It's possible to directly trigger small faults with while fracturing the rock, or to do something stupid like fracture into a freshwater zone other people are using, but that's not what's driving quakes in e.g. Oklahoma.
> “What we intend to do is go to existing power plants—it could be a coal power plant, it could be a gas power plant, any of the thousands of fossil-fired power plants that exists in the United States and around the world—and we will propose to them to create a small geothermal field around them, which is matched to the turbine specification of the power plant. What comes out of the ground is steam that feeds into the turbine, and the rest is what they’ve always done. The turbine creates electricity. The plant is already connected to the grid,”
https://www.powermag.com/a-game-changing-vision-for-geotherm...
Could just be marketing fluff; I'm not an expert here. But don't coal plants exclusively use steam turbines?
Edit: Seems that lots of energy in the US comes from steam turbines: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/how-electric....
Of course, it all depends on how expensive the drilling process is vs. the existing capital asset in the turbines, but maybe you could hit a price point where the repurposed geothermal plant is way cheaper than new solar / gas builds in the 2030s? This would be a transitional tailwind, just when we need it. Down the road, these plants would become more expensive because you'd also need to build new turbines/transmission lines. And at that time maybe solar or fusion is a cheaper solution (or not, who knows). But this could really help with the transition away from fossil fuels, if it was delivered next decade or two.
A question - does deep drilling like this have any downsides, as fracking does? I'm guessing it's less bad since you're not pushing pressurized fluid into the bedrock, instead you're just making a pipe that contains the water.