It’s hard to be a climate optimist these days. With Trumpism ascendant in the United States, Pierre Poilievre well on his way to axing the carbon tax in Canada, and climate policy turning into a political wedge in Europe, there aren’t many silver linings in all these climate clouds. But just when things might seem darkest, a new dawn is promising to emerge with geothermal energy. If it does, it will deliver the final (and, until now, missing) piece in the energy transition puzzle: clean baseload electricity.
Geothermal isn’t a new technology, of course. The idea of tapping into the heat trapped inside deeper reaches of the earth has been around for decades, and has been exploited in places like Iceland where it’s particularly close to the surface. But for most parts of the world, that heat — a free and potentially limitless source of energy — has remained out of reach until now.
While geothermal currently makes up less than one per cent of the world’s clean energy and a significantly smaller fraction of its overall energy consumption, the International Energy Agency thinks it could meet as much as 15 per cent of global demand growth out to 2050. “This would mean the cost-effective deployment of as much as 800 GW of geothermal power capacity worldwide,” it said in a recent report, “producing almost 6,000 terawatt-hours per year, equivalent to the current electricity demand today of the United States and India combined.”
Ironically, geothermal advocates can........