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by citadel_melon 475 days ago
The original comment stated that shallow geothermal can be useful for heating, but did not say anything about shallow geothermal electricity generation.
1 comments

No.

See the first paragraph. [0] The reference explicitly gets into "deep geothermal" (i.e., EGS) and talks about power applications that are viable because of limited drilling (i.e., shallow).

> The more than 1 gigawatt of geothermal power currently produced globally — from California to Iceland to the Philippines — relies nearly exclusively on such natural outpourings of the earth’s heat.

The building heat comment is just a reference to another residential/C&I application with ground loops. They're not dismissing or not acknowledging the grid-scale power applications.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43234465

"Shallow geothermal for building heat works fine, but it takes a lot of drilling just to get some heat."

From my understanding, this is all the original comment says about shallow geothermal. Correct me if I am misunderstanding.

Moreover, I do not see the quote: "The more than 1 gigawatt of geothermal power currently produced globally — from California to Iceland to the Philippines — relies nearly exclusively on such natural outpourings of the earth’s heat" anywhere.

Are we referring to the same comment, or am I misunderstanding something?