On 21/10/2020 14:30, newshound wrote:
On 21/10/2020 13:23, Chris Hogg wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2020 04:51:34 -0700 (PDT), harry
wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZLo0-lwK1k

Been talked about for several decades. The Rosemanowes 'hot rocks'
project in Cornwall in the 1970's was one such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemanowes_Quarry
Never came to anything, even though it was said the be the site in the
UK with the highest heat flow in England at 120 milliwatts per square
metre (which sounds rather small to me; if correct, perhaps it's not
surprising nothing came of it).

There are a few other sites across the world, but mostly you need hot
rock not too far below the surface, otherwise it becomes too expensive
to exploit. Iceland is often given as an example, and great claims
made for it and how the UK will benefit from an interconnector up to
Iceland, which seems to have gone quite. But Iceland's total
geothermal capacity is only 750MW, so they don't make much use of it
themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothe...wer_in_Iceland


CEGB were doing research on this in the 1970s from the Marchwood
Engineering Labs, on the Solent. Conveniently, this region is another
reasonable hot spot.

IIRC there turned out to be two issues, I think the main ones was that
the output would drop off significantly after ~ 50 years because you
would have cooled off such a lot of rock by then, and the other was you
lose something like half of the water that you pump down.

There is this that works:
https://www.engie.co.uk/energy/distr...y/southampton/



I think that Marchwood were also looking at wave power (who remembers
Salter's ducks?) and windmills. Prior to that they had quite a
substantial rig looking into Magnetohydrodynamics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet...amic_generator