=energy
I've noticed a recent trend of advocacy for novel geothermal
power designs as a complete solution for low-cost renewable energy.
There are an infinite number of flawed ideas, so I don't usually write about
why specific ones won't work. Lessons on how to find flaws in ideas can
certainly be valuable, but such analysis seems to even lose that utility
without ephemeral context. But I'll try to generalize a bit.
The
new advocates of geothermal power seem to be people who read something about
human progress being about increased available energy, and it felt correct,
so now that's Known and should be used.
They seem to all be current
or former fans of nuclear power plants. Because they take technological
progress as an axiom, the increased costs of nuclear power over time must,
from their point of view, be caused by regulation. But of course, those cost
increases haven't tracked regulations over time or across countries.
It seems the failure of nuclear power projects to actually deliver caused a
displacement of that hope to geothermal power. Techno-optimism is the axiom,
not the conclusion, so whatever is found from a search must be a solution.
What has supposedly changed about geothermal power? The answer seems
to be "drilling by vaporizing rock with microwaves". There are multiple
startups trying to do this now, including Quaise and AltaRock Energy.
Here's a talk on
this by a researcher at MIT. You don't need to watch it.
This
guy at MIT does stuff with microwaves, and he has some pictures of small
slabs of rock with holes melted through them using microwaves. Well, that's
nice, but I can put a hole in a thin slab of rock with a hammer. What
happens when you have a 1km deep hole?
I shouldn't need to tell you
the answer. Just imagine a deep hole in rock.
You heat up the bottom
of the hole, and eventually you have a hole with molten rock in the bottom.
This doesn't help with drilling. You could try to pump it up the hole, but
it will melt, weaken, or dissolve your pipe. And a lot of energy gets lost
from thermal conduction. And molten rock tends to be extremely viscous.
OK, so instead of trying to pump molten rock, you keep heating it until
it vaporizes. This vapor starts going up the hole, and it condenses on the
sides. It also condenses on your waveguide or whatever you have going down
the hole, making it extremely hot.
I think the thought process of
people who find that talk convincing doesn't get into that, and just goes: "MIT
is doing this research and a startup working on this approach has been
funded, so all the obvious problems must have been solved". (Well, I don't
want to pit my credibility against MIT's here, but when I see a news article
that starts with "MIT scientists have found a way to" I stop reading. Their
PR department is out of control.)
The problem is, that approach
doesn't work. You end up saying things like:
• sure,
this
evidence
doesn't seem to make sense, but the US government wouldn't just make up Iraq
having a nuclear weapon program
• what
Theranos is trying to do doesn't seem possible now, and blood from a finger
prick isn't even the same as blood from a vein, but I'm sure the investors
and the big names on its board of directors would have checked that
• Solyndra is making cylindrical solar cells, and sure,
it seems pretty dumb to make solar cells that are mostly not facing the sun,
especially since lower average light reduces their efficiency, but I'm sure
the US government wouldn't give them a bunch of money if it was really that
dumb an idea
• sure, logically it seems like transmission patterns
imply SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, and Taiwan and China are urgently trying to
get masks, but surely the WHO and CDC wouldn't be saying it's only spread
via surfaces if it's mainly airborne
• US media is reporting that there's a scientific
consensus that COVID-19 couldn't have originated from a laboratory, and
surely it wouldn't just say there's a scientific consensus when there isn't
• surely surgeons wouldn't recommend arthroscopic knee
surgery if it
didn't actually help
• surely carpet companies wouldn't be putting
fluorosurfactants in their carpets if it was actually hazardous
• surely the FDA wouldn't approve
aducanumab if it didn't actually work
• surely media and scientists wouldn't have been saying
that a very-low-fat diet is healthy without good evidence
• surely there's a good reason for quinoa being
considered healthier than rice with lentils
• surely Japan wouldn't be putting
even more money into hydrogen fuel work if it was a fundamentally flawed
plan
• surely the US government wouldn't spend billions on
subsidizing ethanol fuel from corn if that had no chance of ever being
economically viable
• NASA has lots of smart people so surely they wouldn't
spend billions on
SLS and accomplish nothing
You get the idea.
Why is hydrogen fuel research
such a perennial sink for billions of dollars from governments? The problems
seemed obvious, so this puzzled me for a long time, but I think I understand
now. Hydrogen fuel research is invested in because it has lots of papers and
scientists saying it's worth researching, which in turn is because lots of
money was spent on it. Scientists work on whatever they get grants for, the
scientific grant system is rather broken, and everybody has to pretend that
whatever their latest paper is about is actually useful somehow.
That
cycle began, I suppose, because hydrogen fuel sounds futuristic and is
relatively easy to make (commercially impractical) demonstrations for.
By the way, yes, polycrystalline diamond drill bits are great, but
they're a smaller and more situational improvement over tricone bits than
you might think, and diamond bits have been around for a while now. They
certainly don't automatically make deep closed-loop geothermal economically
competitive.
Anyway, there's currently nothing new that enables
new approaches to geothermal that weren't previously viable. I should note
that it is theoretically possible to drill and install pipe cheaply enough
for closed-loop deep geothermal to be economically viable, but pushing
forwards with an approach that can't work is counterproductive: once those
projects fail, investors will take that as a sign to do something other than
geothermal.
Now, I've talked to hardcore techno-optimists before.
If you try to argue, it goes something like:
"Tech X is coming soon!"
"What enables Tech X now?"
"Method A makes X possible!"
"Here are 12
reasons Method A doesn't work, and also it's not a new idea at all."
"You're probably wrong somehow."
"OK, here are some people with
credentials pointing out these problems."
"It doesn't matter if Method A
doesn't work because there's Method B too."
"How many times am I going to
have to go through this?"
It's not worth it. Just smile and nod. And
that's certainly part of the problem: nobody's willing to tell Elon Musk why
something like his Hyperloop paper is stupid, and the competent engineers
have to play Kif Kroker to Zapp Brannigan executives. But I'm not satisfied
with that as an answer.
China invested in silicon solar panel
production, and now it's the largest producer by far. The US invested in
failed companies like Solyndra and subsidies for rooftop solar, which is
~2.6x as expensive
as utility-scale solar and never made economic sense.
The secret to
cheap solar power turned out to be slicing thinner silicon wafers, but I've
been told by some people involved that this sounded too boring.
China
invested in HVDC lines, and now it has an HVDC grid. America invested in CO2
storage from coal plants, Gen IV nuclear reactor research, and hydrogen
power, and got nothing.
China invested in electronics manufacturing
and now Shenzhen produces the world's electronics. Taiwan invested in
semiconductor production and has TSMC.
Risk is necessary, and some
failure is inevitable, but high-risk ventures are only worthwhile if at
least some of them succeed. Project failure rates have been increasing, and
if current trends continue, America is in trouble. You can't run an economy
on nothing but surveillance advertising and SEO and mortgages, and TSMC and
Foxconn can survive without Apple better than vice-versa.