The time has finally come for geothermal energy

Baseload generation is useless in 2025. It's in the name; it's called "base load", not "base generation".

Base generation was a cost optimization. Planners noticed that load never dropped below a specific level, and that cheapest power was from a plant designed to run 100% of the time rather than one designed to turn on and off frequently. So they could reduce cost by building a mix of base and peaker generation plants.

In 2025, that's no longer the case. The cheapest power is solar & wind, which produces power intermittently. And the next cheapest power is dispatchable.

To take advantage of this cheap intermittent power, we need a way to provide power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Which is provided by storage and/or peaker plants.

That's what we need. If added non-dispatchable power to that mix than we're displacing cheap solar/wind with more expensive mix, and still not eliminating the need for further storage/peaker plants.

If non-dispatchable power is significantly cheaper than storage and/or peaker power than it's useful in a modern grid. That's not the case in 2025. The next cheapest power is natural gas, and it's dispatchable. If you restrict to clean options, storage & geographical diversity is cheaper than other options. Batteries for short term storage and pumped hydro for long term storage.

Modern geothermal is dispatchable. It's a really good compliment to wind and solar https://climateinstitute.ca/safe-bets-wild-cards/advanced-ge...

But is it usefully dispatchable? Nuclear can be made dispatchable but it's not usefully dispatchable because the costs are fairly similar whether the plant is on or off.

Like nuclear, I believe geothermal has high capital cost and low running costs, suggesting that it isn't usefully dispatchable.

But that's too simplistic. A big limitation of geothermal is that rock has poor thermal conductivity. So once you remove heat it takes a while for it to warm up again. If you're running it 100% then you need a large area to compensate. OTOH, if you're running it at a lower duty cycle you likely need less area.

So if you know the duty cycle in advance, then you can likely significantly reduce costs. Yay!

But that also means that you likely can't run a plant built for low duty cycles continuously for 2 weeks during a dankelflaute. It's likely great for smoothing out daily cycles, but not as good for smoothing out annual cycles. That means it's competing against batteries, which are also great for smoothing out daily cycles, and are very inexpensive.

In 2025 the power consumption of my state (NSW, Australia) on any given day will be greater then 5 GW. https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...

This "there is no base load" idea is a ridiculous myth trivially disproven: every grid on the planet has continuous demands on it and they're quite significant (5 GW is about 50% the day time peaks).

It doesn't matter what the cost is, because later this evening or tomorrow morning I can guarantee you the same thing: my state will need at least 5GW of power to literally keep the lights on.

The right answer is 'yes to all the above'. Yes, we need solar. Yes, we need wind. Yes, we need batteries and, yes, we should be looking at geothermal. Solar has shown us, again, how artificially holding back a technology for decades has massive costs. Investing a few billion into geothermal right now is cheap and can only lead to a more durable energy infrastructure in the future. There are all sorts of benefits to a rich ecosystem of power generation. Solar and batteries may be amazing but global supply chains can be disrupted. Similarly, having multiple solutions means that niche use cases have more options and a larger likelihood of finding an acceptable solution. So, yes to all of the above. We are big enough to try them all.

That’s a lot of words to admit that geothermal has its place.

Baseload is traditionally about generation, not consumption. And baseload generation only makes sense when it is the cheapest option.

When solar and wind produce at near-zero marginal cost, running inflexible baseload beside them just forces cheaper generation to switch off, driving up system costs.

What the grid needs is dispatchable capacity - batteries, hydro, gas peakers (if we must) and demand shifting - that can plug the gaps when cheaper forms of generation cannot.

You misunderstand the point though. Sure there is always 5GW of demand - but we don't need generation that always supply 5GW cheap since wind/solar is much cheaper for base load. What we need is non-base load generation that can jump in at a moment's notice when needed because wind/solar isn't enough. Previously we would use those peak plants from when there was 6GW of demand (or whatever), but now between those peak plants coming down in price and wind/solar being so cheap we don't want that 5GW from plants that cannot adjust to load anymore - we are getting the can't adjust to load from wind/solar.

That wasn't the conclusion, though. The conclusion was that dispatchable geothermal is competing against daily cycling batteries, a competition it's likely to lose on cost.

> Solar and batteries may be amazing but global supply chains can be disrupted.

Solar and batteries aren't consumables, so they're not particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruption. If we lose our supply of batteries, we'll have ~10 years or so to find an alternate supply. We won't be able to do new installations during the disruption, but existing installations don't stop working.

Unlike a fossil plant when the supply of fuel is disrupted.

One thing which is needed too is spinning load, the grid depends on having enough inertia to maintain the frequency. Flywheels I assume would do that.

Inverters and batteries (or any other DC source) are also very good at doing this.

Not grid following inverters, or "any DC source", as we saw in Spain in Summer

We’re trying that in Germany while we’re still heavily dependent on coal while our electricity prices are twice as much compared to France.

I’m sorry, but wind and solar may be cheap, but they don’t provide cheap electricity 24/7.

It sounds great in theory but doesn’t work in practice.

Just compare Germany to France.

Or just build out nuclear like France and pay just 20 Cents per kWh.

https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...

Nothing to do with the blackout in Spain - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/what-caused-iberian-... - voltage surge and various thermal power generators failing to provide the voltage correction services they were being paid for

But yes, grid following alone does not provided the required stability - synthetic inertia etc needed

which is why dispatchable power is required - not coal?

This is being done and it's called synthetic inertia. Just with capacitors and batteries instead of spinning motors.

Caterpillar provides some really neat small scale flywheel UPS - used in places like hospitals where it would be very bad to lose power. They last long enough for the diesel gennies to start up.

Yes, if you don't install grid stabilization inverters, they don't supply grid stabilization.

Yes please from the UK, where it’s 27 euro cents per kWh currently.

P.S. this is a response to the original title, which has since changed making my comment look off-topic.

Ignore the clickbait headline here: Australia’s Solar Boom Is Breaking the Grid - Or Is It?

It's a sub 15 minute actual grid engineering for lay public explainer video (I know, I'm not a video fan either)

A better duller title might be: How Australia's Grid is being adapted to Solar Boom

  00:00 Introduction
  01:23 The Problem with Too Much Solar
  03:29 Batteries Change the Economics
  05:40 What the Grid Actually Needs
  07:04 A Cautionary Tale – The 2025 Iberian Blackout
  08:21 Australia’s Secret Weapon – Experience with Weak Grids
  10:08 The Genius Technical Fix – Grid-Forming Inverters
  12:25 The Perfect Partner - Batteries
  12:58 From Mechanical to Software-Defined Stability
  13:42 Conclusion – Fixing the Grid Before It Breaks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qavFbOpt4jA

The two nukes that recently came on line in the US were so over budget and timeline that all customers now pay a “surcharge” on their bill to pay for it.

Western counties building nukes is so expensive it makes the cost of electricity go up.

Suitable locations for pumped hydro are very limited, it is a comparably rare resource.

A lot of mountainous places are dry, and a lot of wet places are flat.

Of the remaining places, some are so unique that they cannot be destroyed by industrial construction (National Parks etc.)

For example, the main ridge of Krkonoše (Riesengebirge) on the Polish-Czech border has a lot of wind and rain and deep valleys, but it is the only place south of Scandinavia with a Scandinavia-like tundra and many endemites surviving from the last Ice Age. Any attempt to construct pumped hydro there would result in a national uproar on both sides of the border.

Its so easy that you can’t name me a single city of more than 10000 people that runs entirely off renewables.

That's the current load when the pricing structure actively encourages people to use power at night, because that was when it was cheapest to produce in the last century.

What does it look like if you actively encourage people to use power when it is cheapest to produce now?

I guess we'll find out when 3 hours of free electricity at noon becomes a standard offer next year.

State subsided construction and maintenance doesn’t pass straight through to consumer prices.

Also, France can’t build new nuclear for cheap/fast anymore either. They have a program for new reactors, even if they go ahead the first one won’t come online till 2038 by the earliest. We can’t wait that long.

This is such a tired trope. The differences between the two countries present day energy situation doesn’t tell you anything about how the world should proceed tomorrow.

Unless you have a time machine that you can use to get every country to build state subsided nuclear 50 years ago.

> I believe geothermal has high capital cost and low running costs

Higher capital costs, but not nuclear high capital costs.

> That means it's competing against batteries, which are also great for smoothing out daily cycles, and are very inexpensive.

It likely would supplement batteries rather than compete against them. A battery buffer would allow a geothermal plant to slowly rise to load and fall as that load goes away.

A very large battery can store 200MWh worth of energy. The largest geothermal plant produces 1.5GW. (A lot of the large plants look like they are in the range of 100->200MW). Presumably those plants can run for more than a few hours which ultimately decreases the amount of batteries needed to smooth out the demand curve.

Suitable locations for on river pumped hydro are limited.

But off river? The possibilities are vast.

Not even France can replicate their nuclear construction of decades ago.

Norway and British Columbia are 99% renewable energy and they have many cities larger than that.

France is a western country with its own economic and labour troubles. The enormous expense of building nukes in the US is entirely its own making and much more complicated than just "western" inefficiency.

> pumped hydro for long term storage.

You are using long-term in an extremely vague way.

Pumped hydro is not a solution for seasonal storage or yearly storage. Seasonal variation can be a problem in higher latitudes.

For example we have a serious problem in New Zealand where our existing "green" hydro lakes are sometimes low and our economy is affected: creating national power crises during dry years. We use coal-burning Huntley and peakers to somewhat cover occasional low hydro generation.

Unfortunately our existing generators also have regulatory capture, and they prevent generating competition (e.g. new solar farms) through rather dirty tactics (according to the insider I spoke with).

Apparently much of our hydro generation is equivalent to “run-of-river” which requires the river to flow. Although the lakes themselves are large, they don't have enough capacity to cover a dry year.

NZ had planned a pumped hydro, but it was expensive: planned cost of 16 billion compared against total NZ export income of ~100 billion. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/503816/govt-confirms-it-... So completely uneconomic risk (plus other problems like NIMBY).

Pumped hydro just requires a lake at the bottom of a slope. Unlike hydro generation, it doesn't require flow. Here's almost a million locations suitable for pumped hydro: https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

Two farm dams at a minimum, one at either end of a slope.

You can serve a small town of 500 or so people (plus tourists) with a mini systems for ~ $8 million (AU)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332157

nobody ever seems to recognize the benefits of Modularising your grid as well.

Ukraine is an excellent example of why centralizing your grid energy source is a bad plan... but not just for war situations. If you have an agile, adaptable modular grid you can recover for any form of disaster (natural or man made) very quickly and cheaply.

I really feel this is an under valued aspect of electrification and greening of the power sources we use.

I've worked on mine sites that use this as well.

Hyper administrative state-capitalist economies all have the same problem with infrastructure. The US has an image of being more capitalist and efficient, which is true to a degree, but once you get a large-scale project that hits all fed->state->municipal politics it's not much different than France. It's just minor variations of who the mandatory 'stakeholders' are ...who demands a cut and who delays/blocks progress.

As soon as some project is being pitched by politicians as "creating thousands of local jobs" it's either DOA or will be many years late and over budget.

Long term storage is definitely the weak point of moving to 100% carbon free electricity. Unfortunately geothermal does not cover this need. If we want to cover a dankelflaute with geothermal, we basically need enough geothermal to cover ~100% of our power needs. Pumped hydro is the best answer we have at the moment, even if it isn't a great answer.

What will likely happen is that people will decide that "99% is good enough", and use fossil generators to cover dankelflautes,

You may need small amounts of rare earth elements. Those are definitely a supply chain nightmare.

This feels a bit like talking in hindsight.

With fossil power plants, the bigger plants were more efficient. This lead to centralization. We now find ourselves in a situation where you can end up with a lot of small/local generation.

What happened in Ukraine can probably happen in almost every developed country today as this was all built/planned in a different time.

yeah I'm not saying that they messed up, I'm saying that we dont appear to be taking note from the situation. Doing better based one the world as it is now and how history has played out.

You might want to look up flammanville. They built a new reactor there and that also took 20 years or so and was way over budget.

We've built a lot of nuclear in the last century and then largely stopped. A lot of the know how is gone which is what we're paying for now.

Also, in France, all those reactors were largely the same leading to economies of scale when building them. Everything we build today is essentially a one of so you don't get to spread that cost over multiple.

Which is honestly fine, we would be in such an amazing place if we got to 99%

Nuclear produces very dangerous substances. The long term cost to guard us from them for a million years and the risk that something gets out of control are extemly high.

> but existing installations don't stop working.

They will, albeit slowly.

> Although the lakes themselves are large, they don't have enough capacity to cover a dry year.

It was shocking to me to drive by many of the California lakes/reservoirs that were overfull in the spring of 2019 only to hear that they were basically running dry two years later, and realize that as substantial a water storage system as they are, they're not multi-year scale against the required water supply.

Weakly defined. What does "run entirely off renewables" mean?

We know that in North America, for example, significant energy use comes from transportation and heating requirements, and that at this time, very little transportation is powered by renewables, and not a whole lot of heat either (though both are growing).

On the other hand, the entire current residential electrical demand of the city of Santa Fe (about 82k people) can be met with a single relatively small PV+BESS plant (and might just be if it manages to get built).

> my state will need at least 5GW of power to literally keep the lights on.

I think this abstraction is missing the elasticity of demand that can by unlocked by end-to-end dynamic pricing. Probably if the production was cut in half for some day, and hourly price hiked up until demand matches production, customers would still choose to keep most of the lighting while postponing some more energy intensive loads.

From what I saw: In Spain, inverters are not allowed to provide voltage control, and what we saw in Spain, was a voltage spike that caused generators to drop offline, which then caused frequency issues.

Yes but a very small amount and it is nothing we don't know how to manage.

> the risk that something gets out of control are extemly high

Except this is false, you are just spreading misinformation. I suggest you confront your current knowledge to different sources and listen to the arguments of the proponents of nuclear energy before you make up your mind. Don't just repeat what you have heard.

Canada as a whole is roughly 70% hydroelectric.

Any substance with a half-life of a million years is giving off very, very tiny levels of radiation.

What you should worry about is half-lives of under a few years.

I saw these in the basement of a data center about 11-12 years ago. Most steampunk thing I've seen in real life.

I would guess dankelflaute is mostly irrelevant in New Zealand because our hydro lakes (assuming rivers are flowing) can smooth out generation shortfalls shorter than say a month (kinda equivalent to pumped hydro or batteries). A 3 day dankelflaute as given in the Wikipedia example would likely not matter in New Zealand. Plus our weather is variable, and generation is spread out.

  New Zealand's hydro storage is less than a sixth of the country's total yearly electricity use. Hydro generation typically accounts for over 50% of our annual electricity generation, making us reliant on river flows. The maximum storage (full lakes) is around 5 TWh.

The lakes can't smooth out over long periods.

About 20% of New Zealand electricity comes from geothermal. I would guess political and environmental issues would dominate costs for increasing geothermal generation (plus I would assume we've taken all the low hanging fruit).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

> Unfortunately geothermal does not cover this need.

Artificial geothermal could though.

https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal

The size is orders of magnitude smaller than the depth of natural geothermal wells, and the temperature much higher. Even so, they are aiming for heat loss of < 1%/month, entirely adequate for seasonal energy storage.

See report and first comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44358668

It looked to me that regulators wanted to make solar the scapegoat for political reasons.

The report indicates to me that different operators were using a random monkey theory to make changes until the grid stabilised (they clearly didn't have a handle on the root cause of the instabilities). The regulator screwed up: they are supposed to engineer the network so it can be stable (even in the face of political pressure).

Not for solar, and not for most forms of Li-ion batteries.

Here's a bigger one at ASDEX (a fusion experiment):

https://www.ipp.mpg.de/4244138/generatoren

The way I understand it from people working in the field, is that the issue isn't really that lakes/rivers are running dry, but more that most hydropower is produced on the South Island while most consumption is on the North Island and the connection is woefully inadequate (typical NZ problem, never invest in infrastructure just keep bandaiding it). That said installing wind and solar (both of which are plentiful) would do a lot towards alleviating the problems, but there are the issues of the existing generators lobbying and the political climate, where the conservative party still has a significant number of politicians who think climate change isn't real.

True DC grids avoid this stability issue by not having a phase and allowing power flow to pretty much just self-balance through voltage gradients and clipping of connections/devices to whatever current they can handle.

With enough voltage range that wouldn't even need the tricky loops of voltage regulation common in incandescent-targeted legacy AC grids.

The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power.

Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program. The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.

A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!

The French were also practicing negative learning by doing.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

Can confirm, I live in Georgia.

The real stickler is that just from pure lucky timing, data centers will likely be the direct beneficiaries of the third reactor coming online at the Vogle plant here in Georgia. So taxpayers foot and will foot the bill, and meanwhile our governor and mayor are tripping over themselves giving tax breaks to data centers.

A very large battery storage site, like the top 10 currently running has an order of magnitude more energy storage than you suggest.

The largest under construction for go live in 2027 has another order of magnitude, 19000MWh and will deliver up to 1000MW.

Things are changing fast as battery prices drop and experience accumulates.

To my knowledge Siemens is currently making a lot of money by adding spinning inertia to the grid because that is easier than getting the response time/power out of electronics.

Is that correct only 1MW of power but 19,000MWh of storage? That would take over two years to drain it.

Powering an extended, worst-case-scenario month-long dunkelflaute entirely with gas rather than a realistic mix of options would only take 5% of Germany's current gas usage (coincidentally roughly equivalent to Germany's domestic gas production).

It's wild how much attention that gets compared to the 50% being used to heat buildings.

That is a problem for which we already have great solutions. We have German made heat pumps, that could be German fitted and run off German generated electricity, or worst case EU electricity imports.

Solve 10% of that problem and you have freed up enough gas and money to cancel out an apocalyptic scale dunkelflaute or three every year.

Well spotted, I've corrected to 1000MW (or 1GW).

The UEA are aiming for a longer than usual runtime, but only 19 hours, not 2 years.

"At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." — C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951.

Safe, clean, too cheap to meter?

Some things never change.

The connection is not the issue.

  The issue is that we have insufficient extra generating capacity during a dry year. At the moment we don't have enough [gas] to fully use all our existing thermal plant in a dry year. There are no projects in the generation pipeline that would provide backup energy to cover dry years.

- https://www.mbie.govt.nz/dmsdocument/31240-factsheet-challen...

A lot more solar would help, but the government owned generators are knobbling private investment through dirty tactics (the details are not public - I got this from a planned utility scale solar farm that is being cock-blocked). Fundamentally the issue is that the generators make more money by preventing extra generating capacity coming online.

Don't blame "the conservative party": Labour were also completely useless when they were in power (admittedly National still isn't helping). Politicians rabbit on about infrastructure investment e.g. the link I gave that mentions the pumped hydro scheme backed by Labour and cancelled by National because it was uneconomic. Both parties wastefully "invest" in infrastructure, and both make stupid decisions to score political points rather than solve problems sensibly. It's nonsense to blame one party. Both parties are preventing utility scale solar installations (indirectly). And the minor parties are not helping either. The greens in particular are not a party to accept any compromise, so even they won't back solar.

Climate change isn't the cause here - your bias is showing.

Even Australian politicians and their regulator have managed to sort it out. New Zealand is just fucking it up.

In what world are you living that you not have heard about nuclear accidents? Here is a reading list for you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident

With regard to nuclear waste. Here is an example, how it can went quickly out of control:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

does it matter much when in the end pricing is decided by merit-order system [1]? i.e. when you are dependent on other sources or neighbouring markets with very different composition.

not to say it is remains costlier than conventional sources, albeit not accounting for externalities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_order

Yes I have and you clearly know nothing about those incidents else you wouldn't give a laundry list of wikipedia article you haven't even read.

I am not sure what your point exactly is

The C.G suits were right as long as the digging operation is not too costly (the more shallow and concentrated the better)

Fossil fuels are nothing short of a miracle because they are so energy dense, but it's a slow poison and has high addictive power.

As long as we didn't (want to) know about negative externalities (chief among them CO2 and CH4) whose cost was borne by humanity, it was ok. Dirty but everyone seemed to think it was worth it.

The advantages of nuclear is not that it would be too cheap to meter (even though that becomes true with time because most of the price is upfront investment).

- It is that you can get energy independence even if you don't have uranium because it is so energy dense that you can just stockpile it. For example France could run its plants for 2 years with its current stockpile of uranium, and it only recycles around 10% of its fuel. Compare that with its oil needs, the oil stockpile would only last 3 months, probably less.

- It is CO2 free

Bonus: Nuclear industry is required to take of its waste products (which are only waste products insofar are we are too lazy/cheap to recycle them, else they are just more fuel)

I am not in that field, just a curious citizen, but Siemens seems to offer synthetic inertia gear too: https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/products-servi...

And that location probably wasn't on the ANU map, meaning there were are far more than 1 million suitable locations.

You need them for solar inverters, but you also need them for the turbines like those used to generate power with geothermal/wind/hydro/nuclear/etc.

Erbium perhaps for some power semiconductors, but in very small amounts.

What's the use in turbines? Most generators associated with turbines don't use permanent magnets.

Solar doesn't? As far as I know the process for mining the panel and batteries is the same sulphuric acid process with extremely toxic tailings. And you get uranium in this process of rare earth mining. These toxins are orders of magnitude greater in risk and in volume/ quantity than process's nuclear fuel waste.

I pay 21 cents per kWh and only 11% of my grid is nuclear.