An energy company called Fervo says it has achieved a breakthrough in geothermal technology.
This is half of what we should be doing for power. The other half should be nuclear.
Nuclear is very expensive, which means it needs to be run for a long time to make up for the initial investment costs. There are not very many places where you will be able to have enough cooling water for 3 to 5 decades that is not on a coastline. However, if you build on the coast you have to build with 50 years of sea level rise, tsunamis and flooding in mind. All of that adds to the already high costs.
Cover everything with solar, build up on and offshore wind, improve existing hydroelectric and invest in geothermal, make the grid larger with more grid storage, and if you still need more energy sources then add nuclear.
Yes, I don’t think people realise the scale of production involved. We’re currently producing about 8500 TWh of power with renewables annually (nuclear is about 2600 TWh), and adding about 585 TWh of renewables per year (this is steadily increasing). A typical nuke plant generates about 8.5 TWh annually, so we would need to be building 68 new nukes every year to keep up with renewables (at current renewable numbers). The cost and construction time is massively prohibitive for nuclear, uranium mining is pretty dirty and there’s some downsides of nuclear waste at present. Yes, there’s some emerging tech but we won’t be building many of those for some time to come.
It seems unlikely nukes are a practical path to any significant contribution to new generation required and they will continue to fall behind. They can help but they’re not the magic bullet many people seem to think. Solar, wind and hydro will dominate in the medium term. I think they will ultimately make way for geothermal to dominate, maybe via plasma deep drilling like Quaise or PLASMABit utilise to potentially make bores up to 20 km deep, which opens much of the world up to being suitable.
Fusion may become practical in the next 20 years or so, but that will also be ludicrously expensive, so also unlikely to make a meaningful contribution in the medium term either.
Ideally, I think you’d want to use hydro and geothermal first, because they are local resources that can be built with relatively low overhead, and where you can’t, just spam nuclear (assuming it is within the country’s capabilities), with a massive storage-infrastructure-stabilized (preferentially offshore) wind and solar kickstart. Classical renewables have the advantage that you can build up capacity efficiently, and we are definitely on a timer here.
However, the real world is a little bit more complicated, so I think really we should just take what we can and not overthink it too much. Functionally, there’s no single, clean, silver bullet energy source.
So, it’s fracking?
@4am Sorta, but not really.
Geothermal energy production involves the extraction of hot water or steam from underground reservoirs. This water or steam is then used to drive turbines that generate electricity. No oil is extracted, just hot water or steam.
The article states:
For a natural geothermal system to produce electricity, it needs a combination of heat, fluid and rock permeability, as Bloomberg notes. In many areas, the rock has the required levels of heat, but not enough permeability for fluid to flow through it.
An EGS creates this permeability artificially by drilling deep underground and injecting fluid to create fractures in the rock. That approach can vastly increase the number of potential sites for a geothermal power plant.
Basically, they are creating extra cracks to assist with waterflow.
Fracking is a technique of creating extra cracks in rock using pressurized fluid. They are fracking to increase permeability.
It’s totally useless as long as you don’t shut down plants that are running on coal. Otherwise it’s just adding up with other sources of CO2.
Google is still closely associated with California to many people (and to a lesser degree New York), but it’s determined to change that reputation. The company is launching a $13 billion expansion in 2019 that will give it a total US footprint of 24 states, including “major expansions” in 14 states. The growth includes its first data center in Nevada, a new office in Georgia, and multi-facility expansions in places like Texas and Virginia. This is on top of known projects like its future New York City campus.
This plant is used to power up an expansion of google, which means it’s just adding up CO2 to what we already emit. It’s creating a fake impression that we are reducing our carbon footprint.
There is a simple solution: shut down the datacenter. No more power needed, no more water needed. The problem is not about CO2, it’s about us refusing to let go our previous way of life.
And if you refuse this solution ask yourself why.
But this is only an early phase, base on the article.
The company is hoping to replicate its success at a site in Utah. If Fervo sees similar results there and it successfully implements design upgrades to maximize output, the site is expected to generate enough electricity to power 300,000 homes simultaneously, Latimer said. That’s around a quarter of all homes in Utah.
If they successfully scale it up to power a quarter of the homes in Utah then it could dramatically reduce the need for power generated by other methods in the region. My concern is the part of the article where they talk about fracking other areas to make those areas more suitable for geothermal power generation. Assuming that their process uses the same chemical cocktail as petroleum fracking, I would not support it.
As for Google data centers, this article is not suggesting a reduced carbon footprint for Google. It about minimizing the increase in their carbon footprint. They are expanding and are going to continue expanding regardless of how their power needs are met. It is a good thing if their expansion can be powered by minimally polluting means.
I suspect a large part of the internet and the Fediverse is hosted on Google cloud services. Do you really want to shut down the data centers and hobble the internet? I would much rather we switch 100% to wind, solar, geothermal rather than ditching the internet.
They are expanding and are going to continue expanding regardless of how their power needs are met.
And this is exactly the problem we should focus on. They should not be allowed to expand like that. Either we are in a situation of emergence or we are not. Just stop them, make the political decision to stop them.
I would much rather we switch 100% to wind, solar, geothermal rather than ditching the internet.
Run the numbers, everything we don’t do now to reduce the CO2 emissions will be paid a hundred times more later. Megafires, megadraught, etc.
