Geothermal is limited by the flux* of what you can pull from the ground, which sort of scales with capital costs.

Reducing the draw from the well at time X, leaves more available at time Y. In this way, the capital cost is reasonably preserved and your correction is offered.

--It's not exactly the same thing as flux ---I haven't verified the relative losses here of delaying utilizing the available heat, but rather am assuming the OP is correct about what I believe to be their point*

I still don’t follow.

If the geothermal plant isn’t ran at or near capacity all the time, the capex takes longer to recoup.

You can’t just, say, run it at 50% for a while, and then at 150% later, because a) ya typically can’t run plant at 150%, and for power generators ya can only run them at whatever you’re contracted to supply, so you’d typically want to run geothermal at capacity all the time.

This is true of anything that requires capital expenditure.

Drilling the well is the expensive part. It heats at a relatively constant rate depending on the geometry. You could size the plant to be exactly matched to the well output--but the generators and such are relatively cheap. So instead you make that part of the plant slightly oversized, so you can run at over the well's capacity when electricity is expensive, and under the capacity when it's cheap. The thermal mass of the rocks allows you to average this out over time.

So there are two capacities, that of the well and that of generation (oversized with respect to the well). On average this varying scheme utilizes the well at 100% of capacity (the expensive part to increase), and the turbine generation at less than 100% capacity (not expensive to oversize).

Like someone below said:

> They just let pressure build up higher than normal for 6-8 hours and then the turbine generates more power than normal until the pressure falls back to normal levels again.

So they can run at more than 100%.

You can run it at 400% by building more generators and heat pumps. They aren't the expensive bit.

The expensive bit is drilling and that gives you roughly X heat per month. You can use that at a constant rate or all in one week.

Everyone is overthinking this. They just let pressure build up higher than normal for 6-8 hours and then the turbine generates more power than normal until the pressure falls back to normal levels again. This would not take 50% and make it 100% again, but it does give you something.

Many turbine are running in extreme high pressure (for efficiency). There are no much margin for "build up higher than normal".

Of course we can build something less efficient to allow "pressure build up", but that's another trade off.

It's not pressure on the turbine that builds up, it's pressure at the well head.