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The mountain has a point.
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this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Does remind me of my ongoing question of why we aren't using volcanoes as generators for geothermal power.
Apparently it can be implemented in a way that deliberately draws heat away from the source that's being used for the power, so why not just stick cooling rods into volcanos and then get free electricity courtesy of the earth being a hot pocket?
Because the electricity wouldn't be free, you'd have to build a ton of expensive infrastructure in the middle of nowhere (people tend not to live near active volcanoes), in an area that is very geologically active (cos of the volcano) with a real risk that everything you've built gets wiped out at some point in the next few decades (volcano).
There are a ton of ways to generate clean electricity, the trick is doing it in a way that is even remotely cost effective $/MWh
“(people tend not to live near active volcanoes)”
[Hawaii enters the chat]
Your comment is of course completely accurate. The last paragraph is depressing though, "we have all the solutions, but we won't do them because money".
Good news: solar and wind are actually substantially cheaper than coal or gas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Bad news: large parts of the world have built their economies around coal and gas extraction, and the cost to society of those industries collapsing is harder to quantify
When the price difference is big, it's kind of, 'oh well, have to be practical', when the shitty solution is picked. When the price difference is small and the shitty solution still gets picked; that's depressive. That is when governments need to incentivice the better solution; cause capitalism won't.
People absolutely live near active volcanoes. They have some of the just fertile soil on the planet. Naples, Sicily, Hawaii, Iceland, Japan, Indonesia etc. In fact Iceland is almost entirely powered by geothermal energy.
Geothermal use steam to generate power tho, and active volcanoes is quite risky to build a high cost power plant because we wouldn't know when it will erupt. Also active volcanoes might be too hot for the job.
How hot is too hot tho? Doesn't more hot just mean more energy?
Also, could you locate the electricity generating parts away from the volcano itself and just conduct the heat from the hotzone itself far enough away to still draw the heat out of the system without posing an infrastructure risk to the system?
I really wonder about the potential to basically turn volcanic hot zones into batteries and just suck the excess heat energy that makes them dangerous out of them. It seems like the biggest untapped source of power we have at our disposal next to the sun and all the forces it drives.
Nuclear reactors and geothermal power plants both simply boil water to push steam through a spinning turbine to make energy. That's literally it. There's no other way to utilize that heat in a safer or more efficient way.
It just boil water to create steam to spin the turbine, too hot will harm the equipment quicker.
Yes, they already been doing it, either close (but not too close) to volcano, or in a place where the earth crust is thinner(which is still near volcano), but never on the volcano itself. It's one of the location specific renewable energy.
Also we don't just turn heat to electricity, we use heat to boil water to create steam to generate electricity, the source of heat is what different between power plant, like for example coal, incinerator, nuclear, and sunlight, all are just to boil water.
In the volcano that's about to erupt, there is a geothermal power plant right next to it. Same for the similar eruption in Hawaii, it had a geothermal plant already.
Hellooooo Iceland.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/world/europe/iceland-volcano-eruption.html