As electricity demand from data centers soars, Meta and Google are looking at a novel solution: harnessing clean heat far below Earth’s surface.
As electricity demand from data centers soars, Meta and Google are looking at a novel solution: harnessing clean heat far below Earth’s surface.
www.nytimes.com
Hungry for Clean Energy, Facebook Looks to a New Type of Geothermal
This article was almost surely placed because it came out that the tech firms were using accounting techniques to obscure their impact:
this is one i dont understand. if we down drill far enough anywhere , we get free heat. nuke plants cost billions... we cant drill a few miles for billions of dollars? what am i missing?
Actually making it work means not just drilling a hole, but drilling two holes and then connecting them with a network of cracks which doesn't leak too much. This lets you circulate water through a huge volume of rock and engage in depletionary extraction of the accumulated heat. This wasn't really possible before the advent of fracking, and even then, it required a bunch of additional research to figure out how to make it work in the kinds of igneous rocks you find in the craton instead of the sedimentary rocks you find oil deposits in.
uh, ok. so we drill 2 big holes and link them for billions of dollars. what am i missing?
The thing I heard is that geothermal energy is actually only renewable on geological timescales, i.e. not really "renewable". It's just that there are very large reserves, so it's not immediately obvious. But I can't find a link rn.