Can we generate electricity from magma?

[DSeid]

Well there does seem to some advantage to going after the hotter stuff. That link discusses a project in Iceland that aims for “super-critical” water - heated under pressure miles down in a volcano:

The IDDP well will dip two and a half miles belowground into a pocket of water heated to 1,100° by a bubble of magma. Water normally exists as steam at this temperature, but the immense pressure of the rock above holds the water in a near-liquid state. Once the water squirts to the surface, it will retain nearly all the energy that heated and compressed it. It is virtually certain that engineers will have to redesign existing heat exchangers to handle the water’s heat and potentially corrosive chemistry, but a plant running on naturally occurring supercritical water could churn out up to 500 megawatts, on par with a small nuclear reactor and half of what a large coal plant produces. Unlike these, though, the IDDP’s zero-emissions power source will last as long as the Earth’s core continues to heat rainwater.

Apparently the project is not completed quite yet.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@TriPolar

It places the power generation closer to the end user, minimizing transmission losses.

Doesn’t DC transmission eliminate a lot of transmission losses?

Anyway, my overall point is that going after the hot stuff via a bore-hole seems to limit the scale of the project. Remove the 6km of soil in our way and we can build a power project on scale with the Earth itself. Bigger than anything ever done anywhere. But yeah, maybe it is impractical, I never even considered this before now. OTOH, global warming really isn’t practical either, we gotta think of something…

[TriPolar]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

Doesn’t DC transmission eliminate a lot of transmission losses?

Yes. But it leaves a lot also. And large centralized electricity sources increase the chance of major blackouts.

Anyway, my overall point is that going after the hot stuff via a bore-hole seems to limit the scale of the project. Remove the 6km of soil in our way and we can build a power project on scale with the Earth itself. Bigger than anything ever done anywhere. But yeah, maybe it is impractical, I never even considered this before now. OTOH, global warming really isn’t practical either, we gotta think of something…

Going after existing hot spots has worked well. It just doesn’t seem to be worth all the costs of creating new ones. Regular drilling should work pretty well. But in all these concepts the various problems have to be worked out. Among other things you have to make sure you aren’t going to contaminate aquifers, have contingency plans to deal with shaft collapses or fluid loss, and take the blame for earthquakes whether or not you caused them.

But why not just scale down your plans a little? Figure out what the largest practical geothermal plant could be. It would certainly be worth the costs of additional excavation and drilling to build the optimally sized power plant.