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.

> 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.

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.