Geothermal Breakthrough in South Texas Signals New Era for Ercot

More coverage of the broader geothermal renaissance: Geothermal’s time has finally come https://www.economist.com/interactive/science-and-technology...

And i found this interesting: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/fracking-aust...

Seems fairly promising

As a Texan, I can assure you that ERCOT will find a way to add 6 layers of middlemen, over extend capacity, and generally screw it up.

I watched it progressively get worse growing up. I don’t live in TX anymore, but I’ve still got family there and it’s more of the same.

I wonder if there is the possibility of a technique here to extract the heat by using something that does expand like pumped CO2 instead of water to steam? It is great they are using it for storage though. The more options the grid has for generation, transmission and storage the better.

Is this the same "minimal water loss" they define for all the leaking wells in west and south texas that threaten water supplies? https://www.texastribune.org/2025/02/04/texas-leaking-abando...

I'm not a geophysicist but it doesn't seem like impermeable rock would "inflate like a balloon" and even if it did, that seems like it would be a pretty bad thing for the surrounding countryside. Given that water infamously doesn't like to compress, I'm at a loss for how this thing actually works.

Does anyone have a better explanation than this article?

Essentially, repurposing fracking as a method for energy storage.

70-75% is good efficiency. So did they use an existing old oil well? What are the construction costs of this? I mean it's great they built it quickly but I'm wondering if they built it quickly because the digging had already been done.