With regard to the voting populace, when I think about my high school classmates who blame Biden for any increase in gas taxes but who just might finally think Trump is too evil to be President, I wonder where the most electoral votes could ultimately be gained in the event he gets the GOP nomination: from the dogmatic and naive young progressives or from a possible tide of "ABT" GOP voters.
There's an opportunity to educate conservatives about the complexity of energy policy and how Biden might just be "on their side." This could coincide nicely with a conservative backlash on the "A" word: "wait a minute: we didn't really mean that our daughters, mistresses and wives (or our own selves) should be banned taking care of problems in the first trimester".
If only Fox would go up against a second Trump term or take a more neutral doubtful stance: then Biden could feed targeted messages to Fox that the progressive youngsters would never see...
I've been finding, lately, that my estimates of what technologies are worth investing in are starting to change. We bypassed a lot of opportunities that would have made the energy transition so much easier, but that doesn't mean the opportunities all still make sense. If we had invested more heavily in nuclear continuing into the 80s and 90s, and in natural gas and geothermal in the 1990s-2000s, our lower carbon intensity for electricity production would make electrifying cars, producing hydrogen, and synthesizing e-fuels look even better today. But at the point, solar power (without storage) has been the cheapest energy globally for years, and not by a small margin. Large-scale storage on the 4-16 hour scale with various existing batteries is getting fairly close to (or sometimes beating) capex parity compared to some natural gas peaker plants in pilot and demonstration projects. I'm still hopeful about nuclear SMRs for always-on power and remote installations, and of course I'd rather see people drilling for geothermal than oil and gas. But overall, I don't see it scaling very far before it becomes economically unnecessary.
While I like today's post, and agree with the premise, I think it's important to note the fundamental limits of geothermal. The total geothermal energy that even theoretically exists is tiny compared to the theoretical limits that exist for fossil fuels, solar, wind, or nuclear. It is about 1/10th wind power, and 1/1000th of either solar or fossil fuels. (nuclear is a bit more complicated)
All of this is to say that while we should certainly take advantage of geothermal power where it is feasible, we should not be looking to geothermal as a long-term answer. The future is clearly in solar and wind and (hopefully) nuclear fusion. Carbon capture might even play a big role. But geothermal will likely forever be limited to the few places where the geology for it makes sense. Digging 40 mile holes all over the world does not scale the same way that putting solar panels on every building does.
EGS has the potential to really help deal with heating season. The big downside to Geothermal is that due to the low temperatures the efficiency of conversion to power is terrible. This means a lot of thermal capacity per MW of electrical production, but just as big and expensive of turbines as higher efficiency thermal processes.
Use the heat for local district heating systems - start with institutional users, then new build neighborhoods etc. and now the big disadvantages vanish, and the cost is not so dear that using it at 30-50% capacity over a year still is not worthwhile.
The well does not need to be sized for peak capacity, and per Jesse Jenkins et al, there is a lot of potential to effectively store capacity for up to a week. With no real above ground equipment (just a condenser and injection pump) the cost of that oversized peak is negligible relative to the cost of drilling. District heating does not loose performance in the coldest days, unlike air sourced heat pumps, and if sized to cover demand up to the point heat pumps start to tail off, using supplemental fuel to boost the DH capacity in the coldest days will actually use less fuel than burning fuel to make electricity to run the resistive elements in heat pumps, with much simpler and lower capitol cost equipment as well. (Just a regular commercial scale boiler/hot water heater)
We still need other firm winter capacity to cover all the widespread existing housing stock that is easier to convert to heat pumps, but this could take the worst of the edge off.
My understanding from David Roberts' interview on EGS with Wilson Ricks (https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-extraordinary-potential-value#details) is that EGS costs would have to come down about 90% in order to be competitive with other renewable sources, although it's so far from being commercial that actual industrial cost estimates are pretty much guesswork.
And given that a lot of the technology is pretty mature (it's basically fracking), it's hard to see this kind of solar energy-type learning curve.
Bottom line is that EGS might not be competitive as a baseload electricity source but could be an excellent replacement for natural gas in providing dispatchable electricity, to cover peaks in demand and other times when solar/wind/etc aren't available.
Alas, for the most part, physics says no. It has nothing to do with drilling technology even presuming we could ever drill to such depths. It has everything to do with the thermodynamics of solids and pesky unalterable things like thermal conductivity and thermal gradients.
Rock is an excellent insulator. This is a good thing because if it wasn't the surface of this planet would still be molten and life would be somewhat harder. Your diagram for EGS is telling. Are you tapping into virtually unlimited energy? Why no, you are not. You are cooling rock. If you are extracting heat then what you are producing is an ever expanding mass of cooled rock. From which you very shortly will be able to extract no heat at all. Since this rock is an excellent insulator you will be waiting a very long time before the rock reheats to the point where you can extract more heat. And the only way this works is if you have a very large mass of very hot, near molten, to reheat your cooled rock.
This is why we make boilers for thermal generation out of metals which have high thermal conductivity and thin walled boiler tubes at that. It's all about heat transfer. In essence Geothermal can be made to work only where a high heat gradient exists, very hot rock, that can be used to establish a more or less steady state with the heat being extracted. Like Iceland. There are very few such places in the world. By all means, use them.
When it comes to deep drilling that could possibly expand the number of areas where high thermal gradients could be found. But I doubt it would do so by much. As regards drilling technology I would observe that drill bits are the least of your problems. (Diamond drills have been around longer than I have been alive and I am old.) The deeper you go the higher the pressure. That applies to the l column. of drilling fluid. Currently your average frack pump runs about 10 kpsi. But you can buy pumps capable of 20 kpsi. No technology exists, including pumps and well casing that could possible withstand the pressures required to frack at the depths proposed. No hoses. No piping. I can't even imagine what the well casing that needs to be pressurized would look like.
I see no problem with exploring the possibilities but I wouldn't be too sanguine about spectacular results.
Thanks, I have been wondering about rate at which geothermal heat is replenished versus the rate at which it would be extracted in such a system ever since learning about the London Central Line's problem with "imported" heat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling
Learning by doing works great when the number of experiments can be scaled up without being burdened with humongous cost per experiment. Unfortunately, we have massive Bureaucratic Barriers to Backpropagation, that are invested in the process rather than define clearly measurable outcome oriented tolerance levels (siesmic activity, pollutants allowed, etc.)
Boise brag time: it's had a geothermal system in and near its downtown that dates back over a century. It's been aggressive in expanding it in recent decades, particularly to the campus of Boise State. I'm all for anything that'll make it easier to harness this form of energy.
One winter I stayed at the Breitenbush hot springs - you could soak of course, (you could even "take the waters" since it was developed in the early 20th c) but it was really cool that little cabins also steam-heated thermally via radiators.
Seems like out-of-date regulations, developed a hundred years ago and completely corrupted by special interests, are the source of all of our problems. Just saying. Seems like we should just start over on many of them and put in new ones with expiration dates.
If we can drill deep enough (20km+), location truly does become “anywhere on the planet”, including right under existing coal and natural gas plants. Which means the energy production and delivery infrastructure is already nearly 100% in place. This should mean there would be fewer permitting barriers in those cases. It also means we could “drop in” nearly carbon neutral replacements for all current energy production.
Also, if we drill deep enough, we don’t have to do fracturing, we can have a “two pipe” system down a single borehole, likely eliminating any earthquake risk.
The key is developing the advanced “drilling” techniques to get to those depths. This will likely not be actual drill bits, but rather directed energy. I am personally excited by MIT spinoff Quaise Energy’s (https://www.quaise.energy) millimeter wave drilling. If it works out, this could be the geothermal energy advancement that actually had a chance of getting us close t carbon neutral by 2050.
I really, really, don't know much at all about geology and thermal. So here's my chance to ask a really stupid question:
Would tapping into thermal on a massive scale (as much as we use oil or coal today) have any impact on other aspects of Earth's geology? If we used that much energy could it have any impact on earthquakes, vulcanism, the earth's magnetic sphere or its surface temperature? Or are the scales of those processes a million times greater than the energy we could withdraw?
Geologist here. The scales of those processes you mention are globally much bigger than what we can withdraw.
However, if we drill into shallow, cold rock for geothermal power we can very quickly drawdown what heat is there locally and then make the area unusable for geothermal power. Most of the earth has cold rock at shallow depths, which means that all geothermal power up till now comes from volcanic areas with a magma body at shallow depths (Iceland, Clear Lake CA, Nevada, etc).
Cold pretty much means below the boiling point of water. This is important for geothermal purposes because the boiling point of water changes with pressure, and water is also compressible, so if it expands from pressure loss coming back to the surface it can lose heat.
Here is a map of continental US surface heat flow from underground (units in milliwatts per square meter):
(For context, the deepest oil well ever drilled in the continental US is a 9.5 km well in Oklahoma).
Recharge timescales for hydrothermal systems is hundreds to thousands of years. For hot, dry rock it is hundreds of thousands of years, and for cold, dry rock it is even longer.
It seems that at a depth of4.5-5.5km, most of the continent is above your definition of ‘cold’. How quickly would one exhaust the useful energy transfer at 100-125 C?
The problem is at the pressures at 5 km depth the boiling point of water is greater than 300 C. It is a problem because steam is needed to run generators. All we would be returning from 5 km depth across much of the country is mostly hot water, not steam.
It's pretty hard to extract useful mechanical energy (and thus spin a generator) from heat sources at these temperatures.
The following paper suggests that current Rankine cycle turbines (a special type of heat engine using low boiling point liquids to maximise efficiency for this type of low-grade heat) have a thermal efficiency of about 6% when using heat sources at ~100C.
Those kind of margins also mean that your power production is going to take a huge hit on a hot day.
The thermal conductivity of dry, non-porous granite is ~3 W/mK and the thermal diffusivity is ~10^-6 m^2/s. So, if my math is correct, it would take ~200 years for that 1 cubic meter of granite to be heated from 100 C to 200 C via only heat conduction in a low heat flow setting, ignoring fluid flow and radiogenic heat production.
Yes on permitting reform. But let's be careful about all those pipelines and power lines - people don't like having them on their land when they are forced to accept them by eminent domain (a frequent "reform" that wind and solar advocates propose). Utilities' use of eminent domain - whether for a gas pipeline or a renewable-serving high tension line - is very often a huge negative for rural landowners in particular. One example from personal experience: my wife's family's ranch in western Texas had an easement taken via eminent domain by LCRA (a public utility whose fame when I was in law school in the 1980s was for strip mining and burning lignite - a low grade coal - in a particularly environmentally destructive way but which has now embraced wind power in the Texas Panhandle and so needed power lines to get the energy from there to Austin). LCRA took the easement by eminent domain, and have proved to be - as we feared - dreadful cotenants of the land with us. Florida Power and Light, which doesn't have eminent domain power in Texas, build a power line parallel to LCRA's through voluntary purchases and, among other things, paid the landowners involved multiple times what LCRA paid. Plus the FPL easement's non-monetary terms are much better for the landowners. (If anyone is interested more details on this point, I cowrote an article about the problem of being an "involuntary cotenant" with our lawyers which you can find here - https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/157/ ). I also highly recommend Robert Bryce's PowerHungry podcast (https://robertbryce.com/power-hungry-podcast/ ) and books and writings generally on energy - he knows a lot and writes clearly. Plus he's got great photos of birds (he's a birdwatcher) on his blog.
I do feel compelled to point out that I have near certainty that this LCRA eminent domain line was taken under state law, using state procedures. So, to the extent it’s a general worry about eminent domain as a concept sure, but it didn’t use Federal authorities so the ire there should be directed at state government/ERCOT.
And, yes, rural people don’t like eminent domain and things going across their land. In many ways, that’s the problem we’re trying to solve - how to get power to dense places, which necessarily involves bringing power there somehow, whether via pipeline, power line, or rail/road.
Yes, state law was used - thanks for the clarification. That's where most of the eminent domain action is. The Feds do some limited eminent domain as well and renewable advocates are trying to expand that authority in the name of permitting reform to speed things up. The FPL example shows it is possible to site power lines - in this case from the same point A to the same point B - without eminent domain and with greater respect for the land and landowners' rights.
The European Commission thinks that US fracking costs per unit of energy decreased by roughly 25% in the five years beginning in 2012. However, regional variations were huge, costs increased slightly in some fields and decreased massively in others.
With regard to the voting populace, when I think about my high school classmates who blame Biden for any increase in gas taxes but who just might finally think Trump is too evil to be President, I wonder where the most electoral votes could ultimately be gained in the event he gets the GOP nomination: from the dogmatic and naive young progressives or from a possible tide of "ABT" GOP voters.
There's an opportunity to educate conservatives about the complexity of energy policy and how Biden might just be "on their side." This could coincide nicely with a conservative backlash on the "A" word: "wait a minute: we didn't really mean that our daughters, mistresses and wives (or our own selves) should be banned taking care of problems in the first trimester".
If only Fox would go up against a second Trump term or take a more neutral doubtful stance: then Biden could feed targeted messages to Fox that the progressive youngsters would never see...
I've been finding, lately, that my estimates of what technologies are worth investing in are starting to change. We bypassed a lot of opportunities that would have made the energy transition so much easier, but that doesn't mean the opportunities all still make sense. If we had invested more heavily in nuclear continuing into the 80s and 90s, and in natural gas and geothermal in the 1990s-2000s, our lower carbon intensity for electricity production would make electrifying cars, producing hydrogen, and synthesizing e-fuels look even better today. But at the point, solar power (without storage) has been the cheapest energy globally for years, and not by a small margin. Large-scale storage on the 4-16 hour scale with various existing batteries is getting fairly close to (or sometimes beating) capex parity compared to some natural gas peaker plants in pilot and demonstration projects. I'm still hopeful about nuclear SMRs for always-on power and remote installations, and of course I'd rather see people drilling for geothermal than oil and gas. But overall, I don't see it scaling very far before it becomes economically unnecessary.
Austin Vernon's blog has some interesting articles looking into the cost effectiveness of different approaches to geothermal:
https://austinvernon.site/blog/geothermal.html
https://austinvernon.site/blog/drillingplan.html
https://austinvernon.site/blog/geothermalnextsteps.html
While I like today's post, and agree with the premise, I think it's important to note the fundamental limits of geothermal. The total geothermal energy that even theoretically exists is tiny compared to the theoretical limits that exist for fossil fuels, solar, wind, or nuclear. It is about 1/10th wind power, and 1/1000th of either solar or fossil fuels. (nuclear is a bit more complicated)
All of this is to say that while we should certainly take advantage of geothermal power where it is feasible, we should not be looking to geothermal as a long-term answer. The future is clearly in solar and wind and (hopefully) nuclear fusion. Carbon capture might even play a big role. But geothermal will likely forever be limited to the few places where the geology for it makes sense. Digging 40 mile holes all over the world does not scale the same way that putting solar panels on every building does.
EGS has the potential to really help deal with heating season. The big downside to Geothermal is that due to the low temperatures the efficiency of conversion to power is terrible. This means a lot of thermal capacity per MW of electrical production, but just as big and expensive of turbines as higher efficiency thermal processes.
Use the heat for local district heating systems - start with institutional users, then new build neighborhoods etc. and now the big disadvantages vanish, and the cost is not so dear that using it at 30-50% capacity over a year still is not worthwhile.
The well does not need to be sized for peak capacity, and per Jesse Jenkins et al, there is a lot of potential to effectively store capacity for up to a week. With no real above ground equipment (just a condenser and injection pump) the cost of that oversized peak is negligible relative to the cost of drilling. District heating does not loose performance in the coldest days, unlike air sourced heat pumps, and if sized to cover demand up to the point heat pumps start to tail off, using supplemental fuel to boost the DH capacity in the coldest days will actually use less fuel than burning fuel to make electricity to run the resistive elements in heat pumps, with much simpler and lower capitol cost equipment as well. (Just a regular commercial scale boiler/hot water heater)
We still need other firm winter capacity to cover all the widespread existing housing stock that is easier to convert to heat pumps, but this could take the worst of the edge off.
My understanding from David Roberts' interview on EGS with Wilson Ricks (https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-extraordinary-potential-value#details) is that EGS costs would have to come down about 90% in order to be competitive with other renewable sources, although it's so far from being commercial that actual industrial cost estimates are pretty much guesswork.
And given that a lot of the technology is pretty mature (it's basically fracking), it's hard to see this kind of solar energy-type learning curve.
Bottom line is that EGS might not be competitive as a baseload electricity source but could be an excellent replacement for natural gas in providing dispatchable electricity, to cover peaks in demand and other times when solar/wind/etc aren't available.
Alas, for the most part, physics says no. It has nothing to do with drilling technology even presuming we could ever drill to such depths. It has everything to do with the thermodynamics of solids and pesky unalterable things like thermal conductivity and thermal gradients.
Rock is an excellent insulator. This is a good thing because if it wasn't the surface of this planet would still be molten and life would be somewhat harder. Your diagram for EGS is telling. Are you tapping into virtually unlimited energy? Why no, you are not. You are cooling rock. If you are extracting heat then what you are producing is an ever expanding mass of cooled rock. From which you very shortly will be able to extract no heat at all. Since this rock is an excellent insulator you will be waiting a very long time before the rock reheats to the point where you can extract more heat. And the only way this works is if you have a very large mass of very hot, near molten, to reheat your cooled rock.
This is why we make boilers for thermal generation out of metals which have high thermal conductivity and thin walled boiler tubes at that. It's all about heat transfer. In essence Geothermal can be made to work only where a high heat gradient exists, very hot rock, that can be used to establish a more or less steady state with the heat being extracted. Like Iceland. There are very few such places in the world. By all means, use them.
When it comes to deep drilling that could possibly expand the number of areas where high thermal gradients could be found. But I doubt it would do so by much. As regards drilling technology I would observe that drill bits are the least of your problems. (Diamond drills have been around longer than I have been alive and I am old.) The deeper you go the higher the pressure. That applies to the l column. of drilling fluid. Currently your average frack pump runs about 10 kpsi. But you can buy pumps capable of 20 kpsi. No technology exists, including pumps and well casing that could possible withstand the pressures required to frack at the depths proposed. No hoses. No piping. I can't even imagine what the well casing that needs to be pressurized would look like.
I see no problem with exploring the possibilities but I wouldn't be too sanguine about spectacular results.
Thanks, I have been wondering about rate at which geothermal heat is replenished versus the rate at which it would be extracted in such a system ever since learning about the London Central Line's problem with "imported" heat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling
If geothermal gets good enough, we could have Blue Lagoons everywhere! That resort runs off of waste water from a geothermal plant.
Learning by doing works great when the number of experiments can be scaled up without being burdened with humongous cost per experiment. Unfortunately, we have massive Bureaucratic Barriers to Backpropagation, that are invested in the process rather than define clearly measurable outcome oriented tolerance levels (siesmic activity, pollutants allowed, etc.)
Boise brag time: it's had a geothermal system in and near its downtown that dates back over a century. It's been aggressive in expanding it in recent decades, particularly to the campus of Boise State. I'm all for anything that'll make it easier to harness this form of energy.
One winter I stayed at the Breitenbush hot springs - you could soak of course, (you could even "take the waters" since it was developed in the early 20th c) but it was really cool that little cabins also steam-heated thermally via radiators.
Seems like out-of-date regulations, developed a hundred years ago and completely corrupted by special interests, are the source of all of our problems. Just saying. Seems like we should just start over on many of them and put in new ones with expiration dates.
Is there a regularly occurring natural phenomenon that this mechanism could be named after?
Something like the going-down of a celestial light source?
Evening Nautical Twilight?
It sounds similar to Mancur Olson's work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancur_Olson
If we can drill deep enough (20km+), location truly does become “anywhere on the planet”, including right under existing coal and natural gas plants. Which means the energy production and delivery infrastructure is already nearly 100% in place. This should mean there would be fewer permitting barriers in those cases. It also means we could “drop in” nearly carbon neutral replacements for all current energy production.
Also, if we drill deep enough, we don’t have to do fracturing, we can have a “two pipe” system down a single borehole, likely eliminating any earthquake risk.
The key is developing the advanced “drilling” techniques to get to those depths. This will likely not be actual drill bits, but rather directed energy. I am personally excited by MIT spinoff Quaise Energy’s (https://www.quaise.energy) millimeter wave drilling. If it works out, this could be the geothermal energy advancement that actually had a chance of getting us close t carbon neutral by 2050.
Lots of interesting stuff happening in this space.
We need permitting reform for…just about everything.
I really, really, don't know much at all about geology and thermal. So here's my chance to ask a really stupid question:
Would tapping into thermal on a massive scale (as much as we use oil or coal today) have any impact on other aspects of Earth's geology? If we used that much energy could it have any impact on earthquakes, vulcanism, the earth's magnetic sphere or its surface temperature? Or are the scales of those processes a million times greater than the energy we could withdraw?
Geologist here. The scales of those processes you mention are globally much bigger than what we can withdraw.
However, if we drill into shallow, cold rock for geothermal power we can very quickly drawdown what heat is there locally and then make the area unusable for geothermal power. Most of the earth has cold rock at shallow depths, which means that all geothermal power up till now comes from volcanic areas with a magma body at shallow depths (Iceland, Clear Lake CA, Nevada, etc).
Cold pretty much means below the boiling point of water. This is important for geothermal purposes because the boiling point of water changes with pressure, and water is also compressible, so if it expands from pressure loss coming back to the surface it can lose heat.
Here is a map of continental US surface heat flow from underground (units in milliwatts per square meter):
https://www.smu.edu/-/media/Site/Dedman/Academics/Programs/Geothermal-Lab/Graphics/SMUHeatFlowMap2011_CopyrightVA0001377160_jpg.jpg
And here is a link with maps of continental US subsurface temperatures at various depths:
https://www.smu.edu/Dedman/Academics/Departments/Earth-Sciences/Research/GeothermalLab/DataMaps/TemperatureMaps
(For context, the deepest oil well ever drilled in the continental US is a 9.5 km well in Oklahoma).
Recharge timescales for hydrothermal systems is hundreds to thousands of years. For hot, dry rock it is hundreds of thousands of years, and for cold, dry rock it is even longer.
It seems that at a depth of4.5-5.5km, most of the continent is above your definition of ‘cold’. How quickly would one exhaust the useful energy transfer at 100-125 C?
The problem is at the pressures at 5 km depth the boiling point of water is greater than 300 C. It is a problem because steam is needed to run generators. All we would be returning from 5 km depth across much of the country is mostly hot water, not steam.
You can get around that by using some other working fluid (see comment on Rankine Cycle turbines). But the efficiency is very poor.
It's pretty hard to extract useful mechanical energy (and thus spin a generator) from heat sources at these temperatures.
The following paper suggests that current Rankine cycle turbines (a special type of heat engine using low boiling point liquids to maximise efficiency for this type of low-grade heat) have a thermal efficiency of about 6% when using heat sources at ~100C.
Those kind of margins also mean that your power production is going to take a huge hit on a hot day.
https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/sustainability/sustainability-12-10475/article_deploy/sustainability-12-10475.pdf
The thermal conductivity of dry, non-porous granite is ~3 W/mK and the thermal diffusivity is ~10^-6 m^2/s. So, if my math is correct, it would take ~200 years for that 1 cubic meter of granite to be heated from 100 C to 200 C via only heat conduction in a low heat flow setting, ignoring fluid flow and radiogenic heat production.
I had the same thought. For me, this article is evoking memories of The Core (2003).
Yes on permitting reform. But let's be careful about all those pipelines and power lines - people don't like having them on their land when they are forced to accept them by eminent domain (a frequent "reform" that wind and solar advocates propose). Utilities' use of eminent domain - whether for a gas pipeline or a renewable-serving high tension line - is very often a huge negative for rural landowners in particular. One example from personal experience: my wife's family's ranch in western Texas had an easement taken via eminent domain by LCRA (a public utility whose fame when I was in law school in the 1980s was for strip mining and burning lignite - a low grade coal - in a particularly environmentally destructive way but which has now embraced wind power in the Texas Panhandle and so needed power lines to get the energy from there to Austin). LCRA took the easement by eminent domain, and have proved to be - as we feared - dreadful cotenants of the land with us. Florida Power and Light, which doesn't have eminent domain power in Texas, build a power line parallel to LCRA's through voluntary purchases and, among other things, paid the landowners involved multiple times what LCRA paid. Plus the FPL easement's non-monetary terms are much better for the landowners. (If anyone is interested more details on this point, I cowrote an article about the problem of being an "involuntary cotenant" with our lawyers which you can find here - https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/157/ ). I also highly recommend Robert Bryce's PowerHungry podcast (https://robertbryce.com/power-hungry-podcast/ ) and books and writings generally on energy - he knows a lot and writes clearly. Plus he's got great photos of birds (he's a birdwatcher) on his blog.
I do feel compelled to point out that I have near certainty that this LCRA eminent domain line was taken under state law, using state procedures. So, to the extent it’s a general worry about eminent domain as a concept sure, but it didn’t use Federal authorities so the ire there should be directed at state government/ERCOT.
And, yes, rural people don’t like eminent domain and things going across their land. In many ways, that’s the problem we’re trying to solve - how to get power to dense places, which necessarily involves bringing power there somehow, whether via pipeline, power line, or rail/road.
Yes, state law was used - thanks for the clarification. That's where most of the eminent domain action is. The Feds do some limited eminent domain as well and renewable advocates are trying to expand that authority in the name of permitting reform to speed things up. The FPL example shows it is possible to site power lines - in this case from the same point A to the same point B - without eminent domain and with greater respect for the land and landowners' rights.
And - I almost forgot to mention the great Australian film, The Castle (not the US one with Robert Redford), about eminent domain. Very well done and clever, with a superb cast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_(1997_Australian_film)
My question is always “will it work?” One can venture a decent answer with two data points:
1) How much has the cost of sinking a deep oil well decreased in the last 30 years?
2) Would geothermal energy be competitive with nuclear if its cost decreased by the same factor as deep oil drilling over the last 30 years?
We don’t know that geothermal costs would fall exactly as quickly as drilling costs, but it would be a good reality check.
Does anyone have the data to plug into my little model?
The European Commission thinks that US fracking costs per unit of energy decreased by roughly 25% in the five years beginning in 2012. However, regional variations were huge, costs increased slightly in some fields and decreased massively in others.
http://www.insightenergy.org/system/publication_files/files/000/000/067/original/RREB_Shale_Gas_final_20170315_published.pdf?1494419889