There has been some effort on going to really deep depths in IDDP (Icelandic Deep Drilling Project) - see https://iddp.is/about/
If I remember correctly, they were never able to hit their goals because of drilling down into magma chambers. The steam coming up was also of a different scale than regular geothermal steam, causing corrosion that has not been dealt with before.
As far as I know, the main problem is coming up with casing materials that can withstand the extreme corrosive environment at scale and at cost, and for IDDP that's one of the main focuses.
From what I saw on an earlier post about this technology is that the mm wave drilling technique actually causes the bedrock walls of the bore hole to turn to a type of glass and then no casing is needed. I will try and find the source on that.
Yeah, so drilling into magma chambers might not be the best approach.
Iceland sits on a big magma chamber, so they would need to proceed differently. Still, they have a lot of practical experience with utility-scale geothermal energy extraction the rest of us ought to learn from.
Seems like hitting a magma chamber would simply shorten the depth you have to drill to, or am I missing something? Geology and drilling are decidedly outside my areas of expertise.
Liquid rock is much messier to deal with than hot, solid rock. In particular, it is often under pressure, and full of dissolved volatiles, and wants to force its way up your borehole and all over your equipment, personnel, and neighborhood.
Or abandon failed ideas like nukes, and build out what has proven overwhelmingly better on every axis.
A very respectable amount of utility power is generated geothermally, and has been for decades without mishap. What is new here is a drilling method. Power extraction from a hot borehole is mature tech.
which produce 778 billion kwh in the united states
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> A very respectable amount of utility power is generated geothermally
16 billion kwh
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> and has been for decades without mishap.
More deaths have occurred from geothermal, total, than nuclear, despite that nuclear delivers 48x the power.
Guatemala City: 33.
Dieng: 41.
Fenton Hill: 12.
Sorik Marapi: 5.
Soultz-sous-Foretz: 19.
Calpine: three times. 1, 5, 4.
El Salvador: 12.
Sumatera: 6.
Leyte: two incidents: 5, 17.
Sarulla: 18.
Brisbane: 14.
Reykavik: 2.
It'll get worse. AltaRock had to be stopped twice for causing earthquakes. Strasbourg was permanently stopped. So was dover.
Pohang's earthquakes put a city under lockdown and killed two people.
There exists no decade since the launch of geothermal power where at least 25 people didn't die. Nuclear has only had that count once.
I am sure you have also totted up all the accidents that occurred mining, refining, or transporting uranium. And, everybody poisoned by runoff from mine tailings leaching into their water supply. (Some American Indian tribes, for example, have lawsuits on over that.) And, deaths in construction accidents during plant construction, and in transporting the thousands of tons of concrete and steel. And, mining the limestone, manufacturing the concrete, and mining and making the steel.
> You seem to have thought of a solution but not a problem. What problem would this solve?
For the people I've talked with so far, it means 1) they don't have to re-implement the spreadsheet logic in their server, and 2) whenever the spreadsheet is updated (either Google sheet edit, or an Excel file is uploaded again) the API is automatically up to date.
Some of these people are already creating GRID documents backed by their existing spreadsheets, and have a use case to make an API call from their own systems to perform a computation that already lives in the spreadsheet.
Notice I'm not talking about writing data to the spreadsheet and using it as a database. I'm talking about reading values from a spreadsheet model through a queryable API. Not sure how AirTable and DataTables compare – will have to look into that.
> I'm talking about reading values from a spreadsheet model through a queryable API.
OK, I understand now.
There are an absolute ton of these products already. AirTable is the most famous, but Google and Microsoft also have official web APIs that do the same thing.
Just whatever data is being shown interactively, to also be available as a file that you can download (in order that you can process it locally).
Otherwise, if you have a link to the interactive report but not to the data as a downloadable file, it won't work so well; users (at least myself) would complain.
Thanks for elaborating – I think I see your point.
The good news is, for your own GRID documents, they're going to be backed by a spreadsheet file you made or already have access to.
However, in the case of GRID documents made by others, it's up to them if they want to make the underlying spreadsheet model available to the users viewing the GRID document. You can see an example of this here: https://grid.is/@sigrid/scenario-analysis-user-funnel-P1yGUF... – at the bottom of the document, the document author has made the spreadsheet available for anyone.
This problem can be so detrimental for teams who want to measure the success of their products it's hard to put into words (ಥ﹏ಥ)
This is exactly the reason why we built Avo (https://www.avo.app). It's designed for everyone on the team: product managers, analysts, data scientists and developers. It works by generating code derived from an analytics spec, which you create and maintain in a user friendly web app.
You can check it out and reach out to me a@avo.sh, I'm happy to help any way I can.
If I remember correctly, they were never able to hit their goals because of drilling down into magma chambers. The steam coming up was also of a different scale than regular geothermal steam, causing corrosion that has not been dealt with before.
As far as I know, the main problem is coming up with casing materials that can withstand the extreme corrosive environment at scale and at cost, and for IDDP that's one of the main focuses.