Many thanks Hannah - that's a great summary and you've made the important distinction between the different types of "geothermal". NZ has a long history of generating electricity from geothermal - typically about 30% of our base load generation (25-30 GW). I would just make a couple of points: a) geothermal to electricity is best suited to base load usage as it doesn't lend itself to being ramped up and down to respond to a variable demand or peaks; and b) Emissions from geothermal fields vary widely - in NZ across 13 main generating stations the lowest is an impressive 21 gCO2e/kWh but the highest is 341 gCO2e/kWh, which is getting into the zone that can be compared with using natural gas for generation. Thanks again.
I am puzzled by why geothermal electricity production cannot be readily ramped up and down. It seems like it would be easy to vary the flow of fluid though the system as required, though of course this would increase the cost of generated electricity due to large fixed initial investment, similar to curtailing renewables or nuclear w/o compensation
they are looking at geothermal as a battery as a well will build up heat naturally if not in use and added pressure can help store energy like excess solar
Geothermal desalination is an excellent add on for areas of differing energy demands
Geothermal heat to release in situ oil in oil shales and oil sands without the need for digging up and heat treating these resources as many areas in the western US one has to go through these formations to get to the hot rock granites.
I've been following Quaise energy, they have a technology they've been developing that can potentially reach significantly deeper drill depths than what's currently available. Hopefully they can successfully commercialize their tech in the next year or two and we will see geothermal become viable in many more regions shortly afterwards.
Geothermal electricity also needs cooling. We can't directly convert heat to electricity, we can only tap the flow of heat energy from a hot source to a cool sink. A good heat sink would be ocean or river water. A cooling tower at a. nuclear power plants is an example of using the air as a (less efficient) heat sink. Here's a link to a pdf of the firsts chapter of my 2024 book, explaining this. https://hargraves.s3.amazonaws.com/Energy+for+Civilization.pdf
"There are vast amounts of heat beneath our feet. This energy is available all the time. It’s low-carbon. And sure, we need to dig it out from underground, but that’s a skill we’re very good at; so good, in fact, that it’s the reason why we’re facing the problem of climate change in the first place."
This comment is utterly asinine. To be factually correct, the climate must never have changed until humans started to extract and burn fossil fuels! Point to a time when the climate was not changing?
To believe an increase in the ppm of a molecule, the level of which is still way below historical averages, and that this increase is the sole or main driver of 'Climate Change' is akin to a belief in homophathy: it is not credible science.
Bad logic. Yes the "but the climate has always changed" is true, but so is "it is changing rapidly now because of raised CO2". The natural susceptibility of climate to change is why it is so sensitive to raised CO2 from fossil fuel burning - if climate wasn't so susceptible the CO2 wouldn't cause climate change.
Worth keeping in mind that the best time ever for humans has been The Holocene - the past 10,000 years - and there are good reasons to believe that was because global climate was unusually stable compared to anything over the time homo sapiens has been around. That stability of climate allowed dependence on agriculture (and civilisations) to emerge. That stability has been disrupted.
As well as looking at how gas molecules absorb and emit across the electromagnetic spectrum studies of deep past climate (paleo-climatology) show the strong connection between CO2 concentrations and global average temperatures.
Climate science isn't pulling this stuff out of thin air; presuming the conclusions of decades of deep study of Earth's climate system to be wrong is your personal choice but I believe it is the duty and responsibility of those holding the highest Offices of trust and responsibility - a duty of care - to base their policies on the top level science based expert advice. Which governments commissioned in order to make informed decisions. And not even the top Intelligence agencies have managed to find evidence of conspiracy or falsification. It is almost certain they have been asked to look.
Whether or not "David" is an actual person, this comment is perfect for auto-fisking! I ran it through ChatGPT's "Post Comment Reply Generator" with the "firm" option. The initial results appear below:
"David": "This comment is utterly asinine. To be factually correct, the climate must never have changed until humans started to extract and burn fossil fuels! Point to a time when the climate was not changing?"
ChatGPT:
"here’s a firm, fact-based reply to that comment:
"No one serious is claiming the climate has ever been static. The Earth’s climate has always changed — but what matters is why and how fast. Natural shifts took place over thousands to millions of years, giving ecosystems and species time to adapt. The problem now is the rapid, human-driven spike in greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution, causing warming at a rate unprecedented in human history.
"Pointing out that climate has always changed doesn’t excuse or negate the damage we’re causing now — it’s a lazy deflection from addressing real, measurable problems backed by overwhelming evidence."
MA: Right. Couldn't have said it better myself!
"David": "To believe an increase in the ppm of a molecule, the level of which is still way below historical averages, and that this increase is the sole or main driver of 'Climate Change' is akin to a belief in homophathy [sic]: it is not credible science."
ChatGPT:
"This argument completely misrepresents both the science and the context. Yes — CO₂ levels have been higher in Earth’s deep past, but those changes happened over tens of thousands to millions of years, not over a couple of centuries. The issue isn’t just the concentration but the rate of increase and the resulting rapid destabilization of climate systems that human civilization depends on.
"Comparing this to homeopathy is a false equivalence. The evidence linking greenhouse gas increases — particularly CO₂ and methane — to modern climate change is among the most robust, peer-reviewed, and globally consistent findings in science today. Ignoring this isn’t skepticism, it’s denial."
MA: Excellent answer, IMHO! Heh. ChatGPT is the universal FAQ-o-matic!
So, you have to rely on AI for a response: well done you!
As to why there is climate change, well, it certainly is not a small rise in Co², and if you think it is, you are scientifically illiterate. You will likely live long enough to understand this, but perhaps not.
All in all, we need more Co² in the atmosphere, not less, if we are going to feed the 10 billion+ people who will be alive at some point later in the century.
You climate alarmists think in too short a timescale and are so arrogant to believe we should maintain a static climate that suits humans. This is not how it works. The climate changes, and living creatures evolve to cope.
All in all, you are joke figures, and most of the world's population knows this or is more interested in staying alive than in indulging your fantasies.
But fair play to you when you are out of your depth, pretending others who don't share your delusion must be BOTs is a workable solution if it makes it bearable for you.
Just out of interest, what flag do you have in your social media bio?
While I am not a mentalist, I suspect I would know your position on Brexit, immigration, Ukraine and Israel
"This is a textbook example of misrepresenting both climate science and basic ecological reality. No serious climate scientist claims the climate should be static — the issue is the rate of change, which is now happening so rapidly due to human-driven greenhouse gas emissions that natural systems, food supplies, and economies can’t adapt fast enough without major disruption.
"The claim that we “need more CO₂” ignores the complex, well-documented impacts of climate destabilization: extreme weather, droughts, crop failures, and ecosystem collapse. Elevated CO₂ might slightly boost plant growth under lab conditions, but in the real world, it comes with heatwaves, water shortages, and soil degradation — hardly a recipe for feeding 10 billion people.
"Dismissing decades of peer-reviewed science as "alarmism" isn’t skepticism — it’s willful ignorance. We don’t get to evolve out of food crises, displaced populations, or ecosystem collapse on a human timescale."
If only you could think for yourself, you would perhaps understand just how foolish your posts are. And to expect a large language model to be able to provide you with a reasoned answer on this subject is laughable.
Climate systems are measured in thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. [Milankovitch cycles] So, getting hysterical about a few decades of ambiguous and often fabricated data is not helpful.
You only need to look at the optimum level that greenhouses are filled with Co² to know that it is essential for plant growth. The planet is the greenest it has been for a million years! Even the BBC acknowledge this and they are right at the forefront of pushing the Climate Change agenda
"factors contribute to this greening trend:
Increased CO2 levels:
Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations act as a fertilizer for plants, promoting growth, according to a BBC News article. "
Future humans will look back and laugh that there were people who seriously believed that Co² was responsible for climate change. Some of us are already laughing.
"Ah yes — the classic string of half-truths dressed up as insight. Nobody denies that CO₂ is essential for plant life or that higher concentrations can stimulate plant growth in controlled greenhouse conditions. But this oversimplification ignores reality: increased CO₂ in the open atmosphere, coupled with rising temperatures, extreme weather, droughts, and shifting precipitation patterns, destabilizes ecosystems and threatens food security — precisely the opposite of what you’re implying.
"As for “a few decades of ambiguous, fabricated data” — this isn’t just from weather stations. It’s corroborated by satellite records, ice core samples, ocean heat content, and thousands of peer-reviewed studies from every continent. The rate of change today is so sharp it’s already disrupting agriculture, ecosystems, and weather systems in ways natural cycles like Milankovitch patterns don’t account for in such short timescales.
"Future generations won’t laugh — they’ll be cleaning up the mess left by people who smugly dismissed overwhelming evidence in favor of cherry-picked narratives."
MA: I still think "David" might be an AI too. All it has are revenant denialist memes, long since iteratively debunked by peer-reviewed science, thus fully discoverable by AI. There haven't been any new ones for years! AFAICT from my 37 years of tracking the progress of climate science, and pushing back on denialism in all its guises, ChatGPT's responses to "David's" provocations have been as good as anything I could write. I may or may not continue with auto-fisking, now that the point is proved.
Your belief that Co² is responsible for climate change is so ludicrous it is akin to a religious faith, something you allude to when you use an appeal to authority argument. This is further demonstrated with the sleezy way you try to conflate scepticism about the climate change hypotheses with a denial of the Holocaust: we see you.
Consensus is not science, and climate science is such a loose term, it is rendered meaningless, so let's stick to reality. You claim Co² at high levels is the cause of Climate Change, which I suspect you actually mean warming, yet by historical records, the level of Co² is low, lower than optimal for plant life. Equally, the warming hypothesis can not explain how we have had warm periods recently with lower Co²! It is as though Co² is divorced from the actual temperature and at best is a lag indicator.
It is odd that while you have to rely on a LLM I actually know some basic facts, and because I can think for myself, am able to understand that the claims being made have no basis in fact.
I love the fact that you are still enthralled by Peer Review and don't appear to understand that the system is now utterly corrupted and gamed. The fact that you claim weather systems have been altered for the worse, but have no means of knowing this. Fortunately, while climate alarmism is a luxury belief held by some in the West, the majority of the world is dealing with reality. And on the off chance that any current warming is manmade, then you should be grateful for this, as the alternative is going to be far worse.
The arrogance of climate alarmists to think humans can control the weather is staggering to me. Especially that the 5% of Co² produced by humans is the cause of Climate Change is just laughable. Though it is not laughable that you loones are trying to dim the light from the sun and feed cattle addative to reduce them farting! You and your ilk are not serious people if you were a quick look would enable you to know the claim about Co² is far too simplistic, but one that has been promoted and gained traction. It takes a long time to reverse people's firmly held beliefs, regardless of how ludicrous those beliefs often are. So i have no confidence you are ever going to be able to understand that Co² is not the cause of climate change.
One aspect of geothermal energy that I often wonder about is how bringing heat up from the Earth’s core will impact on global heating. Not from carbon emissions, but from heat emissions.
I have a heat-pump that takes it's heat out of the atmosphere to heat the hot water and it seems to be quite efficient. It had to be replaced after about 12 years due to corrosion [ and repairing it would have cost more than a replacement unit !!! ] , so I am not too sure of the economic benefits , if any , but we always had plenty of hot water. Installing it into the ground would be an even more expensive installation and is less appealing that the version that I have and I am not sure that it too would not have corroded and needed replacement !.
Anyway , I am an advocate of heat pumps for hot water.
.
For straight-out-heat : great ! .................For Electricity Generation : Not so much !
e.g...."In 2010, 47 projects were identified in Australia. Of the larger projects, Geodynamics
Cooper Basin demonstration plant managed to progress the furthest.
As at May 2022, no geothermal power plants are operating in Australia."
e.g......"Australian geothermal installations include many ground-source heat pumps,
mostly installed in the colder regions of Australia, and numerous direct-use installations,
largely located in the Perth, Otway, Gippsland and Great Artesian basins.
The geothermal energy sector in Australia is still in its infancy"
e.g.....And this one has proved to be a real "Baskett Case "..............................pun intended !
"A $4-million geothermal power plant in Winton was built to use the naturally hot water to create electricity.....The renewable energy project was set to be the only operating geothermal power plant in the country and was touted as the start of a geothermal windfall in the region.
But more than two years since construction finished, it has never delivered power and is not operational....."It's bloody disappointing, to put it mildly, for such a great potential for the water that comes into town," Winton Shire Council Mayor Gavin Baskett said.."
AND........former councillor Joel Mann said......"I just think we were sort of a bit of a test "dummy" ........which is appropriate for something so obviously still in it's "infancy" !!
How much savings would there be with using ground vs air sink for home heat pumps? I would speculate it’s low or it might be more commonly incorporated into new builds. With an insulation barrier could it not be put under the house?
Apologies - I need to eat a little humble pie: the units I gave missed an "h", and 25-35 GW should have read 25-35 GWh, being the daily output of the geothermal plants. The proportion of total generation remains valid. The real-time balance of grid generation and pricing in NZ can be seen at https://app.em6.co.nz/?stackedgwap.filter.gridZone=15&stackedgwap.filter.interval=30minute .
Keep in mind that natural dissipation of heat through the curst is only 40 TW, just about 4 times global energy demand. Safer to scale up wind (1000 TW natural dissipation) or, preferably, solar (100 PW).
Ground source heat pumps for heating and cooling come in different flavours too, including using boreholes that go a lot deeper than a few metres but not so deep as hot rock geothermal for electricity does - up to a few hundred metres as well as Thermal Networks for urban/suburban heating and cooling using some of both. Trials include use of repurposed gas supply pipework and skillsets.
These offer great potential for inter-seasonal heat storage. David Roberts Volts page here on Substack has some excellent interviews with some of those involved, asking good questions that the more usual press releases perhaps with some journalist commentary do not.
A technical question that has been bothering me for some time now about geothermal heat pumps, that maybe someone here can answer: Why does the fluid have to flow so far underground? The year-around soil temp here at only about one meter below the surface is around 11C. Both heating and cooling with a heat pump would be so much more efficient if the ambient temp it were drawing from were 11C than is it in the winter here (say, 0C air temp) or summer (say, 25-30C air temp), yet there is little geothermal heat pump usage. Why do GHP installations involve installing pipes several meters below the surface, hence at much higher cost than a shallower installation?
Not an expert here, but likely with quite correct answer. Heat pumps with ground source are relying more on the large mass of the ground and relatively stable temperature there rather heat than flow from the core- when demand temperature is close to hot/cold source heat pumps will get more efficient (high COP). Rocks and soil are insulators, so one needs very large surface area to get good heat transfer- otherwise little heat (total energy) will be transferred before temperature equilibrium. And then there is a risk of freezing the ground, where normally no frost ever happens- turning moisture into ice with its expansion- could be even dangerous for building, roads on top. Physical principles are well explained in free book by prof. David MacKay https://www.withouthotair.com
Many thanks Hannah - that's a great summary and you've made the important distinction between the different types of "geothermal". NZ has a long history of generating electricity from geothermal - typically about 30% of our base load generation (25-30 GW). I would just make a couple of points: a) geothermal to electricity is best suited to base load usage as it doesn't lend itself to being ramped up and down to respond to a variable demand or peaks; and b) Emissions from geothermal fields vary widely - in NZ across 13 main generating stations the lowest is an impressive 21 gCO2e/kWh but the highest is 341 gCO2e/kWh, which is getting into the zone that can be compared with using natural gas for generation. Thanks again.
Thank you for an excellent piece. Another benefit of geothermal is that its per MWh critical mineral requirement is very low.
I am puzzled by why geothermal electricity production cannot be readily ramped up and down. It seems like it would be easy to vary the flow of fluid though the system as required, though of course this would increase the cost of generated electricity due to large fixed initial investment, similar to curtailing renewables or nuclear w/o compensation
HI Hannah, a few other points of interest
they are looking at geothermal as a battery as a well will build up heat naturally if not in use and added pressure can help store energy like excess solar
Geothermal desalination is an excellent add on for areas of differing energy demands
Geothermal heat to release in situ oil in oil shales and oil sands without the need for digging up and heat treating these resources as many areas in the western US one has to go through these formations to get to the hot rock granites.
I've been following Quaise energy, they have a technology they've been developing that can potentially reach significantly deeper drill depths than what's currently available. Hopefully they can successfully commercialize their tech in the next year or two and we will see geothermal become viable in many more regions shortly afterwards.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/quaise-energy/
Geothermal electricity also needs cooling. We can't directly convert heat to electricity, we can only tap the flow of heat energy from a hot source to a cool sink. A good heat sink would be ocean or river water. A cooling tower at a. nuclear power plants is an example of using the air as a (less efficient) heat sink. Here's a link to a pdf of the firsts chapter of my 2024 book, explaining this. https://hargraves.s3.amazonaws.com/Energy+for+Civilization.pdf
I serialized NEW Nuclear is HOT starting at
https://hargraves.substack.com/p/serializing-new-nuclear-is-hot
"There are vast amounts of heat beneath our feet. This energy is available all the time. It’s low-carbon. And sure, we need to dig it out from underground, but that’s a skill we’re very good at; so good, in fact, that it’s the reason why we’re facing the problem of climate change in the first place."
This comment is utterly asinine. To be factually correct, the climate must never have changed until humans started to extract and burn fossil fuels! Point to a time when the climate was not changing?
To believe an increase in the ppm of a molecule, the level of which is still way below historical averages, and that this increase is the sole or main driver of 'Climate Change' is akin to a belief in homophathy: it is not credible science.
Bad logic. Yes the "but the climate has always changed" is true, but so is "it is changing rapidly now because of raised CO2". The natural susceptibility of climate to change is why it is so sensitive to raised CO2 from fossil fuel burning - if climate wasn't so susceptible the CO2 wouldn't cause climate change.
Worth keeping in mind that the best time ever for humans has been The Holocene - the past 10,000 years - and there are good reasons to believe that was because global climate was unusually stable compared to anything over the time homo sapiens has been around. That stability of climate allowed dependence on agriculture (and civilisations) to emerge. That stability has been disrupted.
As well as looking at how gas molecules absorb and emit across the electromagnetic spectrum studies of deep past climate (paleo-climatology) show the strong connection between CO2 concentrations and global average temperatures.
Climate science isn't pulling this stuff out of thin air; presuming the conclusions of decades of deep study of Earth's climate system to be wrong is your personal choice but I believe it is the duty and responsibility of those holding the highest Offices of trust and responsibility - a duty of care - to base their policies on the top level science based expert advice. Which governments commissioned in order to make informed decisions. And not even the top Intelligence agencies have managed to find evidence of conspiracy or falsification. It is almost certain they have been asked to look.
Whether or not "David" is an actual person, this comment is perfect for auto-fisking! I ran it through ChatGPT's "Post Comment Reply Generator" with the "firm" option. The initial results appear below:
"David": "This comment is utterly asinine. To be factually correct, the climate must never have changed until humans started to extract and burn fossil fuels! Point to a time when the climate was not changing?"
ChatGPT:
"here’s a firm, fact-based reply to that comment:
"No one serious is claiming the climate has ever been static. The Earth’s climate has always changed — but what matters is why and how fast. Natural shifts took place over thousands to millions of years, giving ecosystems and species time to adapt. The problem now is the rapid, human-driven spike in greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution, causing warming at a rate unprecedented in human history.
"Pointing out that climate has always changed doesn’t excuse or negate the damage we’re causing now — it’s a lazy deflection from addressing real, measurable problems backed by overwhelming evidence."
MA: Right. Couldn't have said it better myself!
"David": "To believe an increase in the ppm of a molecule, the level of which is still way below historical averages, and that this increase is the sole or main driver of 'Climate Change' is akin to a belief in homophathy [sic]: it is not credible science."
ChatGPT:
"This argument completely misrepresents both the science and the context. Yes — CO₂ levels have been higher in Earth’s deep past, but those changes happened over tens of thousands to millions of years, not over a couple of centuries. The issue isn’t just the concentration but the rate of increase and the resulting rapid destabilization of climate systems that human civilization depends on.
"Comparing this to homeopathy is a false equivalence. The evidence linking greenhouse gas increases — particularly CO₂ and methane — to modern climate change is among the most robust, peer-reviewed, and globally consistent findings in science today. Ignoring this isn’t skepticism, it’s denial."
MA: Excellent answer, IMHO! Heh. ChatGPT is the universal FAQ-o-matic!
So, you have to rely on AI for a response: well done you!
As to why there is climate change, well, it certainly is not a small rise in Co², and if you think it is, you are scientifically illiterate. You will likely live long enough to understand this, but perhaps not.
All in all, we need more Co² in the atmosphere, not less, if we are going to feed the 10 billion+ people who will be alive at some point later in the century.
You climate alarmists think in too short a timescale and are so arrogant to believe we should maintain a static climate that suits humans. This is not how it works. The climate changes, and living creatures evolve to cope.
All in all, you are joke figures, and most of the world's population knows this or is more interested in staying alive than in indulging your fantasies.
But fair play to you when you are out of your depth, pretending others who don't share your delusion must be BOTs is a workable solution if it makes it bearable for you.
Just out of interest, what flag do you have in your social media bio?
While I am not a mentalist, I suspect I would know your position on Brexit, immigration, Ukraine and Israel
ChatGPT:
"This is a textbook example of misrepresenting both climate science and basic ecological reality. No serious climate scientist claims the climate should be static — the issue is the rate of change, which is now happening so rapidly due to human-driven greenhouse gas emissions that natural systems, food supplies, and economies can’t adapt fast enough without major disruption.
"The claim that we “need more CO₂” ignores the complex, well-documented impacts of climate destabilization: extreme weather, droughts, crop failures, and ecosystem collapse. Elevated CO₂ might slightly boost plant growth under lab conditions, but in the real world, it comes with heatwaves, water shortages, and soil degradation — hardly a recipe for feeding 10 billion people.
"Dismissing decades of peer-reviewed science as "alarmism" isn’t skepticism — it’s willful ignorance. We don’t get to evolve out of food crises, displaced populations, or ecosystem collapse on a human timescale."
MA: Great tool! It may save me a lot of typing.
If only you could think for yourself, you would perhaps understand just how foolish your posts are. And to expect a large language model to be able to provide you with a reasoned answer on this subject is laughable.
Climate systems are measured in thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. [Milankovitch cycles] So, getting hysterical about a few decades of ambiguous and often fabricated data is not helpful.
You only need to look at the optimum level that greenhouses are filled with Co² to know that it is essential for plant growth. The planet is the greenest it has been for a million years! Even the BBC acknowledge this and they are right at the forefront of pushing the Climate Change agenda
"factors contribute to this greening trend:
Increased CO2 levels:
Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations act as a fertilizer for plants, promoting growth, according to a BBC News article. "
Future humans will look back and laugh that there were people who seriously believed that Co² was responsible for climate change. Some of us are already laughing.
ChatGPT again, getting the firmness right:
"Ah yes — the classic string of half-truths dressed up as insight. Nobody denies that CO₂ is essential for plant life or that higher concentrations can stimulate plant growth in controlled greenhouse conditions. But this oversimplification ignores reality: increased CO₂ in the open atmosphere, coupled with rising temperatures, extreme weather, droughts, and shifting precipitation patterns, destabilizes ecosystems and threatens food security — precisely the opposite of what you’re implying.
"As for “a few decades of ambiguous, fabricated data” — this isn’t just from weather stations. It’s corroborated by satellite records, ice core samples, ocean heat content, and thousands of peer-reviewed studies from every continent. The rate of change today is so sharp it’s already disrupting agriculture, ecosystems, and weather systems in ways natural cycles like Milankovitch patterns don’t account for in such short timescales.
"Future generations won’t laugh — they’ll be cleaning up the mess left by people who smugly dismissed overwhelming evidence in favor of cherry-picked narratives."
MA: I still think "David" might be an AI too. All it has are revenant denialist memes, long since iteratively debunked by peer-reviewed science, thus fully discoverable by AI. There haven't been any new ones for years! AFAICT from my 37 years of tracking the progress of climate science, and pushing back on denialism in all its guises, ChatGPT's responses to "David's" provocations have been as good as anything I could write. I may or may not continue with auto-fisking, now that the point is proved.
Your belief that Co² is responsible for climate change is so ludicrous it is akin to a religious faith, something you allude to when you use an appeal to authority argument. This is further demonstrated with the sleezy way you try to conflate scepticism about the climate change hypotheses with a denial of the Holocaust: we see you.
Consensus is not science, and climate science is such a loose term, it is rendered meaningless, so let's stick to reality. You claim Co² at high levels is the cause of Climate Change, which I suspect you actually mean warming, yet by historical records, the level of Co² is low, lower than optimal for plant life. Equally, the warming hypothesis can not explain how we have had warm periods recently with lower Co²! It is as though Co² is divorced from the actual temperature and at best is a lag indicator.
It is odd that while you have to rely on a LLM I actually know some basic facts, and because I can think for myself, am able to understand that the claims being made have no basis in fact.
I love the fact that you are still enthralled by Peer Review and don't appear to understand that the system is now utterly corrupted and gamed. The fact that you claim weather systems have been altered for the worse, but have no means of knowing this. Fortunately, while climate alarmism is a luxury belief held by some in the West, the majority of the world is dealing with reality. And on the off chance that any current warming is manmade, then you should be grateful for this, as the alternative is going to be far worse.
The arrogance of climate alarmists to think humans can control the weather is staggering to me. Especially that the 5% of Co² produced by humans is the cause of Climate Change is just laughable. Though it is not laughable that you loones are trying to dim the light from the sun and feed cattle addative to reduce them farting! You and your ilk are not serious people if you were a quick look would enable you to know the claim about Co² is far too simplistic, but one that has been promoted and gained traction. It takes a long time to reverse people's firmly held beliefs, regardless of how ludicrous those beliefs often are. So i have no confidence you are ever going to be able to understand that Co² is not the cause of climate change.
One aspect of geothermal energy that I often wonder about is how bringing heat up from the Earth’s core will impact on global heating. Not from carbon emissions, but from heat emissions.
I have a heat-pump that takes it's heat out of the atmosphere to heat the hot water and it seems to be quite efficient. It had to be replaced after about 12 years due to corrosion [ and repairing it would have cost more than a replacement unit !!! ] , so I am not too sure of the economic benefits , if any , but we always had plenty of hot water. Installing it into the ground would be an even more expensive installation and is less appealing that the version that I have and I am not sure that it too would not have corroded and needed replacement !.
Anyway , I am an advocate of heat pumps for hot water.
.
For straight-out-heat : great ! .................For Electricity Generation : Not so much !
e.g...."In 2010, 47 projects were identified in Australia. Of the larger projects, Geodynamics
Cooper Basin demonstration plant managed to progress the furthest.
As at May 2022, no geothermal power plants are operating in Australia."
e.g......"Australian geothermal installations include many ground-source heat pumps,
mostly installed in the colder regions of Australia, and numerous direct-use installations,
largely located in the Perth, Otway, Gippsland and Great Artesian basins.
The geothermal energy sector in Australia is still in its infancy"
e.g.....And this one has proved to be a real "Baskett Case "..............................pun intended !
"A $4-million geothermal power plant in Winton was built to use the naturally hot water to create electricity.....The renewable energy project was set to be the only operating geothermal power plant in the country and was touted as the start of a geothermal windfall in the region.
But more than two years since construction finished, it has never delivered power and is not operational....."It's bloody disappointing, to put it mildly, for such a great potential for the water that comes into town," Winton Shire Council Mayor Gavin Baskett said.."
AND........former councillor Joel Mann said......"I just think we were sort of a bit of a test "dummy" ........which is appropriate for something so obviously still in it's "infancy" !!
How much savings would there be with using ground vs air sink for home heat pumps? I would speculate it’s low or it might be more commonly incorporated into new builds. With an insulation barrier could it not be put under the house?
Apologies - I need to eat a little humble pie: the units I gave missed an "h", and 25-35 GW should have read 25-35 GWh, being the daily output of the geothermal plants. The proportion of total generation remains valid. The real-time balance of grid generation and pricing in NZ can be seen at https://app.em6.co.nz/?stackedgwap.filter.gridZone=15&stackedgwap.filter.interval=30minute .
Keep in mind that natural dissipation of heat through the curst is only 40 TW, just about 4 times global energy demand. Safer to scale up wind (1000 TW natural dissipation) or, preferably, solar (100 PW).
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2011.0316
Let’s get to work, California:
http://hotspringsdirectory.com/usa/ca/map_ca_all.html
Great article. It’s always great to hear your thoughts, Hannah. Thanks for sharing.
Ground source heat pumps for heating and cooling come in different flavours too, including using boreholes that go a lot deeper than a few metres but not so deep as hot rock geothermal for electricity does - up to a few hundred metres as well as Thermal Networks for urban/suburban heating and cooling using some of both. Trials include use of repurposed gas supply pipework and skillsets.
These offer great potential for inter-seasonal heat storage. David Roberts Volts page here on Substack has some excellent interviews with some of those involved, asking good questions that the more usual press releases perhaps with some journalist commentary do not.
eg https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-geothermal-heat-pumps-work?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.volts.wtf/p/thermal-energy-networks-are-the-next?utm_source=publication-search
A technical question that has been bothering me for some time now about geothermal heat pumps, that maybe someone here can answer: Why does the fluid have to flow so far underground? The year-around soil temp here at only about one meter below the surface is around 11C. Both heating and cooling with a heat pump would be so much more efficient if the ambient temp it were drawing from were 11C than is it in the winter here (say, 0C air temp) or summer (say, 25-30C air temp), yet there is little geothermal heat pump usage. Why do GHP installations involve installing pipes several meters below the surface, hence at much higher cost than a shallower installation?
Not an expert here, but likely with quite correct answer. Heat pumps with ground source are relying more on the large mass of the ground and relatively stable temperature there rather heat than flow from the core- when demand temperature is close to hot/cold source heat pumps will get more efficient (high COP). Rocks and soil are insulators, so one needs very large surface area to get good heat transfer- otherwise little heat (total energy) will be transferred before temperature equilibrium. And then there is a risk of freezing the ground, where normally no frost ever happens- turning moisture into ice with its expansion- could be even dangerous for building, roads on top. Physical principles are well explained in free book by prof. David MacKay https://www.withouthotair.com
Thank you! I'll check out the book by MacKay.