Energy: At the core

Most energy mankind has used has been from one of two main sources: the sun, and fossil fuels. The first is a pretty good long term bet, but difficult to capture efficiently and economically. The others up for discussion are mostly based around wind and water energy, essentially driven by the climate with a little bit of tidal and other forces thrown in, but all difficult to capture on a grand scale, and often with ecological implications of their own. There is of course an alternate energy source that is little discussed...



I kid, I kid.

Actually, what I am thinking of is this:


Its what keeps us alive at night. Actually, its what keeps us alive generally, or really, what let us be alive in the first place. Our wildly complex and hardly understood magnetic core. And it is hot. I mean really hot. And sometimes, it likes to make other things hot. Like this:


So the question then becomes how to get at that energy. The answer is Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) - basically engineering a hot water heater courtesy of all that hotness down below us. Here is the basic idea:

If done right, you get cheap (like ha'penny on the dollar cheap) hot water. And a lot of it, with the US west being an ideal place for this.

I am a firm believer that our future energy needs will be easily met by renewable sources, but I think wind and solar in their current form are crap. Wind and solar production is all over the place, it is not constant, and thus is useless (without crazy storage solutions) for baseline energy needs. This is the opposite, and thus much more practical.

Energy is abundant on Earth and in the solar system. My prediction is that we move more and more towards a system whereby energy is drawn from the sun or the core, with nuclear power used in certain off-the-grid scenarios and other roles. To me, this is logically an efficient way to harness the power of the core.