The world is desperately searching for a source of clean, safe, electricity.
Solar and wind are pretty good. Solar uses up large amounts of land. Sometimes we’re so desperate for electricity, we make a solar power plant instead of a farm. Worse yet, what are we going to do with all those solar panels in 30 years when they’re not productive anymore? Yikes.
Similarly, wind power kills birds and can be ugly. Worse yet, what are we going to do with those gigantic wind turbines when they’re old and useless?
Wind and solar power are good, but they’re not dependable. Building enormous banks of batteries is not the answer. Batteries produce too much waste for too little power storage.
Hydro power is great but there’s not nearly enough to go around.
What if there’s another source of immense power available everywhere in the world. This source of power is clean, dependable, and won’t be used up for billions of years. This solution is geothermal.
It’s not exactly new. The Geysers in California began producing electricity in 1960 and is still going today. The problem today is that this location is exceptionally lucky to have very high temperatures very close to the surface. In most places, you need to drill much, much deeper to get temperatures high enough to produce electricity. Our current drilling technology isn’t good enough for that.
MIT spun out a company, Quaise (https://news.mit.edu/2022/quaise-energy-geothermal-0628), that is intending to use microwaves to vaporize the rock and get us down to the high temperatures we need. If they are successful, it will be a race to see if fusion power can get cheaper than these new geothermal techniques.
Maybe mankind will solve one of its biggest problems in my lifetime.
802701 A.D. 