work with geothermal-favorable rock.
Another interesting concept I heard Fervo researching: this kind of geothermal is not "baseload" style power, so there's a few tricks they can do to get better cost efficiency and peaker-like or battery-like behavior. Remember the two wells that form the circulation loop: injection and extraction? Well, you need pumps on both sides (remember, this isn't "geyser-style" geothermal where natural pressure and geology do all the work). Pumps take energy to run, something like 20-30% of the overall extraction output (you put a unit of energy in to run the pumps and you get 3-5 units of energy back out the other end). Not great, not terrible either... it's an energy return comparable to solar and wind. But what you can do is run the injection pump when power prices are low (ie when there's an excess of solar on the grid), pressurize all your fracked channels underground (the reservoir), and then when grid prices rise in the evening you run just the extraction pump to pull out the pre-heated, pre-pressurized water. You're still at a 3-5x energy return, but the time-shifting has made the cost multiplier more favorable.
My understanding is it's still in research phase, but Fervo is piloting this technique. Like another thread said, they're pre-IPO now, so they've been flooding the renewables media with all these stories. They filed an S-1 recently, but always read the eventual S-3 before considering your investment options blahblahblah.
4th paragraph of TFA:
> Several companies are now building upon existing techniques for accessing geothermal resources by integrating enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) into operations. While conventional geothermal systems produce energy using hot water or steam, pumped from naturally occurring hydrothermal reservoirs trapped in rock formations underground, EGS use innovative drilling technologies, such as those used in fracking operations, to drill horizontally and create hydrothermal reservoirs where they don’t currently exist.
Sounds like marketing hype to me.
Geothermal reservoirs exist at depth.
Drilling horizontally doesn’t magically reduce the depth, nor the problem that drilling in to hot rock is like drilling in to plasticine, at least for temperatures worth working with.
1 reply →
EGS has been around for at least 15 years. See AltaRock Energy as an example (I’m sure there are others). They started almost 20 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaRock_Energy
So it basically says nothing useful other than try to generate hype and make them look good.
1 reply →
My understanding is that it's due to better drilling techniques. The industry learned a fair bit from fracking and they're learning more from experience as they apply it to geothermal.
No particular breakthrough, but there's a learning curve and they learn more as they do more. Other industries sometimes work that way, too.
https://www.austinvernon.site/blog/geothermalupdate2026.html
It’s a stupid ploy by oil drillers to try and expand their existing capex to something more future proof. Their theory is to randomly frack the ground and hope superheated water shows up there. It’s probably just going to end up ruining existing groundwater sources.
The Casa Diablo geothermal facility in the eastern Sierra Nevada of California has been a success. I also remember reading years back about ideas surrounding how to extract energy from Yellowstone both to provide clean energy but also to decrease risk of another massive explosion. If I recall they were proposing digging a massive horizontal tunnel to come in deep and extract heat without compromising the roof.
Long Valley Caldera Geothermal Area | Open Energy Information https://share.google/5DvljMhL3EVMDeIAL
Here is an article that is a bit old but discusses the start of things [1]. It would be a bit ironic if fracking tech helped get us further from using natural gas. I think the reality will be if this gets established we will see rapid improvement as scale comes on line so if it is remotely economical now it will be massively better in 5-10 years. Of course the 'if' applies.
[1] (2023) https://time.com/6302342/fervo-fracking-technology-geotherma...
There's one of those sites near where I live. The numbers would be amazing if true, but feel a lot like "to good to be true" to me
https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/06/super-hot-rocks-geoth...
Newberry Volcano is too good to be true in that there are few (outside of Yellowstone) equivalent sources of geothermal awesomeness at similar depths in the USA. Good for research bad for generalization of drilling costs to hit similar temperatures. There are federal protections for geothermal drilling anywhere near Yellowstone.
While I’m not extremely bullish on large scale geothermal, much like with Housing, we need any and all types of it.
Those geothermal plants up by Mammoth Lakes are looking like a great idea right now
With all the exotic drilling tech making fracking work, it seems like geothermal is a natural pivot since much of the challenge is controlling the cost of drilling deeply.
this looks like a search for fluffy money durring an energy crisis.
Turbines are completly mature, and nothing dealing with some new deap drilling breakthrough or heat exhanger advancement, or more efficient and durable pumps, crittical CO², or H²O ?, not yet. Existing geothermal plants use the same generation technology as a coal plant, but use near surface heat assosiated with volcanoes and hot springs, and there is a distinct limit on more of that.
What is the point of building energy outside of solar farms? I'm sincerely asking
An inexhaustible 24/7 production capable plant has many advantages over solar and maintaining large most types of battery banks.
Cost is like 90-99% of what matters. Last year, China installed 300GW of new renewables and 0GW of geothermal, despite geothermal being "an inexhaustible 24/7 production capable".
Geothermal will compete with solar if they can get the cost low enough. I hope they succeed!
Some people don't really want the planet covered in solar panels. Others are cool with it so long as they don't have to see it.
Night time? But batteries! Several cloudy days in a row? More batteries! Cost? -> a mix of sources becomes attractive
Batteries? You mean like digging a hole/making a wall and pumping water?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...
Or we could just spin some rocks around.
https://www.torus.co/torus-flywheel
Rather have solar/wind and this than shipping depleting goop from foreign nations.
https://imgur.com/a/dV8gk3R
can you find curves like this for any other power source?
also batteries are getting exponentially cheap too
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Is 150GW enough for a “revolution”? That’s about 10% of current total power production.
Solar and wind, with battery storage, can get you to say 90%, and then you only need 10% from other sources like geothermal and nuclear to fully decarbonize.
Solar is at 7%. It's very significant.
That’s my point. Solar is on track to eclipse that amount way before we would build all of this speculative geothermal.
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In case you didn't know, geothermal energy extraction works on cooling our planet's core. It's not 'free', or 'clean', or 'green'.
IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE LESS IDIOTIC WAY OF ENERGY PRODUCTION
Would be great to see this in our lifetime
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You might be joking, but he might just be that simple. Today he seemed to conflate capital punishment with crimes committed in a capital city.
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It has exclusivity which might be enough, you can't own the sun (modulo Simpsons episode) but you might be able to "own" geological hotspots for this purpose, the same way you can "own" a coal mine or an oil well. Remember the goal here is to create poverty. I mean, obviously you say you want to create "wealth" but only in a relative sense.
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Pretty sure they’re interested in collapsing the cost of domestic energy production in a way that’s resilient to adversarial supply chain risk since energy production is the base of the economic pyramid - energy availability is upstream of nearly all economic output.
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"It really is off-brand for this administration. They are only interested in energy sources you pull out of the ground, burn, and turn into CO2/pollution."
They are pro nuclear and that alone means their energy policy is more environmentally friendly than the previous one. Renewables are a dodge for those who either don't look at industry numbers or are scientifically illiterate. It isn't an accident that the last 2 governors of CA came from very big oil money and spoke a lot about renewables.
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They're pretty friendly to nuclear which comes out of the ground.
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Seriously, I wonder about why it's supported. Maybe the drillers are from the fossil fuel extraction industry.
> Seriously, I wonder about why it's supported.
$$$.
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There is no continent called “America”.
Surprisingly, this depends on your culture.
Depending on where you're from you'll have been taught a different set of continents (North + South America / America, Europe + Asia / Eurasia).
You know how the United Arab Emirates are known as the Emirates, how the United Mexican Sates are known as Mexico and how the United States of America is known as America? Are you unfamiliar with what synecdoche is?
> how the United Mexican Sates are known as Mexico
I can’t believe I didn’t know that’s Mexico’s official name! TIL!
Yes. North America.
United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (formerly NAFTA)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Mexico%E...
https://www.ghy.com/trade-compliance/guidance-on-us-energy-i...
https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/analysis-the-united-st...
Now USMCA (if you are American) or CUSMA (if you are Canadian) or T-MEC (if you are Mexican).
Canadian United States Mexico Agreement.
It is up for review July 1st I believe.
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Or, as you've presented, three of the twenty three independent states and territories of North America.