jakebol

I'm not a hard core nuclear fan but this Fervo project is coming in at about FOAK nuclear projects in terms of project costs per power output. It hasn't had to go to the public either for the cost of its power given the commercial off takers. I think people seem to think that enhanced geothermal is going to be cheaper than nuclear but many geothermal projects are signing contracts for $100+ MW/h power costs. EGS has the potential to be a considerable water consumer (non-potable) if field leak off rates are high and that sets up for potential public pushback given the arid farming/ranching environments these plants will be situated in the great basin. Like any technology there are advantages and tradeoffs, I see both technologies struggling without additional policy support.

A lot of geothermal energy investment happened after the California Public utilities commission issued procurement mandates for clean firm power after SB 100 passed.

I don't see why necessarily, they are in the same ballpark LCOE cost wise. The advantage of enhanced geothermal is that you can potentially build it relatively quickly but that is more a policy choice.

Enhanced geothermal are engineered geothermal systems in naturally hot dry rock where natural fluid convection and permeability are not found. The term comes from the fact that conventional geothermal power plants are often tapping into natural near surface convective systems with high water permeability. Bringing that heat to the near surface also heats the surrounding rock over hundreds of thousands of years so one way to "enhance" the output of traditional geothermal power plants was to theoretically engineer permeability into these surrounding rock formations. Fervo's facility is built next to an existing conventional geothermal power plant.

Not really, it is more the limiting physics of extracting heat through conductive transfer in the rock. The rate of heat extraction through fluid convection has to be less than the rate of conductive replenishment though the basement rock to not get thermal drawdown and these rates are often not economical.

Fervo engineers for thermal drawdown up front, it is well known that for EGS to maintain constant power output you need to periodically re-stimulate the field after a period of some number of years. What matters for the economics is the rate of eventual drawdown. The nameplate 100MW is also a bit misleading as it represents gross power output without taking into account the parasitic load of pumping which for an EGS plant is quite high. There was a ~60% parasitic load for their test facility and IIRC Fervo is eventually targeting 30-40% for the commercial power plant.

That is one part, the other part is that you would get more persistent high pressure blocking patterns over Europe due to reordered atmosphere circulation which will lead to more intense droughts. That is what happened this summer.

Current research is that it would get a lot drier than it is currently. Also the AMOC collapse process would play out over many decades (~50-100 years) it will not be a sudden event.

SSRIs have much more clinical evidence of efficacy for addressing anxiety disorders vs a placebo than depression. The effect size is ~0.7 vs 0.2 in meta studies.

We are certainly seeing higher monetary velocity in certain sectors. That usually follows from real economic expansion but could also be due in part to inflation.

Extensible trait support seems like another big one if the ecosystem is going to significantly grow. Not having clearly defined traits in the language made larger projects composing many libraries in Julia difficult.

You forgot to add that he was in a relationship and later engaged to the chief of staff at Anthropic while raising and running his fund, but I’m sure he had no access to material non-public information.

I don’t know if I would trust opinion writing to be predictive of a growing reactive populist movement. I would caution people being dismissive of how angry people are, data centers are just a political focusing mechanism. It will get worse of course if all of this ends with an economic shock.