PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

What are the particular advantages of this technology over both what we already have and the next generation of nuclear? There's been a lot in the papers lately about nuclear fusion. We've all seen this big drop in prices for solar. What is the compelling case for geothermal?

Oh my gosh. Let's start. For one, geothermal is baseload. It's 24/7. You don't need energy storage for geothermal. That is a big deal. When you talk with utilities struggling right now with increasing intermittence on the grid, and you look at where energy storage is in terms of scalability, for grid scale energy storage, having a clean baseload source of energy in the very near term is an exciting prospect. Geothermal also has a tiny footprint compared to other renewables. If you look at sources of clean energy, like solar and wind, the geothermal footprint, comparatively megawatt to megawatt, is about 1 percent of that of solar and wind. That's a big deal in a space-constrained world, particularly if you're wanting to put power plants near population centers, where there are people and you don't have a lot of land. That's another really exciting thing. Job creation: Geothermal per megawatt creates three or four times more jobs than other renewables do. I think that's a really interesting concept. And what I've really grabbed on to, and you mentioned nuclear, are next-gen nuclear concepts coming down the pike. [...]

 For geothermal to be ready for prime time -- meaning we're getting teams into the field, getting technologies demonstrated, full-scale, get oil and gas engaged and start scaling this thing -- it's a drop in a bucket comparatively in terms of what's needed for investments. About maybe a half a billion dollars worth of field deployments might get us to a place for geothermal where we could have a scalable concept ready to go, and we'd be off on another shale boom, but this time for clean energy. I think that's really an interesting thing to think about. What's it going to take to get massive scale in terms of the dollars invested? And that's where geothermal, I think, really bests nuclear. But the thing that I'm really excited about, of course, and this is what my focus is right now, is the fact that we have an existing, globally present industry with millions of highly trained individuals in the workforce that are perfectly suited to take geothermal to scale really fast.

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