I don't know why this isn't done more in the US. At least with thermal water, my understanding is that you don't need huge temperature differentials and this is cost effective on a pretty small scale.
I bet you can get some huge differentials next to volcanos or Yellowstone. You'll need to fight conservationists (understandably) but clean energy is clean energy.
And every gigajoule you take from Yellowstone is one less gigajoule for the next supervolcano eruption.
We’ll never know unless we do more research. I don’t think we can make a dent in the amount of energy under Yellowstone either way - if it’s going to blow, it will and there’s nothing we can do.
If we could take enough energy out of Yellowstone to make it less supervolcanic, we’d have a hard problem dealing with whatever waste heat would be left after consuming that much energy.
The excess power, that is the power that is not reaching the surface by normal processes and that keeps heating up the volcano seems to be in the order of a few gigawatts. This is absolutely possible with cooling measures like they are used for large power plants.
If a lot of extraction is done, geysers and other surface geothermal activity reduce or stop. Rotorua, New Zealand had these issues back in the 1980s when everyone had a private bore. Blocking them up helped a lot.
There is data to go by that supports that these systems are highly dynamic and human activity around them do feed back into the system irreversibly effecting them. There is a hot spring 10km from where I lived called Gunnuhver. It was a tiny little mud pool that steamed a little, but it was fun watching the mud boil. In 2006 they raised a giant (and really ugly) power plant close by. Now the mud pool is unrecognizable from before. It is massive, it is hard to see the mud under the amount of steam it releases. It is a common believe that the geothermal power plant is the direct contributor to this change.
However there are ways to mitigate the uncertainty. You can start small, observe, and if still stable, expand. I believe that is how most new geothermal plants are done today in Iceland.
I would really like to see a project like this actually attempted. Protests against it would be very understandable because of the impact of several large power plants. I think the biggest issue might be that they also need to release the waste heat somehow. That would mean water consumption and cooling towers with steam clouds that might be visible from far away.
Please don't. Yellowstone is a pristine nature reserve. There's many other areas in nearby Idaho you probably could tap into similar thermal energy without ruining the first National Park. Yellowstone is also in one of the least densely populated areas in the country so it's very difficult to transport without massive energy loss by resistance.
There are approximately twenty supervolcanoes around the world, so I wouldn't worry to much. There is an almost supervulcano in Italy that is also much closer to where power is needed [0].
Remoteness is not that much of a problem though: (ultra) high-voltage direct-current ("(U)HVDC") power lines have losses in the order of 3% per 1000km (that's 620mi) which is very acceptable. China has power lines that move the power equivalent of several nuclear power plants over thousands of kilometers for example.
Yellowstone is not just "a supervolcano", as mentioned it's a natural preserve and generally beautiful place. I'm pretty sure there are enough other geologically active sites closer to populations and with less history that there's no reason to bother with Yellowstone
As I already said, I absolutely understand the concerns. That does not mean that it might not become inevitable to do something about it one day. In the long run, the choice seem to be that it either blows up right away (in the geologically-near future) or to extract enough energy to at least delay the disaster.
Edit, as reply to child comment: here is the NASA report that concludes that it is possible to cool supervolcanoes:
Think bigger! Imagine it as the maintenance node and transportation hub for the new coast to coast hyperloop network! All subterran! Not only powered by renewable energy, but powering the entire network and nation by subterran HVDC also!
maybe, but if not, and (hypothetically) if it could solve the problem of carbon neutral energy and therefore halt global climate change, destruction of Yellowstone as a 'beautiful place' could well be a price worth paying in the long run. i don't think it's likely though, fortunately for Yellowstone!
For accuracy's sake: resistance losses in long-distance high-voltage AC or DC transmission are actually quite low. On the order of 6%.
The majority of generating losses (about 60% of input thermal energy) is due to Carnot efficiency losses, not transmission inefficiencies. There's also some loss in transformers (ramping voltages up or down), and rectifiers (converting AC to DC and vice versa).
But the biggest losses are in going from thermal to mechanical energy itself.
There have to be some additional tradeoffs with distance? What city would you hope to power with energy from Yellowstone? Seattle? Denver? What would be the realistic costs of getting energy to those places? How much infrastructure build out would be needed? Would the tradeoffs be clearly worth it?
Keep in mind that the same general region is a major coal-producing zone presently, and much of that coal is burned locally for generation: it's cheaper to move the electricity than the coal used to generate it.
This also means that a substantial amount of the transmission infrastructure is already in place.
The problem is that there are no large population centers near Yellowstone. Maybe you could reach Salt Lake City or Denver without prohibitive transmission line inefficiency?
Maybe increasing automation means that we can build more factories and data centers near these sources of massive renewable energy potential without struggling to convince workers to live in these remote locations (although that might not be a huge challenge for a beautiful place like Yellowstone).
High-capacity long-distance electrical transmission is actually both cheap and efficient, relative to many other energy options.
It's far less expensive to build one high-capacity line than many low-capacity lines (e.g., serving wind farms or solar farms).
Geothermal has the added benefit that it's dispatchable power. It can be extracted on demand, when the need arises. As a complement to wind and solar, it's actually a great fit.
If you have a plant that can make 100 MW continuously then that is what you do with it. Unless someone is going to pay you to turn it off, you keep it running.
Depends on if you're considering the generator perspective or the grid perspective.
The grid doesn't simply want megawatts. It wants a balance of supply and demand, and a minimisation of outages.
Wind and solar cannot be spun up on demand. Hydro can be, and in general is (much lower-capacity hydro is grid smoothing). Hydro will even suck capacity off the grid where possible (pumped storage).
Geo which can load-match, disable when grid is oversupplied, and fill in for cloudy & windless days, makes all kinds of sense at the grid level.
With geothermal, though, you don't actually want to run flat-out all the time, as the geothermal reservoir does require time to recover, whether that's groundwater refresh or heating up after a period of high generation which extracts heat faster than it is transmitted through surrounding rock (most cases) or magma (not yet a major utilisation mode).
Soaking up excess generating capacity through interruptable heavy loads is somewhat better suited to wind or solar. If you have a task you can divert electricity that will be generated anyway to, so much the better. That's what pumped-hydro, desalination, grid-scale battery banks, or fuel synthesis represent.
The "irony" here is that it's frackers who are going to drill the geothermal wells. If they start seeing clearly, they'll realize that green energy could mean a juicy paycheck.
It is expensive, and if you don't have a large yard, the cost goes way up as you need to install a vertical system instead of a horizontal one.
Tree roots mess with the piping, and you have to be careful to not drive or set anything over it (much like a septic drain field, though not as fragile).
