Landsvirkjun, which paid for most of the IDDP’s work, decided it needed financial support to drill more exploratory wells. “We said, ‘We’re just a small energy company in Iceland,'” Palsson told me. But it has made its research available to the international scientific community, and there has been intermittent interest from the UK, Germany, Canada and New Zealand. “Here we are now, trying to get it funded as a science project that can also benefit the energy industry,” Palsson said.
Heading back toward the airport, we saw piles of snow and black rock caves marking the trails extending beyond view. Iceland’s transformation into a country powered almost entirely by renewable energy may seem utopian, and the scenario further reinforces this impression. Because Iceland is lonely in many ways – that only Arctic-four species! those little horses with them Tall!– You may feel that geothermal energy is a niche endeavor, unlike one that is technically and economically viable in places where volcanic eruptions are not part of the daily forecast. But that sentiment is old and misleading.
Geothermal is underdeveloped, and its upfront costs may be high, but it is always on and, once established, it is cheap and sustainable. The dream of geothermal energy is to meet humanity’s energy demands affordably, without using horses for horsepower, slaughtering whales for their oil, or burning fossil fuels. The planet’s heat could be used to pasteurize milk or heat dorm rooms or light baseball stadiums for night games.
At temperatures over five thousand degrees Celsius, the Earth’s core is almost as hot as the Sun’s surface. The temperature on the earth’s surface is about fourteen degrees. But in some places like Iceland the ground beneath the feet is much warmer. Hot springs, geysers and volcanoes are surface-level signs of hell on Earth. Some say that Dante’s description of Hell was inspired by the landscape of sulfurous steam plumes found in Devil’s Valley in Tuscany.
Snow monkeys and humans have been using water heated by the Earth as bathing for ages. In the Azores, a local dish, Cozido de las FurnasThe pottery is cooked by burying it in hot volcanic soil; In Iceland, bread is still sometimes baked in this manner. The first geothermal power generator was built in Devil’s Valley in 1904 by Prince Piero Ginori Conti of Trevignano, who was extracting borax from the area and thought of using the steam coming out of mining boreholes. The generator initially powered five light bulbs. Shortly afterwards, it operated the railway system of central Italy and some villages. The geothermal complex is still operational today, providing one to two percent of Italy’s energy. In the United States, the first geothermal plant was built in 1921 in Northern California, in an area filled with geysers that one surveyor described as the Gates of Hell. That plant powered a nearby resort hotel and is still in use.
“So anyway, tell me something about yourself.”
Cartoons by Avi Steinberg
There are no gates to hell anywhere. The temperature one kilometer below the ground in Kamchatka is significantly warmer than one kilometer below the ground in Kansas. Geothermal energy is also readily available in Kenya (where it provides about fifty percent of the country’s energy), New Zealand (about twenty percent), and the Philippines (about fifteen percent) – all volcanic regions with tectonic cracks. But the costs and uncertainties of drilling deeper in search of sufficient heat in low Hadean scenarios have halted development. This partly explains why, in the area of clean energy, geothermal is often either not listed or mentioned under “other”. For decades, private and government investment in geothermal energy was negligible.
That has changed now. Over the past five years, in North America, more than one and a half billion dollars has been invested in geothermal technologies. This is a small amount for the energy industry, but it is also a rapid increase. In May, 2021, Google signed a contract with Texas-based geothermal company Farvo to power its data centers and infrastructure in Nevada; Meta signed a similar deal with Texas-based Sage for a data center east of the Rocky Mountains and with a company called XGS in New Mexico. Microsoft is co-developing a $1 billion geothermal-powered data center in Kenya; Amazon installed geothermal heating in its newly constructed fulfillment center in Japan. (Geothermal energy enables companies to avoid the vagaries of the electric grid.) Under the Biden administration, the geothermal industry finally received the same type of tax credits given to wind and solar, and under the current Trump administration it has received the same type of fast-track permission given to oil and gas. Donald Trump’s Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, spoke at a geothermal conference and made the announcement, in front of a asked for-like a sign that says “Magma (Making America Geothermal: Modern Advances),” that although geothermal has not yet achieved ”liftoff”, it should and can. Depending on who you talk to, it’s either weird that suddenly everyone is talking about geothermal or it’s weird that there’s a cost-competitive energy source with bipartisan appeal that no one is talking about.
Scientific work that has been abandoned or forgotten may return—sometimes through unintentional duplication, sometimes through deliberate retrieval. In the early nineteen-seventies, the US government funded a program at Los Alamos that focused on developing geothermal energy systems that did not require proximity to a geyser or volcano. Two connected wells were built: in one, water was directed into fractured hot, dry rock; From the other, steam produced as a result of water meeting the rock emerged. In 1973, Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, which aimed to develop energy sources outside fossil fuels. “But when Reagan came into office, he changed things,” Jefferson Tester, a professor of sustainable energy systems at Cornell University who was involved in the Los Alamos project, told me. The price of oil had fallen, and support for geothermal had waned. “People got the impression it was a failure,” Tester said. “I think if they look a little closer, they’ll see that a lot of the knowledge gained in those first years could have been used to take advantage of what’s happening now.”