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Sounds like low-hanging fruit. But not really scalable. A 7MW plant sounds OK for some applications. But a really big geothermal plant might compete with nuclear.



It's a good point, but there are many grid experts who argue that smaller, distributed generation is more robust and reliable than larger, 500MW+ plants. Outside a few areas, most geothermal plants are quite small: I doubt we'll ever see one over 15MW in Canada, for example.

A 7MW plant doesn't sound like much, but if you're cookie-cuttering 9 of them along a line, costs come way down since they're all essentially identical. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and if we did all the larger (over 15000hp) natural gas compressor stations in the US and Canada, we'd be looking at something like 42TWh per year of generation. That compares to 68 TWh for all deployed utility solar (2018 tho). That's just gas compressor stations, which are about 15% of the industrial heat generated in the US.


Responding specifically to the competition with nuclear: you're absolutely correct: the Geysers geothermal complex (which is actually about 22 power plants) is about 1.6GW. That's easily the world's largest though: I don't think there's another one over a gigawatt anywhere. And you need really special conditions for that kind of power - specifically really hot geological conditions.

The problem, as always, is that jerk Carnot and his limit. Most accessible geothermal fluid is <150C except in very geologically active areas. That puts a pretty hard limit on plant efficiency.




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