Quote:
Originally Posted by bootsnixon
In the second video, an engineer from Eavor mentions they envision their use case as baseload energy for wind and solar. I was guessing it was because it would be much more expensive. I would guess, beyond the upfront development cost, it should be very cheap to operate bringing down the energy/$ ratio each year. Seems a bit like the planting a tree analogy:
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago and the second best is today.
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This is also how I see it, but it'll still need to complete with other baseload options like emerging storage solutions, nuclear, hydropower and even HCDC transmission. If it's low cost (meaning shallow higher temperature geothermal heat available) it'll be able to beat the other options. It'll also work where there'll be political will to use existing skills and technologies like Alberta.
I'm really hoping it works out better and Eavor is looking promising, but cost improvement from scalability will be difficult as each site is always unique. I do think the technology is already viable and a success, but it's overall impact will be all about cost and political will to invest. The difficulty in predicting cost curves and political winds makes this difficult.
For example, if politics didn't exist and carbon emission elimination the goal, BC would build out hydro and Alberta would keep adding more wind and solar, while building a bunch of big inter-ties and we'd be good. An example of where the political winds help, Germany's investment in expensive solar is what allowed for the cheap solar we have today. It's certainly possible that geothermal can scale, otherwise you wouldn't see so much investment.