Comment by hunterpayne
16 hours ago
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