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The time has finally come for geothermal energy

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160 points riordan | 16 comments | 17 Nov 25 13:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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bryanlarsen ◴[17 Nov 25 17:07 UTC] No.45955571[source]▶
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.

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jmward01 ◴[17 Nov 25 20:24 UTC] No.45957855[source]▶
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.
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1. iso1631 ◴[17 Nov 25 20:46 UTC] No.45958073[source]▶
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.
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2. bryanlarsen ◴[17 Nov 25 20:51 UTC] No.45958123[source]▶
Inverters and batteries (or any other DC source) are also very good at doing this.
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3. iso1631 ◴[17 Nov 25 21:02 UTC] No.45958252[source]▶
Not grid following inverters, or "any DC source", as we saw in Spain in Summer
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4. jamescrowley ◴[17 Nov 25 21:08 UTC] No.45958314{3}[source]▶
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

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5. iSnow ◴[17 Nov 25 21:15 UTC] No.45958387[source]▶
This is being done and it's called synthetic inertia. Just with capacitors and batteries instead of spinning motors.
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6. _whiteCaps_ ◴[17 Nov 25 21:18 UTC] No.45958441[source]▶
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.
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7. bryanlarsen ◴[17 Nov 25 21:28 UTC] No.45958536{3}[source]▶
Yes, if you don't install grid stabilization inverters, they don't supply grid stabilization.
8. defrost ◴[17 Nov 25 21:59 UTC] No.45958848[source]▶
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
9. senectus1 ◴[18 Nov 25 00:30 UTC] No.45960062[source]▶
I've worked on mine sites that use this as well.
10. icehawk ◴[18 Nov 25 04:02 UTC] No.45961243{3}[source]▶
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.
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11. kaonwarb ◴[18 Nov 25 04:36 UTC] No.45961453[source]▶
I saw these in the basement of a data center about 11-12 years ago. Most steampunk thing I've seen in real life.
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12. robocat ◴[18 Nov 25 05:14 UTC] No.45961641{4}[source]▶
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).

13. cycomanic ◴[18 Nov 25 07:49 UTC] No.45962445{3}[source]▶
Here's a bigger one at ASDEX (a fusion experiment):

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

14. namibj ◴[18 Nov 25 08:13 UTC] No.45962609{4}[source]▶
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.

15. adrianN ◴[18 Nov 25 09:34 UTC] No.45963092[source]▶
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.
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16. iSnow ◴[18 Nov 25 13:29 UTC] No.45965585{3}[source]▶
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...