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How geothermal could outlive the sun as source of energy – a great article by WIRED

How geothermal could outlive the sun as source of energy – a great article by WIRED Hydrothermal resources showing/ conceptual elements of a high-temperature resource ( Source: Modified and generalized after Cumming 2009, GeoVision report)
Alexander Richter 13 Mar 2020

With major sources of energy essentially based on the energy of the sun, nuclear energy and geothermal energy stand out. How much energy geothermal could provide to the world is topic if a great article by WIRED this week.

Wired Magazine in the U.S. has published a rather interesting article that looks into “how long the world could run on geothermal power?”.

Always tricky to write about a well written article without taking too much fanfare from you actually reading it. So make sure to check the article out here.

In essence, the article looks at how much heat energy the world stores in the context of using it for our energy needs.  The author looks at where the different renewable energy technologies derive their energy, solar naturally as sun energy, but even fossil fuels essentially being plants that died and turned into oil etc. now burned in cars. Wind in a sense is also based on sun energy, as the different heat in the Earth’s atmosphere essentially making air expand and push to other places essentially creating wind.

Hydroelectric power essentially is gravitational energy with the sun heating up water, it evaporates and coming down as rain filling rivers and dams that fuel hydropower facilities.

With that said, the author points to only two forms of energy technologies without a connection to the sun. These are nuclear power and geothermal energy.

The scientifc approach to evaluating how much energy is there is interesting, yet naturally brings us to the question how much is actually accessible. But overall a rather interesting article highlighting the great role geothermal energy can play.

There is yet the overarching other element as well and that is the the opportunity of multiple and cascaded use of the energy contained in geothermal heat. When used to generate electricity it still contains sufficient energy in the form for other use, e.g. heating and related industrial applications.

Source: Wired