Lateral wells branch out from them, staying parallel until they meet at the end. Like so:. Meeting at the end is easier than meeting in the middle. As for land use, after the initial drilling, the only part that technically needs to be aboveground is the air cooler that cools the water before it descends. Power lines, even the electric generator itself, could be underground. Since all Eavor needs to work is hot rock, which is pretty reliably located beneath almost any site in the world, it avoids the need for expensive exploration and modeling.
An Eavor-Loop can act as baseload always-on power, but it can also act as flexible, dispatchable power — it can ramp up and down almost instantaneously to complement variable wind and solar energy. It does this by restricting or cutting off the flow of fluid. As the fluid remains trapped underground longer, it absorbs more and more heat. So, unlike with solar, ramping the plant down does not waste curtail the energy.
As rock becomes harder, equipment must also be hardened to additional vibrations. And electronics need to be better insulated. It was not intended to be commercially viable. To make geothermal work, Eavor and other companies will need to master going deeper and hotter. She stresses that there are no insuperable barriers if enough technical know-how and capital are brought to bear.
The main problem facing renewable energy is that the biggest sources, wind and solar, are variable. Building an electricity system around wind and solar thus means filling in the gaps , finding sources, technologies, and practices that can jump in when wind and solar fall short say, at night. And the electricity system needs to be extremely secure and robust, because decarbonizing means electrifying everything , moving transportation and heat over to electricity, which will substantially raise total electricity demand.
The big disputes in the clean energy world thus tend to be about how far wind, solar, and batteries can get on their own — 50 percent of total power demand? The answer currently favored by renewable energy advocates is more energy storage, but at least for now, storage remains far too expensive and limited to do the full job. Geothermal power, if it can be made to reliably and economically work in hotter, drier, and deeper rock, is a perfect complement to wind and solar.
It is renewable and inexhaustible. It is available almost everywhere in the world, a reliable source of domestic energy and jobs that, because it is largely underground, is resilient to most weather and human disasters. It can operate without pollution or greenhouse gases. The same source that makes the electricity can also be used to fuel district heating systems that decarbonize the building sector. One thing that might get more people talking about geothermal is the somewhat serendipitous opportunity it offers to the oil and gas industry, which is reeling from oversupply, persistently low prices, and cratering demand caused by the pandemic.
Consequently, it is hemorrhaging jobs. Geothermal is buzzing with startups that specifically need innovation and expertise in drilling technology, the very skills many oil and gas workers already have. They could put those skills to work making the planet safer for future generations. Industry veterans have taken notice.
The industry is taking notice as well. Investments in geothermal would give them a way to shelter part of their portfolio from the brutal oil market. And geothermal is a more natural match than wind and solar for many of these companies. Geothermal remains a relatively small industry, with a market cap in the single-digit billions, while oil and gas is a trillion-dollar industry.
Oil and gas has one of those. Recent oil and gas technology innovations are going to turbocharge geothermal, especially if policymakers can get their act together and offer some support. With an inexhaustible, dispatchable, flexible renewable energy source so close to breaking through, the vision of a fully renewably powered world seems less and less utopian, more and more tantalizingly within reach.
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Sunlight glows through the steam of a geothermal power plant in Niland, California. Tapping into it, though, turns out to be pretty tricky. DOE Four basic types of geothermal energy technology Once it reaches the surface, geothermal energy is used for a wide variety of purposes, mainly because there are many different ways to use heat.
To promote wider geothermal energy development, IRENA coordinates and facilitates the work of the Global Geothermal Alliance GGA — a platform for enhanced dialogue and knowledge sharing for coordinated action to increase the share of installed geothermal electricity and heat generation worldwide.
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