25
As electricity demand from data centers soars, Meta and Google are looking at a novel solution: harnessing clean heat far below Earth’s surface.
(www.nytimes.com)
This article was almost surely placed because it came out that the tech firms were using accounting techniques to obscure their impact:
this is one i dont understand. if we down drill far enough anywhere , we get free heat. nuke plants cost billions... we cant drill a few miles for billions of dollars? what am i missing?
Actually making it work means not just drilling a hole, but drilling two holes and then connecting them with a network of cracks which doesn't leak too much. This lets you circulate water through a huge volume of rock and engage in depletionary extraction of the accumulated heat. This wasn't really possible before the advent of fracking, and even then, it required a bunch of additional research to figure out how to make it work in the kinds of igneous rocks you find in the craton instead of the sedimentary rocks you find oil deposits in.
uh, ok. so we drill 2 big holes and link them for billions of dollars. what am i missing?
You're not missing anything. Nuclear is looking more and more like it won't be economically feasible going forward. If modern geothermal provides a cheaper way to feed dispatchable electricity into the grid, in more places, then that might very well be the last link in making a zero-carbon grid possible.
i can see how nuclear and eventually fusion will be important in the centuries to come for ... portable.. energy. just boggles my mind why we have put zero effort into geothermal
we have no problem going to ridiculous lengths for oil and gas.
I think you just answered your question.
The thing I heard is that geothermal energy is actually only renewable on geological timescales, i.e. not really "renewable". It's just that there are very large reserves, so it's not immediately obvious. But I can't find a link rn.