Iceland drills 4.7 km down into volcano to tap clean energy
I'd be careful about getting too optimistic.Conventional geothermal is about 4-5 cents/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.Well costs are ~quadratic in depth. Given how much money has already been spent optimizing drilling for the oil&gas industry, along with how cutthroat that market is, I don'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.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't see an obvious path forward short of a drilling tech miracle.(source: Climate and Energy R&D group)