According to a Canary Media email alert the hot new thing is… solar? No. Wind? No. Nuclear? No. Hydrogen? No. Instead it’s “next-gen geothermal” and it’s all the rage with, um government. And Meta, fresh from its disastrous failure to launch the metaverse. “Sage Geosystems has unveiled a huge generation deal with Meta, just after announcing its first commercial geothermal storage project earlier in August. Oh, and the U.S. government dropped $31M for geothermal projects yesterday. It’s a real groundswell of support.” In reality a demonstration project for vast, virtue-signaling social media platform and a big government subsidy don’t add up to a “groundswell of support”, they signal its conspicuous absence.

Now to be fair Meta, né Facebook, was itself such a preposterous business proposition, considered rationally, that we might want to hold off on scoffing at anything it subsequently undertakes. (Seriously, if it did not exist, is there one person on the whole planet Earth who’d be sitting around thinking “You know what would really make my life better?” and then would describe this thing?) But would you invest your own money on being told:

“On August 13, Sage Geosystems unveiled plans to build what it called the world’s first geopressured geothermal energy storage facility, located in Christine, Texas, on the site of a coal plant owned by the San Miguel Electric Cooperative. The installation will pump water underground, building up pressure that can be released later, when power demand spikes, in order to spin a turbine and send electricity to the grid. The company successfully tested the technology, which it has referred to as an ‘earthen battery,’ at an abandoned gas well in San Isidro, Texas, in 2023. The facility will use grid power to begin with, but Sage is looking into the possibility of installing its own solar in the near term, Taff told Canary Media. Once online later this year, the installation will be able to discharge 3 megawatts of electricity to the Texas grid for between six and 10 hours at a time.”

Not might. Will. So say the boosters. In this case Canary Media, who explain further that this new old thing will work for sure this time:

“Sage’s two new announcements are the latest evidence of the ongoing renaissance in geothermal energy production. The energy source is not entirely new. The largest geothermal power plant complex in the world, built on a field of hot springs in Northern California, has operated continuously since 1960. But historically, geothermal energy has been viable only in certain geological regions, like swaths of the American West or Iceland, where heat simmers just beneath the earth’s surface. Those constraints have capped the potential of traditional geothermal energy, and today it accounts for just 0.4 percent of U.S. electricity generation.”

Yeah, it’s that pesky thing with the Second Law of Thermodynamics again, which makes it impractical to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.

It is a bit of an issue. As the Manhattan Contrarian invites us dourly:

“Come here for the latest news on how the so-called ‘energy transition’ is grinding to a halt. No amount of government handouts can make this ridiculously uneconomic fantasy work. My last post on the subject, on July 20, reported on the collapse of a large ‘green hydrogen’ project in Australia, with the stated loss of an investment of about $2 billion (Australian) (equivalent to about $1.3 billion U.S.). It seems that that one was just the tip of the iceberg. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a substantial roundup of the financial status of a half-dozen or so so-called ‘clean fuel’ projects. The headlines from the print and online versions tell you what you need to know. In the print edition (page B3) it’s ‘Clean-Fuel Startups Begin to Fizzle Out.’ Online, it’s ‘Clean Fuel Startups Were Supposed to Be the Next Big Thing. Now They Are Collapsing.’ As the headlines indicate, pretty much all of these ‘clean fuels’ ventures are failing. Who could have guessed?”

But such things need not detain us, or at least them. Those are the old Next Big Things. This neogeothermal is the new NBT. Or something. Anything with subsidies. Another Canary Media piece avers that “Georgia voters could make or break their state’s clean energy jobs boom”. And while you might think it’s the effectiveness of the work being done that matters, they see it differently:

“The swing state has been a big winner of Biden’s clean energy manufacturing incentives. Now, its voters will play an outsized role in deciding whether those gains endure.”

Those gains being the huge subsidies the Inflation Reduction Act confers, despite its name. Apparently Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes might be the difference between Kamala Harris continuing the subsidies and Donald Trump cancelling them. (Or not, because Congress rather than the President passes laws, to nitpick.)

Thus, and yes, Canary again:

“How Dalton, Georgia, went from Carpet Capital to Solartown, USA/ This northwest Georgia community got in early on the national boom in cleantech manufacturing spurred by the climate law, and it’s reaping the benefits.”

Not the customers, because solar isn’t a good deal. Nor the taxpayers who have to subsidize everything. The benefits go to the people effective at getting paid to make what the state decrees people should want rather than what they do. See it’s all in the free money:

“Federal policy can’t will a nationwide manufacturing renaissance into being; factories have to go somewhere, and that’s where state and local leaders come in. Georgia demonstrates that enthusiastic state leadership can matter more than the party in power: Plenty of states with liberal leaders and aggressive climate targets have whiffed on attracting clean energy factories, while Georgia cleaned up.”

Whether the stuff actually works doesn’t matter, if someone else is paying and you’re good at elbowing your way to the trough and diving in. Now back to our geothermal dreams of reality:

“Thanks to recent technological advances, many ported over from the oil and gas industry, geothermal energy could soon be unshackled from its geographic limitations. There’s some amount of heat, and therefore energy, underground everywhere — the challenge is accessing it. That’s what Sage Geosystems and other next-generation geothermal startups are trying to figure out how to do in a cost-effective and consistent way.”

Until then, it’s awfully tempting to invest other people’s money in it and get a photo op cutting a ribbon or something. And then go back to your conventionally powered limousine or, in this case, your conventionally-powered alternative energy plant.