I was talking to my dad a while back about renewable energy and a new digging technology that could make establishing geothermal power easier and faster. He told me "I don't like geothermal power. We shouldn't be digging into the earth like that." I was so flabbergasted all I could say was "What?", shake my head, and walk away abandoning the conversation. And I am still trying to mentally recover from that conversation.

He also doesn't like solar or wind because they are "to unreliable". So I really should have seen something like that coming.

There is a WILD asterisk here though. No place on earth has done Geothermal at the scale would need to at the levels they are describing, and we're currently the largest producer of Geothermal energy, shockingly.

It also has ecological drawbacks just like everything else. I believe Iceland has the sanest capture system right now where it not only provides power, but hot water heating, and mineral reclamation. If we could these small capture systems that can be deployed outside of large cities just to cut natural gas usage, that would be huge.

Unlike conventional geothermal plants limited to volcanic and tectonic-plate-boundary regions with readily-accessible below-ground heat, EGS requires drilling three to eight kilometers or nearly two to five miles deep, injecting fluid to crack rocks, then pumping the heated fluid back up to generate electricity.

Sounds like the differentiator is easier deeper drilling, cool.

The Stanford study compared scenarios with and without EGS and found that adding EGS to the renewable energy mix produces substantial infrastructure savings. When EGS provided just 10% of electricity supply, onshore wind capacity needs dropped 15%, solar capacity fell 12%, and battery storage requirements decreased 28%.

The big reduction in battery needs seems quite significant, since variability is an oft cited drawback of renewables.