Good look on your surgery, and thank you for your insights.
Supporting authoritarianism to protect financial interests harms society in the long run - and you can't eat money nor buy a society pleasant to live in.
You wouldn't necessarily need an SQL frontend as it's readonly anyway, and there are multiple ways of letting SQLite access databases in S3 buckets, e.g. https://github.com/michalc/sqlite-s3-query
Confidentiality should be agreed on in a sane manner.
That said - full strategic insight into the vision and what‘s done to achieve it and welcoming input will engage employees in a very productive way, but requires free flow of information.
Usually, the benefits outweight the problems _by far_.
The first geothermal wells in Germany have exhausted their heat gradient; after less than 30 years … so, unless you’re actually in Iceland or the Canaries or something similar, this might not even sustainable for even one full generation …
> The first geothermal wells in Germany have exhausted their heat gradient
The first hit on google for this phrase is .. this comment, so could you provide a less circular citation please? :)
I do understand that all heat is local, you cannot extract heat faster than it can flow to the point of extraction, which is dependent on the R value of the rock and whether you've drilled into a liquid area or not.
(I wonder if there are some oil fields that have high enough below-ground temperatures to be worth using for this? The drilling is done, a sunk cost, and the wells produce mostly dirty water)
From what I’ve heard you just need to let the reservoir “recharge” for about 30 years to get the heat back. So worst case you need to build twice as many geothermal plants. It’s not that different from nuclear power plants that need to be decommissioned after some decades… except you can just leave borehole and reuse it after a couple of decades or so.
It’s also better than drilling for oil/gas.. where you need to keep drilling constantly to get more oil/gas.
And as some here have pointed out, if there’s an excess of energy, which there will often be in a world with lots of renewables, you can pump heat back down into the reservoir, extending its lifetime.
So as always, at just comes down to cost. And I truly believe that if we put as much money into geothermal as we have with fossil fuels and nuclear power, it’ll be the cheapest and most environmentally friendly way of making power in a decade or two.
They can either recharge naturally (i.e. with earth conduction), but it takes a lot of time.
Or you can also recharge them during the summer, either with solar thermal panels, or on a small measure, by running your HVAC "backwards" (i.e. cooling your home and thus heating the wells)
The wells would recharge even without Earth's existing surrounding heat reserves. Moon (and Sun) induced tidal forces do manifest not only in the body of water but also in the Earth's crust, and the resulting tension/friction is quite a source of energy/heat.
I can't find anything to back this up. If anything, Germany are investing more in geothermal. It's expensive to set up, which is the downside, but it's a great baseload source for power/heat that keeps generating nonstop with minimal operating costs/maintenance for 30-40 years. Nothing about exhausting their heat gradient.
Heath exhaustion in geothermal definitely exists. Even wikipedia mentions it
> Even though geothermal power is globally sustainable, extraction must still be monitored to avoid local depletion.[21] Over the course of decades, individual wells draw down local temperatures and water levels until a new equilibrium is reached with natural flows. The three oldest sites, at Larderello, Wairakei, and the Geysers have experienced reduced output because of local depletion. Heat and water, in uncertain proportions, were extracted faster than they were replenished. If production is reduced and water is reinjected, these wells could theoretically recover their full potential. Such mitigation strategies have already been implemented at some sites.
I assume that some of the places with the largest geothermal investments (ie. Iceland) don't suffer this problem that much.
For people who love alternative history stories, the "Ring of Fire" series (starting with "1632", which you can get for free at http://www.baen.com/1632.html) is highly recommended.
Supporting authoritarianism to protect financial interests harms society in the long run - and you can't eat money nor buy a society pleasant to live in.
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