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by wffurr 20 days ago
It's not anywhere near hot enough to generate steam and make electricity.

There are uses for low grade heat but they require colocation and careful design, which costs more than just dumping the heat.

1 comments

It actually is, just not water steam. There's a hot springs resort in Alaska that uses pentane (boiling point 38C) to generate energy. The efficiency is terrible, of course.
True. Chena Hot Springs [1]. They are famous in the "direct use" geothermal community.

A lot of the thermal energy is not used for electrical generation. Although a small portion actually is -- made possible by the \Delta T rejecting heat at a low annual average atmospheric T.

Most of the rest of the heat is used to run an absorption chiller to maintain the ice "palace" in the summer.

(This info might be slightly outdated. It was true about 2018 or thereabouts when I met the owner of the resort at a geothermal conference.)

[1] <https://www.chenahotsprings.com/>.