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No it's not. It exists but it's certainly not common for individual dwelling to use ground source heat pumps, at least in Norway. It is more common in Sweden[1] but still far less common than air source and over 90% of heat pump installations in Norway are air source[2].

The only ground source installations I can think of in Norway serve large office buildings and similar. The largest heat pump installation I know of in Norway is actually a third kind: water source[3]. It takes heat from the Drammen river to provide heat for a district heating system and for keeping the town centre clear of ice in the winter as well as supplying the new hospital with heat.

I imagine that the rest of the Nordic region is similar.

See:

[1] http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JR...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221313882...

[3] https://energiteknikk.net/2023/11/drammen-fjernvarme-storst-...

There was a new in 1988 house in Champaign, Illinois, USA that used the same system, and i mention that because it was a normal modern house, and it's the only one i've heard of with that system.

It seems so smart.

> if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water. That's deeper than most oil wells.

That’s going to be very dependant on location.

Here in NZ there are regions where water is boiling at surface level.

According to the below, 18% of our power is produced with it.

https://www.eeca.govt.nz/insights/energy-in-new-zealand/rene...

I think this looks interesting, but still very early stage. The “150 GW revolution” sounds more like theoretical potential, not something we will see soon in real deployment.

Main problems: drilling is still expensive, managing induced seismic activity is not trivial, permitting can take long time, and you also need transmission infrastructure. Also not yet proven that companies like Fervo can scale this in reliable and low-cost way.

Nope. To efficiently tap geothermal energy, you need to boil something but not necessarily water. Isopentane, for example, boils at 28º at standard pressure, so they pressurize the secondary loop to raise the boiling point close to whatever the primary loop temperature is.

The idea that geothermal only works well at steam temperatures is outdated 20th-century thinking.

> Maybe not quite exactly what you envision.

I'm too zonked to pick out the method from the article - but I'll offer that geo methods can be region specific. What I described fits the SE US, with our 13 month summers and abundant underground water.

I don't know how economical that is, but just as an anecdote - the town I'm from in Poland has district heating to all single family homes, town of about 20k people. And coincidentally, I now live in the UK and a new estate near me has district heating to all the houses they are building, not apartment blocks. So it must make some sense to someone, or they wouldn't be outfitting 100+ houses this way.

Heat pumps require a specific temperate differential to work. So they work in zones with are a bit hotter or colder than you would like and so require moderate amounts of heating or cooling. They don't work in temperate zones nor in very hot or cold places. So Santa Fe or Minneapolis for example they work but Mexico City or San Francisco they don't. If you are in a place where they work and that isn't too dense or has earthquakes, go for it. If not, don't. There are businesses that will help you understand when they do and don't make sense. Those businesses don't sell heat pumps though (the businesses that sell things will almost always tell you it works, even when it doesn't, for example PV in the UK doesn't work).

The water at these temperature / depths has a lot of dissolved salts and minerals so it's not (human / ag) usable. Modern designs are closed loop systems where production wells bringing the hot water to the surface go through a heat exchanger to a different working fluid to drive the turbine and then is re-injected back into the reservoir. There is consumptive water use for fracking the reservoirs in these types of enhanced geothermal systems, but beyond that it's more water redistribution in the area around the well systems where re-injection and production lead to different pressurization from pumping / natural ground water replenishment rates.

> One of the problems with the data center boom is its use of fresh water. How does geo-thermal plants use water and how much?

Baring leaks, ground source heat pump geo will consume no water at all. Water is pumped from one layer of the aquifer and is returned to a slightly higher layer.

I dont know why this keeps coming up? It is a closed loop system. The water aren't used at all.

They're way ahead of the microwave drilling people.

There's no reason why this shouldn't work. But they've been at it for 9 years, with considerable funding, and it doesn't really work yet. That's a concern.

The core breakthroughs were working with partners to develop PDC bits that enable high rates of penetration in drilling out these horizontal wells in high temp granitic rock and then demonstrating plug / perf fracture networks that have a high engineered permeability in these source rocks to support economical flow rates and heat transfer. These were considerable advances over previous efforts.

There will be other learning by doing advances in how you structure your power plant design to take advantage of these to make practical long term power production possible (well spacing and injection / production placement / flow rate and temperature decline management).

> PG&E for example has several geothermal plants which have been economic disasters and were and are being shutdown.

Those are very different from EGS

Sounds like marketing hype to me.

Geothermal reservoirs exist at depth.

Drilling horizontally doesn’t magically reduce the depth, nor the problem that drilling in to hot rock is like drilling in to plasticine, at least for temperatures worth working with.

EGS has been around for at least 15 years. See AltaRock Energy as an example (I’m sure there are others). They started almost 20 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaRock_Energy

So it basically says nothing useful other than try to generate hype and make them look good.

Cost is like 90-99% of what matters. Last year, China installed 300GW of new renewables and 0GW of geothermal, despite geothermal being "an inexhaustible 24/7 production capable".

Geothermal will compete with solar if they can get the cost low enough. I hope they succeed!

https://imgur.com/a/dV8gk3R

can you find curves like this for any other power source?

also batteries are getting exponentially cheap too

Now USMCA (if you are American) or CUSMA (if you are Canadian) or T-MEC (if you are Mexican).

Canadian United States Mexico Agreement.

It is up for review July 1st I believe.

Or, as you've presented, three of the twenty three independent states and territories of North America.