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> There's no reason why this shouldn't work. But they've been at it for 9 years, with considerable funding, and it doesn't really work yet. That's a concern.

It does work. They've had a pilot project producing 3 megawatts since 2023. But scaling takes a lot of time and money, particularly when it's something new and you have to go through a lot of operational learning.

Shale took something like 30 years to become a thing. 9 years is nothing in the energy space.

by micro258810 hours ago|

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It does work technically I think it is still an open question if it can work economically. There are issues of commercially viable flow rates / thermal decline rates that are harder physical limits you run up against and the pilot design doesn't address. In human timescale terms it's more like heat mining rather than renewable heat due to thermal depletion rate vs replenishment rate. These systems have a targeted lifetime of ~20-30 years and net power will decline over this timespan.

by hunterpayne13 hours ago|

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"There's no reason why this shouldn't work."

Geothermal has had the same problem for its entire history. That problem is that the water being heated goes through the ground (not in a pipe) to "gather" more energy. But this means that when the water comes back up, it has a lot of weird salts in it (and other things). Those salts cause corrosion, lots and lots of corrosion, far more than even a maritime environment. So the plant needs to be shutdown a lot of the time for repairs. And that's what makes it uneconomical. Also, the salts often contain things that require special handling which also increases costs.

PS This is why geothermal works in Iceland where there is so much geothermal heat they can use pipes. In CA, they can't so it doesn't work there.

by micro258811 hours ago|

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Fervo uses engineered reservoirs in granitic basement rock so this is less of an issue. Hot rock in a working fluid can still dissolve silicates out of the granite and lead to scaling / degradation of the flow rates through the reservoir and that is a risk but chemical anti scaling treatments are used to reduce this.

CA has the worlds largest geothermal power complex in the Geysers. That one field produces an equivalent amount of power as all the geothermal in Iceland and there are others.