Given the cost, it seems like there would be a big opportunity to install geothermal to bring that cost down. The payback would be quick with electricity costs like that.
I read this article, and I couldn't help thinking — Couldn't they spend these billions on something like deep geothermal energy and get a much better (and more likely) return?
Geothermal makes so much sense conceptually. It seems ridiculous to run natural gas pipelines everywhere when there is a limitless supply of heat under every house provided one drills down far enough. Hopefully the process can be simplified and costs can be reduced significantly.
Sure, and they could shrug off the cost of installing a ground-source heat pump[1] too, which would be too expensive for more modest homes. But they'd again have to give a damn, which I am only semi-optimistic about...
Aren't we at the point where most large scale infrastructure projects require huge outlays? Unless geothermal is an order of magnitude more expensive per MW or GWH than say nuclear, is it a point against it?
> They require more capital investment than solar or wind projects: $3,000 to $6,000 per kilowatt, compared with $1,700 to $2,100 per kilowatt for wind and solar. (However, a geothermal plant will produce between two and four times as much electricity as a wind or solar plant of the same capacity.)
I wish someone would setup neighborhood geothermal heat pumps as a heating utility or coop model. It's so expensive for everyone to bore into the ground for this.
You may have missed the point of this article. The northeastern United States is very geologically stable, so any geothermal energy would have to come by going very, very deep underground. We don't have any hot springs around here. So even if this project works out and eliminates a lot of future carbon emissions, it will hardly be considered cheap.
Normally I agree with your assessments but I don't think you're right on this one. Presuming geothermal wells would have a >100 year lifespan with minimal upkeep the upfront costs may be very large but the long-term cost per/MW extracted would go close to zero because of the virtually non-existent marginal costs for operating geothermal wells.
Ignoring externalities created by using fossil fuels for heating (pollution, corruption, etc.), if this technique is sound it could be a more financially sensible decision than any alternative.
Gotta wonder if you could get funding for "Geothermal Offsets", to replace some of the Earth's sapped heat from geothermal power sources. You could possibly run such a system for free :D
reply