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A comment on Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet. Parent comment

Re:Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet by caminante on Sunday March 02, 2025 @06:14PM (#43236315)
Sure. Exposing these situational constraints and free benefits (third-party sunk costs) aligns with my stance.

I don't agree with the above comment:

> Fervo isn't just trying, they are succeeding

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Re:Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet by micro2588 on Sunday March 02, 2025 @06:37PM (#43236506)
I think as a tech demonstration project it was successful because they were a bit conservative in some ways that will make the economics look worse. I agree it's far from "geothermal everywhere" which seems to be the hype. You can't extrapolate that from one successful EGS well literally right next to an existing geothermal power plant.
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Re:Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet by caminante on Sunday March 02, 2025 @06:51PM (#43236621)
> they were a bit conservative in some ways that will make the economics look worse

Or they simply ran into headwinds on a speculative project. I'll "take the under" when your PR is cagey about basic project attributes.

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Re:Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet by micro2588 on Sunday March 02, 2025 @07:23PM (#43236865)
They do a good job of publishing their results in technical industry publications (advancing the field overall in a surprisingly open way) but I agree can be misleading in their marketing.

It will be interesting to see the results of the Cape project once they do multi-well laterals from a single pad power plant with larger diameter wells. That is really more a demonstration of power plant economics beyond the technical feasibility of creating a horizontally fracked reservoir that can be operated for a year.

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Re:Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet by caminante on Sunday March 02, 2025 @09:08PM (#43237551)
Ah!

Cape Station does look much more significant. [0] 400MW of power plant capacity with 2028 COD and mostly contracted with SoCal Edison? Good job.

[0] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/cape-station-enhanced-geoth...

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