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Technology Breakthroughs Are Unlocking Geothermal Energy's Vast Potential Across The Globe
(www.renewableenergymagazine.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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I see this more as a transitional technology. If they manage to convert old coal and gas plants into geothermal ones to expand their lifespan that's great. But the overall costs of large centralized power-plants are just not competitive anymore, so there is little point in building new ones in general and completely new geothermal plants only make sense where it is cheap to do so due to to the geological situation.
Geothermal makese sense on high latitudes (see Iceland for example) where heat is desirable even if electricity can't be extracted.
Where you cannot drill deep enough (a Finnish company tried a 5 kilometer borehole and didn't hit good enough heat) - artificial geothermal (thermal storage in large underground caverns) still makes sense, but not for electricity production. Just storing heat extracted from the environment during summer.
If drilling should get cheaper (e.g. those MIT guys declaring that they have a practical and reliable maser drilling rig), accessing good enough heat may be possible in places where it's not worthwhile currently.
In some locations, production of geothermal energy can be combined with extracting dissolved chemicals - e.g. some borehole may produce a lot of dissolved lithium salts. No point in letting lithium back underground, better to put it aside.