[ajross]

My response here is the same as what I say to proponents of new nuclear technologies: it's gotta work on a balance sheet, not just in a pitch deck. This isn't a new technology enabling new markets and new kinds of growth here, it's just... electricity. And even as a renewable option, it needs to be able to compete not just with fossil fuel generators with-all-the-externalities-factored-in, but with dams and windmills built with century-mature technology.

That's just a tall order. Should this be a legitimate research topic? Absolutely. Would I put my money down as an investor on this being a win? No. Should we be throwing public money at this? Hell no, we should be building more turbines with that money. Start on the weird stuff only once we've picked the low hanging fruit.

[XorNot]

Geothermal power is a non-nuclear baseload source of energy though. Unlike all others, it just sits there and makes electricity/heat without other inputs: we should absolutely be throwing public money at it, we should've been doing this all along.

Geothermal that you can sink pretty much anywhere would be a gamechanger - it doesn't create local pollution, and it does produce waste heat: built in or neat town areas, you can make electricity and completely clean town heating that works all year round.

[foepys]

When the Swiss tried to build a geothermal power plant, they had quite a few earthquakes which lead to the discontinuation of the whole project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_seismicity_in_Basel

Boring this deep does have significant risks, especially when we are pumping fluids in and out.

[stormbrew]

> it's gotta work on a balance sheet, not just in a pitch deck.

It shouldn't have to work on either of those things, because neither of those things take any account of externalities.

This attitude that no energy project is worth doing if it's not profitable is how we're going to kill our entire civilization in a few decades. We need to be thinking longer term than "is it cheaper than coal right now?" when the cost of co2 emitting energy sources is literal death and destruction down the line.

[ajross]

I didn't say "profitable". I said "cheaper than a windmill". That's the standard in this industry. And windmills are really, really cheap. Pick the low hanging fruit, then get fancy. Exotic energy technologies are at best an exercise in premature optimization, and more likely an attempt at soaking the woke masses to fund someone's startup.

[klabb3]

Why not both? Windmills are intermittent, hugely dependent on location, short lifespan, requires a lot of space, dangerous to service etc etc. It's not a full solution.

[VyperCard]

Jeder Euro fürs Atom fehlt uns beim echten Ökostrom.

Because if you habe finite resources, you better invest them in something that works than waste a considerable part to do something that probably maybe should work.

[stormbrew]

Money is a 'finite' resource in the sense that we have largely agreed that it is finite. Funnily enough, we only manage to agree that it's finite for some things (education, health care, climate change) but not others (police, militaries, extravagant government buildings).

In terms of actual physical and labour resources, they're not fungible. People working on nuclear power or geothermal are not going to be terribly useful to advance the state of the art on wind power, which is already a largely mature technology that needs money and effort put into deployment not research. They also use largely different materials, technology, and equipment.

Likewise, you can't just take "money spent on geothermal" and throw it at "building windmills" because there are other bottlenecks involved in windmills that aren't just magically solved with money. And, of course, likewise.

Anyways, every advance in materials science all of these things engage in helps all of them advance.

[formerkrogeremp]

Killing our entire civilization now. Now.

[stormbrew]

In case you thought I disagree with you, this might clarify why this is just a difference in tense: If you have malignant cancer, it is "killing you now" (you are in the process of dying of something) but only later on will it actually "kill you" (ie. you will become dead).