The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm. Shadow, and flame.
I know it's so small-scale by compare, but it still feels like a really obviously bad plan to sap energy from the magneto-hydro engine deep inside spaceship earth that we probably can never recharge. The scale of drain might remain small across millenia but it's still not something I feel ok messing with. "Nearly limitless" is at some indefinite expense of some deep future, especially if it works & succeeds & scales.
And we're dumping the heat into the atmosphere which also doesnt really need additional heating.
I acknowledge these sensibilities are mostly, well, wrong. That there are just so many orders of magnitude difference. But the doubt is still there too.
Imagine a breakthrough in some incidental category and 'poof' everyone is using geothermal and fossils, solar, nuclear etc. fall to the side, all of world geopolitics shifts and 'climate change' arguments dissapear.
It would be like the change wrought by the telephone + car + radio kind of thing - just unthinkable.
I don't think people from the 1890's really imagined what things would be like in 1990.
That said, it may be that those things won't happen and we do have an idea of the 2090's because it's not that-that much different than today.
I've watched enough terrible sci-fi movies on the Syfy channel to know that if we start using geothermal energy, we'll suck all the heat out of the core of the Earth, it'll stop moving, our magnetosphere will degrade, and we'll all die in a solar flare apocalypse.
No, but seriously, good luck to these guys. Someone's got to be the first to succeed at making geothermal power scalable/practical, let's hope it's them so we don't have to wait another century.
This is interesting, but isn't the challenge with "deepest holes ever" that they frequently cave in on themselves? And wouldn't you need multiple levels of water storage while pumping upwards since there are practical limits to how high water can be pumped? (rough citation on that: https://www.theurbandeveloper.com/articles/how-water-works-w...)
I heard this episode of How I built this, about company Quaise on how they plan to drill to unprecedented depths using new technologies involving drilling with microwaves to be able to tap into geothermal energy. The idea of repurposing coal powered plants and leveraging the turbines that were already built, then drilling holes next to these plants to generate geothermal energy is absolutely brilliant. I'm surprised more people haven't heard of this company.
Discussion on this startup from two weeks ago, 186 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32342501