Re:You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill dee...
by alex_smart on Saturday February 26, 2022 @07:23AM
(#30477002)
I think one relevant question is: how does that amount of energy compare to the energy that the earth is bombarded with by the sun anyways? If it is miniscule (say less than 1%) in comparison, will that have a significant impact on global warming?
https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026
>A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use.
So even if we get all of our current energy needs from these sources, that is less than 0.01% of the energy earth gets from the sun. Is that going to have a significant effect on the temperature of the earth?
Reminder: few energy sources do not add heating to the atmosphere during the whole energy lifecycle!
It's the ones that *subtract* energy from the environment in the first place: solar, wind, dams, tidal energy.
Other sources (including geothermal, nuclear, oil ...), even if we could produce a 100% efficient power plant, are still extracting energy that would otherwise stayed "locked-in" somewhere.
Keep in mind that virtually all electrical energy produced turns into heat released in the atmosphere.