At least in the US, environmental activism has contributed to lack of geothermal development. While the US has large regions with high geothermal potential, such as the Great Basin area of the mountain West, much of this land is undeveloped and under Federal control. This allows activists anywhere in the country to make getting permission difficult and expensive, the effect of which has been to limit the practical size of the power plants to ~25 MW.
Large-scale geothermal installations are not pretty and they cover large areas of land. The individual bore holes must be widely separated from each other, so if you are aggregating the energy of many bores, you are building giant pipe networks. It looks a bit like a large oil field. This gets attacked by environmental activists as despoiling the natural habitat/beauty etc of the formerly undeveloped land. In places like Nevada, which has a lot of geothermal power, there is nothing attractive or unique about this land, it is essentially volcanic badlands of the boring variety, but the campaigns against them use deceptive pictures from other parts of the country suggesting that they are paving over national parks and similar.
This propaganda against geothermal power generation makes it impractical at scale. Instead, the geothermal power plants that are practical to build in this regulatory environment are all solutions with small land footprints. The largest geothermal power plant in Nevada is <100 MW and most don't even do 20 MW.
Of course, there are similar challenges when trying to install solar power at scale in the same kinds of places. Too much of our "green energy" policy is dictated by activists that don't want to build any kind of power generation anywhere.
There is plenty of geothermal power generation going on in the US, but it is not increasing.
That is not a triumph of ecoterror, but of economics: solar and wind are already substantically cheaper, and continue getting much cheaper, where geothermal, like nukes, stays just as expensive to build and operate as ever. So, pace baseload, a dollar spent today is overwhelmingly better spent on a solar panel or wind turbine, or, soon, storage for solar and wind, or production of H2 as feedstock for industrial processes and hydrocarbon synthesis from captured CO2.
There is never any need to install new solar or wind in wilderness. Both coexist productively and synergistically with current agricultural land use. A farm or pasture with solar is more agriculturally productive than the same without, and also generates clean power. In effect, the power output subsidizes construction of the shading infrastructure that reduces heat stress and evaporation.
A wind turbine displaces minimal ground area, and thus may be in the middle of a solar farm, both situated in current, productive cropland. Output may be used locally to produce ammonia when spot prices bottom out, useful on-site for both fertilizer and fuel.
Large-scale geothermal installations are not pretty and they cover large areas of land. The individual bore holes must be widely separated from each other, so if you are aggregating the energy of many bores, you are building giant pipe networks. It looks a bit like a large oil field. This gets attacked by environmental activists as despoiling the natural habitat/beauty etc of the formerly undeveloped land. In places like Nevada, which has a lot of geothermal power, there is nothing attractive or unique about this land, it is essentially volcanic badlands of the boring variety, but the campaigns against them use deceptive pictures from other parts of the country suggesting that they are paving over national parks and similar.
This propaganda against geothermal power generation makes it impractical at scale. Instead, the geothermal power plants that are practical to build in this regulatory environment are all solutions with small land footprints. The largest geothermal power plant in Nevada is <100 MW and most don't even do 20 MW.
Of course, there are similar challenges when trying to install solar power at scale in the same kinds of places. Too much of our "green energy" policy is dictated by activists that don't want to build any kind of power generation anywhere.