Re:Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet
by kragen on Monday March 03, 2025 @12:53PM
(#43244606)
We can do a pretty good job of predicting solar and wind production; that's done routinely. What's harder is predicting how load will change when electric energy is nearly free in most daytimes and expensive on calm nights.
Re:Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet
by Paradigma11 on Monday March 03, 2025 @01:19PM
(#43244903)
That does not matter. You can only postpone washing your clothes for so long and heating in northern winters is non optional. The problem are things like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
Extreme weather events are what is important and we do have the data.
Re:Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet
by kragen on Monday March 03, 2025 @04:42PM
(#43247175)
Heating in particular is an especially easy problem to solve; various kinds of thermal energy storage (sensible-heat, phase-change, TCES) can store heat for later climate-control purposes several orders of magnitude more cheaply than batteries. Washing your clothes is a harder problem, although a stockpile of clean clothes is easily stored.
Predicting how willing Swedes will be 10 years from now to buy extra jeans and install phase-change energy storage in their houses, however, that's beyond anybody's ability.
For example this solution would be sufficient and have no blackouts/brownouts per year in 99% of historical data....