New type of geothermal power plant powers data centers in the desert

The novelty seems to be restricted to their using fracking techniques to get access to enough hot rock to let them collect a respectable amount of thermal power.

That is new and does sound promising, but the chemical com,position of the water they circulate could get interesting. The stuff that dissolved in it deep underground might come out of solution after it has been cooled off in the generating plant.

Interesting.

Thank you for sharing.

Zoning.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

And if they are pig-ignorant clowns they won't do all that well either.

It might be sub-optimal part of the time (day). But other parts of the time (night) it may be more optimal than elsewhere.

Piped / trucked in just like it would be for other things built in the area.

I strongly suspect that some ~> most of the water is re-used for multiple cycles.

Not all holes in the ground are equal.

I strongly suspect if a new hole could bring up oil or natural gas then it would already be doing so or on a list to start doing so soon.

I suspect there are far more places that such a hole won't provide oil or natural gas but could provide hot water.

Many deserts can get quite cold at night. Massive temperature swings between day and night.

Land is probably significantly less expensive in the desert than many other places.

Experiment to see if something is possible.

Funny thing, instead of being an aquifer-desecrating environmental sacrilege, fracking becomes an excellent green energy idea as soon as it’s aligned with the ESG grift.

This despite needing to do orders of magnitude more of it, due to the very low-density, low-quality energy produced.

(Before the fanbois get started: yes, energy is energy, but how useful it is depends on how much entropy comes with it.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

On a sunny day (Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:53:43 -0800) it happened John Larkin snipped-for-privacy@997PotHill.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

But it would make CO2 (a well known deadly poison gas I'v heard).

The power plant is there because it is close to the power lines, The data center could be anywhere. As long as it is not a bitcoin mining plant ..: A single Bitcoin transaction could cost as much water as a backyard swimming pool:

It has never been all that useful, so the people who have stuck with doing it aren't all that enterprising.

Read the report

"That strategy piggybacks on hydraulic fracturing techniques developed by the oil and gas industry. Fervo drilled two wells that each extended more than 7,000 feet down before turning fully horizontal. It then connected them by fracking, producing cracks in the rock that connected the two boreholes. Water enters one borehole cold and exits the other at a temperature high enough to drive turbines and generate power."

The fractures are produced within a deeply buried chunk of un-fractured rock and only connect the horizonal sections of two deeply buried wells.

Presumably the rock outside the fractured the area is under some compressive stress from the fractures, but not enough for it to come apart. The rock drilled out to create the wells will create a volume into which some of the compression fractured rock can move.

Read the article.

Bitcoin should be terminated. It's criminally wasteful of real resources.

Jeroen Belleman

Read the report. They get enough flow rate to produce a useful amount of electricity. The energy they can extract is limited by the thermal resistance of the surrounding rocks, and it has to diffuse up from the centre of the earth, so it isn't going to get there all that fast, but there is a lot of it down there.

They won't be using evaporative cooling in the Nevada desert.

John Larkin clearly can't do basic math, and doesn't know enough to realise it.

The Ponzi scheme is even more elementary, but while we've got John Larkin's around it's going to keep on getting revived.

Bitcoin is an application of block-chain techniques to currency market. It's not a hoax, but - like every new idea - criminals are exploiting it to make money dishonestly.

It won't evaporate, but it won't be useful either.

Like Putin in Russia, who doesn't seem to worry Jan nearly as much.

Of course Jan doesn't know what it means, as is obvious from the nonsense he's free to post.