Iceland drills 4.7 km down into volcano to tap clean energy
I&#x27;d be careful about getting too optimistic.<p>Conventional geothermal is about 4-5 cents&#x2F;kWh, on par with natural gas in the US. The dominant capital cost is drilling a large well (you need volume), and so geothermal plants are generally only built in areas that require shallow (1km) wells.<p>Well costs are ~quadratic in depth. Given how much money has already been spent optimizing drilling for the oil&amp;gas industry, along with how cutthroat that market is, I don&#x27;t see the cost coming down significantly. As a result, deep geothermal will likely be limited to niche regions like Iceland. And you need deep geothermal to scale it past the existing locations.<p>I would love to be wrong, since geothermal checks all the boxes for renewables and is also suitable for base load power, but I don&#x27;t see an obvious path forward short of a drilling tech miracle.<p>(source: Climate and Energy R&amp;D group)