Geothermal's Time Has Come
Mood
supportive
Sentiment
positive
Category
science
Key topics
geothermal energy
renewable energy
sustainability
The title suggests that geothermal energy is becoming increasingly relevant or viable, potentially due to advancements or changing circumstances.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Moderate engagementFirst comment
14m
Peak period
9
Hour 1
Avg / period
7
Based on 14 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
11/19/2025, 12:38:44 PM
6h ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
11/19/2025, 12:52:20 PM
14m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
9 comments in Hour 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
11/19/2025, 1:52:31 PM
5h ago
Step 04
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Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Previously, the New Yorker with near identical headline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953568
If money is being spent on this instead of adtech, so be it. Fake it til you make it, energy folks.
We need less e-gold. We need less Facebook and Google and streaming services.
We need less ai scrapers and cloudflare in front of everything.
We are burning up the planet for bits.
It's insane.
To me the most important fact to keep in mind about geothermal is that the energy flow across the crust is ~0.1W/m^2. Compare that to the sun which has >100W/m^2 even at high latitudes. Of course this does not mean geothermal is useless (in particular heat pumps, if you count those, are great), but it goes a long way to explaining why geothermal isn't seeing the same explosion as solar.
It's a misleading comparison. This is only the average amount of heat that diffuses through an ordinary patch of surface, and has more or less nothing to do with how a geothermal plant works, since they don't harvest heat by covering a large area of surface with conducting material.
The surface heat flow is low because rock acts as an insulator. If you drill down to where it's hot and draw the heat up you obviously get orders of magnitude larger flows of energy to the surface.
Iceland and Australia would become new powers imho.
Some places are covered with snow and get under 8 hours of sun a day, but your point still stands.
You know it's pretty compelling when there are several concurrent multi-billion dollar projects to transmit solar power from Africa, by undersea cable, to mainland Europe.
this is already what the earth is doing, but at least now we can direct that energy where we want.
The time has finally come for geothermal energy (newyorker.com)
2 days ago | 268 comments
On the other hand the estimate for a propane heater upgrade from the oil boiler was only $20,000 (I imagine it was an underestimate though). And window units for the 20-odd rooms would be less than $500 each. Or a lot of split systems for $2-4k a room.
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