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same shit every day, on god
(mander.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Science Memes
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Because it's not as cool as directly harvest the energy itself like in scifi.
geothermal is boiling water too, and it's pretty neat
I've been thinking that for a while. Issue is that it's risky, if you fuck up there's a pretty high chance that there are going to be a lot of houses with cracks in their walls (assuming you're doing it in a relatively densely populated area that doesn't normally see earthquakes).
You mean, like fracking (for oil power) minus the poisoning groundwater part?
We could just not use any power source that severely damages our environment. Solar and wind don't have these issues to this extend, even if you include the necessary storage capacity (batteries, hydroelectric reservoirs) and include the resource use for building them (though that resource use is still a pretty big issue).
Though it's not impossible to use geothermal energy without severely damaging the environment, you just need either a large amount of unsettled land (like Iceland) or you need to be really, really careful and limit the kinds of things you do - using geothermal energy for district heating apparently is a lot less likely to create earthquakes than what Iceland is doing.
Yes, geothermal heating is common here (switzerland). Power gen. less so.
dropping the latter assumption?
What do you mean?
Assume it's an area with frequent earthquakes
But that's usually not true. You can either just not do geothermal in areas that aren't prone to natural earthquakes, force every homeowner to make their home earthquake-proof (which is extremely expensive, probably a lot more than just building batteries for solar+wind) or suck it up when they get damaged, or the owners of the geothermal plant have to pay for any damages (unlikey).
my house has been through 1 major and countless minor earthquakes and the only crack is in cement we poured ourselves out in the yard. i'm really confused by your assumptions.
Any powerplant will usually done in a pretty isolated area for safety reason, so i'd assume the chance of it happen is very, very slim. If location isn't permitted it's probably shouldn't be build, especially for the type that need to dig very deep to access the heat, so solar panel on roof is probably the best way for any power generation that is placed close or in the populated area.
Here in Germany, that hasn't been true at all so far. For starters, there aren't any "pretty isolated areas" in the first place, since the entire country is pretty densely settled compared to e.g. Iceland. There are still some ongoing projects, though, IIRC they are usually being done for district heating, which has to be near populated areas per definition. I think these types of projects aren't as likely to create earthquakes as the ones for electricity in Iceland, though.
I remember seeing a documentary about a village in Germany, where many houses were damaged by geothermal plants, caused by water entering layers where it usually didn't reach and the material there taking in water and expanding. So it probably depends a lot on the local geology and also on the depth. I sadly don't remember how deep the one in the documentary was.
I know a few people that got geothermal heating installed for their homes (in Germany), which goes a lot less deep than something intended for whole cities or districts. The one at my friend's home is 50m deep, and it looks like anything less than 400m is considered "near surface"
Huh, interesting. I checked my country for this and it seems here we too have a coal plant right next to housing area, but it seems like the housing is the one creep toward the coal plant, not the other way around.
But then i'm not sure what sort of error will cause a quake and ruin houses. Is there any case happen to past construction?
I don't think a coal plant would cause earthquakes.
From @crater2150@feddit.org's comment:
It's specific to geothermal
Ohh ya i wasn't saying it would, i was just correcting my misinformed opinion that powerplant won't be build near housing area.
Like solar panels converting photons to electrons?
Like solar thermal powerplant or molten salt reactor, LAME.
That's why solarpunk is the coolest.
Honey, go toss another plutonium pellet in the house slot, please.
Let me guess, you need to boil some water?