[Music]

Gideon Lichfield: Lauren, have you ever ever met somebody with an concept that appears fully on the market, after which whenever you speak to them they persuade you it is truly completely affordable, after which a short while later you end up considering it is nonetheless outlandish, however you truly cannot clarify why.

Lauren Goode: Yes. I work in media.

[Laughter]

Lauren Goode: So we encounter individuals like this.

Gideon Lichfield: Happens on daily basis.

Lauren Goode: All the time. Yeah. But are you telling me that is what occurred to you and Jamie Beard?

Gideon Lichfield: That’s proper. I’m discovering myself on this bizarre head area the place I concurrently assume her concepts about geothermal energy are completely wild and clearly completely proper on the similar time.

Lauren Goode: But how does it truly work? So, you’re taking that warmth from the core of the Earth, you one way or the other faucet it to energy electrical energy vegetation as an alternative of utilizing fossil fuels or wind or photo voltaic.

Gideon Lichfield: Yeah. You’ve obtained it. Exactly.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Gideon Lichfield: And it is an inexhaustible useful resource. It would take 17 billion years for the warmth on the Earth’s core to expire, which is manner 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. Almost one hundred pc of their warmth comes from geothermal.

Lauren Goode: Interesting. So Iceland has found out not solely fermented meals but additionally geothermal power.

Gideon Lichfield: And yogurt and sweaters.

Lauren Goode: And scorching springs, which I’m guessing are associated to the geothermal power.

Gideon Lichfield: To the geothermal power. Indeed.

Lauren Goode: If Iceland’s figured it out, why hasn’t everybody else?

Gideon Lichfield: Well, Iceland simply occurs to have very uncommon geology with a numerous lively volcanoes. So the geothermal warmth comes up very near the floor there. In different locations, 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 only have a visceral response. They’re considering they do not need individuals drilling of their neighborhoods, or there is a lack of funding. That means we have not found out how to do this very effectively.

Gideon Lichfield: Exactly 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 Seventies when oil costs have 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 information on how possible geothermal could be at a big scale.

Lauren Goode: So what’s Jamie Beard’s large thought round this?

Gideon Lichfield: Well, she mentioned why begin from scratch and attempt to discover funding for this costly sort of drilling after we have already got a whole trade dedicated to digging deep within the floor, which is after all the oil and fuel trade.