[Music]
Gideon Lichfield: Lauren, have you ever ever met somebody with an concept that appears utterly on the market, after which while you speak to them they persuade you it is really completely cheap, after which a short while later you end up considering it is nonetheless outlandish, however you really cannot clarify why.
Lauren Goode: Sure. I work in media.
[Laughter]
Lauren Goode: So we encounter individuals like this.
Gideon Lichfield: Occurs daily.
Lauren Goode: On a regular basis. Yeah. However are you telling me that is what occurred to you and Jamie Beard?
Gideon Lichfield: That is proper. I am discovering myself on this bizarre head area the place I concurrently suppose her concepts about geothermal vitality are completely wild and clearly completely proper on the identical time.
Lauren Goode: However how does it really work? So, you’re taking that warmth from the core of the Earth, you in some way faucet it to energy electrical energy vegetation as an alternative of utilizing fossil fuels or wind or photo voltaic.
Gideon Lichfield: Yeah. You’ve got acquired it. Precisely.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Gideon Lichfield: And it is an inexhaustible useful resource. It could take 17 billion years for the warmth on the Earth’s core to expire, which is means longer than the solar will final. And geothermal is already broadly utilized in locations like Iceland. They energy two-thirds of their houses with it. Nearly 100% of their warmth comes from geothermal.
Lauren Goode: Attention-grabbing. So Iceland has found out not solely fermented meals but in addition geothermal vitality.
Gideon Lichfield: And yogurt and sweaters.
Lauren Goode: And sizzling springs, which I am guessing are associated to the geothermal vitality.
Gideon Lichfield: To the geothermal vitality. Certainly.
Lauren Goode: If Iceland’s figured it out, why hasn’t everybody else?
Gideon Lichfield: Properly, Iceland simply occurs to have very uncommon geology with a numerous lively volcanoes. So the geothermal warmth comes up very near the floor there. Somewhere else, you would need to drill fairly deep to get it.
Lauren Goode: And let me guess, the second you convey up drilling fairly deep to individuals, they simply have a visceral response. They’re considering they do not need individuals drilling of their neighborhoods, or there is a lack of funding. Which means we have not found out how to try this very effectively.
Gideon Lichfield: Precisely that. So geothermal is utilized in a couple of locations within the US on a small scale, and it had a little bit of a second within the Nineteen Seventies when oil costs had been very excessive. So there was curiosity in funding geothermal analysis, however then that fizzled. And since then we have gone all in on renewables, which simply means that there’s not a number of knowledge on how possible geothermal could be at a big scale.
Lauren Goode: So what’s Jamie Beard’s huge thought round this?
Gideon Lichfield: Properly, she stated why begin from scratch and attempt to discover funding for this costly sort of drilling after we have already got a complete trade dedicated to digging deep within the floor, which is in fact the oil and fuel trade.