3 ms·
The threat of mantle-cooling from geothermal energy is about as likely as stopping the wind with too many windmills. Or stopping the rotation of the earth by ev
by function_seven 3y ago
The threat of mantle-cooling from geothermal energy is about as likely as stopping the wind with too many windmills. Or stopping the rotation of the earth by everyone running east.
Total energy contained in the mantle is about 12 million million million million million Joules. 12 x 10^30 J.
If every person on Earth extracted a million watts every day, it would still take millions of years to deplete that heat.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago> stopping the wind with too many windmills If you were wondering, the point at which adding more wind turbines slows the others by more than it generates (saturation wind power potential) is estimated to be about between 80 and 380 TW, depending on if you only include land but not Antarctica, all surface area including oceans and the jet streams.[1] Total global electricity generation is currently about 3TW, and all energy is about 20TW, so there's quite some headroom there! Also illustrates the massive civilisational scale undertaking to electrify the world: rebuild electrical capacity maybe 5 times over. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1208993109 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1208993109
- eternityforest 3y agoI'm surprised it's even the same order of magnitude on land. Hopefully we can mostly use solar and not significantly slow the wind!
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoWell, the point is that even if you converted every single fuel source humans currently use, from coal to nuclear to oil, to wind, you wouldn't even come close to the point where you slowed the wind enough to make more turbines not worth it. So no one's significantly slowing the wind any time soon, no matter what we do.