Amazing.
Geothermal has actually become my favorite energy "pie in the sky" source.
If drilling was 10x cheaper, we'd all be using geothermal for everything.
If we could just figure out how to drill a bit better, the world would be a fundamentally different place from the perspective of transportation, housing, and energy.
Why pay to boil water when it's hundreds of degrees right under our feet? Here is a crazy fact: if you go down 15 feel and measure the temperature in the middle of winter even in the frigid cold of Alaska, it will be about 45 F or 8C.
It has amazing consistency, works during night, can give you heat via a ground source heat pump. It has basically zero environmental impact.
I didn't realize at first this is the same company Google started a partnership with in 2021: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/goog...
I understand using geothermal as a heat battery where the in/out is balanced over time (like seasonal heat storage) but I'm skeptical we understand enough about the structure under the earth to keep pure extraction working over time and not just cool everything down.
Solar + large-scale energy storage seems like the future
In metric units: 4805 meters, 271°C
The average drilling speed over 16 days is: 1 cm every ~3 seconds, or 1 inch every ~7 seconds.
The press release quotes a maximum average rate of penetration (ROP) of 95 feet/hour which is: 1 cm every 1.2 seconds, or 1 inch every ~3 seconds.
They also quote an instantaneous ROP of over 300 feet/hour which is: 1 cm every 0.4 seconds, or 1 inch every 1 second.