US report finds sky is the limit for geothermal energy beneath us:
"Advancing enhanced geothermal techniques alone could produce 45 gigawatts of
electricity by 2050. Add in the more conventional plants, and you’re at 60
gigawatts—26 times more than current geothermal generation. And in a scenario
where natural gas prices go up, making geothermal even more competitive, we could
double that to 120 gigawatts. That would be fully 16 percent of the total projected
2050 generation in the US.
Additionally, that electricity can be generated around the clock and can even be flexibly
ramped up or down, making it an excellent pairing with intermittent forms of renewable
energy like wind and solar.
On the heating (and cooling) side, there are two main areas of opportunity. Traditional
ground-source heat pumps circulate fluid through loops in the ground to provide cooling
in the summer and heating in the winter, and they could be much more widely adopted
with minimal effort. The report estimates that installations could increase 14 times over,
to 28 million homes by 2050, covering 23 percent of national residential demand.
Accounting for limitations in how quickly the market could realistically change brings the
number down to 19 million homes—still a massive increase.
There’s even more potential for district heating systems, where a single, large
geothermal installation pipes heat to all the buildings in an area. There are only a handful
of such systems operating in the US today (Boise, Idaho, has an example), but the
report finds more than 17,000 locations where it would make sense, covering heating
needs for 45 million homes."
See:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019...-grid-by-2050/