IEA Report on Energy Production

yes

 

No. It’s the cleanest of the fossil fuels.

 

It's still a fossil fuel although it's cleaner than other fossil fuels such as coal or petroleum-based liquid fuels (fuel oil, diesel, gasoline, etc).

 

America has its first "enhanced" geothermal power plant on-line, in Nevada. The plant drills deeper than a typical geothermal plant to access deeper sources of heat. The plant is rated for 3.5 MW. Google is helping to finance the project to support its massive data centers in Nevada.

America's first 'enhanced' geothermal plant just got up and running

 

The geothermal plant (see above) has a power cost of about $450/MW-h, which is much more than what most people pay for their power. After some optimization, they hope to get the costs down to $45/MW-h within a dozen years.

 

Never understood why we weren't bigger into hydroelectric. I know some pacific northwest states eave it and their energy bills are pretty cheap comparatively.

 

Damming up rivers usually upsets ecosystems. California is in the process of tearing down dams on their rivers. Plus rainfall is not very reliable in most of the western states (south of Washington state and part of Oregon). In fact, the west was largely settled during the 1900's, which was considered the "wet" century in the 1,000-year cycle of the west (only about one century in ten is considered a wet century for the west; the other nine are dry to some extent or another).

Hydroelectric was very big a century ago (80-120 years) when most of the dams were built. Labor and building materials for dams were also much cheaper than they are today. It is very expensive to do major projects in the U.S. nowadays.

 

I did not see any specific reference to their current cost being at or below $90/mwh.

This seems like it would be very achievable given the experience we have with fracking. Where does the water come from that is forced down the well and comes back as steam?

 

My bad. I miscalculated the 90% reduction of cost to $45/MW-h. A current cost of $450/MW-h could be reduced by 90% to yield a future cost of $45/MW-h. I think the article was reluctant to state the current cost for fear that people would faint. That is a fairly unsupportable cost by current standards, but may not be terrible for a first attempt at a new technology.