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Pasting a comment here I made on the previous article: To me the most important fact to keep in mind about geothermal is that the energy flow across the crust
by phreeza 11mo ago
Pasting a comment here I made on the previous article:
To me the most important fact to keep in mind about geothermal is that the energy flow across the crust is ~0.1W/m^2. Compare that to the sun which has >100W/m^2 even at high latitudes. Of course this does not mean geothermal is useless (in particular heat pumps, if you count those, are great), but it goes a long way to explaining why geothermal isn't seeing the same explosion as solar.
- echelon 11mo ago> Compare that to the sun which has >100W/m^2 even at high latitudes. Some places are covered with snow and get under 8 hours of sun a day, but your point still stands. You know it's pretty compelling when there are several concurrent multi-billion dollar projects to transmit solar power from Africa, by undersea cable, to mainland Europe.
- griffzhowl 11mo ago> the energy flow across the crust is ~0.1W/m^2 It's a misleading comparison. This is only the average amount of heat that diffuses through an ordinary patch of surface, and has more or less nothing to do with how a geothermal plant works, since they don't harvest heat by covering a large area of surface with conducting material. The surface heat flow is low because rock acts as an insulator. If you drill down to where it's hot and draw the heat up you obviously get orders of magnitude larger flows of energy to the surface.
- xnx 11mo agoDoesn't that deep down rock reach equilibrium with the system and is then limited by the flow rate?
- phreeza 11mo agoExactly. The only exception to this are very rare sites like the one in Iceland where you can get close to a magma cell which has a much higher thermal gradient and possibly magma convection replenishing it.
- phreeza 11mo agoAre you suggesting to basically harvest the thermal energy in the rock in a non-renewable fashion? I don't think that is very promising, the heat capacity of rock is not that huge. Back of the envelope calculation is drawing 1 GW from a cubic Kilometer of rock would lower the temperature by 1 degree C every 25 days. So I think you'd deplete a typical borehole quite quickly?
- griffzhowl 11mo ago> Are you suggesting to basically harvest the thermal energy in the rock in a non-renewable fashion? As I understand it, that's how many geothermal plants work, effectively mining the heat underneath them, but at a rate of extraction that means they would become uneconomical over a span of decades rather than months.
- linhns 11mo agoShould the technologies mentioned in the article can be perfected for large scale use, we would see a boom in geothermal, even larger than that of solar, as intermittency is automatically resolved. Iceland and Australia would become new powers imho.