YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Mathematics of Geothermal Energy

21 points srameshc 2 hours ago 9 comments

sghiassy 2 hours ago | parent

Wish geothermal energy was being discussed more for a power source for data centers.

Iceland has unlimited geothermal energy and a cold climate. Seems a lot easier than going to space for solar energy

idontwantthis 1 hour ago | parent

It’s hard to come up with any idea that is not easier than going to space for solar energy.

account42 51 minutes ago | parent

Lots of hamsters in wheels driving tiny generators?

idontwantthis 46 minutes ago | parent

I’m not going to bother to check the math but Gemini estimated $20billion/y to generate 1gw with hamsters on wheels so honestly that could be competitive.

gus_massa 30 minutes ago | parent

It's easier to dump all the excess heat in Iceland than in space.

Johnny_Bonk 1 hour ago | parent

I think i just saw Fervo delivered their 100MW facility a day ahead of schedule in 23 months.

fghorow 1 hour ago | parent

Disclaimer: I work in this field.

This is a very brief, high-level overview. It weirdly dives deep into some less-relevant topics and glosses over a LOT of things.

It is not irrelevant, but not terribly reliable either. The "Mathematics" in the title is self-evidently clickbait.

YMMV.

Heliosmaster 1 hour ago | parent

Would you be open to do one yourself and share it? (Not sarcastic, just asking)

fghorow 22 minutes ago | parent

Honestly, to do anything like justice to this topic would require a publishable academic paper. That is something I simply do not have time for.

There are (at the very least) 2 reasonable places I can think of off the top of my head in which to look around for answers -- both are organizations that run annual meetings on the topic of geothermal energy.

One is the Geothermal Rising professional organization [1]. There is a claim on the website that the papers from the annual meeting (roughly a month back) are available for free download by anybody. I can't find the actual head-link for those papers. A search engine is your friend. (I would not trust an LLM for this particular job.)

A second one is the Stanford Geothermal Workshop [2]. That is also an annual meeting. Again, use a search engine.

Sorry to not be more helpful, but this is a pretty large topic.

[1] https://www.geothermal.org/2026-geothermal-rising-conference... [2] https://geothermal.stanford.edu/events/workshop/past-proceed...