The Weekly Anthropocene: Geothermal Energy
A Deep Dive into the Wild, Weird World of Humanity and its Biosphere.
The Background: Failure to Launch
Back when this writer was a wee lad, learning about renewable energy in the first decade of the 21st century, it was often described as a triad of technologies: solar, wind, and geothermal. Today, you’re much more likely to hear “wind and solar”, or perhaps “wind, water, and solar (WWS)” to include hydropower. Why is this?
In the 2010s, wind and solar boomed enormously, becoming very cheap very fast, revolutionizing the world’s energy market and looking set to dominate new energy capacity built through the 2020s and beyond. It’s one of the great technological success stories of our time, and gives the world a fighting chance to avoid truly catastrophic climate change. You’ve heard this story before, often in this newsletter. Solar is now the cheapest electricity in the world. “Renewables are set to account for almost 95% of the increase in global power capacity through 2026, with solar PV alone providing more than half.” Wind energy grew 1,312.21% glob…
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