alt Hacker News"There's no reason why this shouldn't work."
Geothermal has had the same problem for its entire history. That problem is that the water being heated goes through the ground (not in a pipe) to "gather" more energy. But this means that when the water comes back up, it has a lot of weird salts in it (and other things). Those salts cause corrosion, lots and lots of corrosion, far more than even a maritime environment. So the plant needs to be shutdown a lot of the time for repairs. And that's what makes it uneconomical. Also, the salts often contain things that require special handling which also increases costs.
PS This is why geothermal works in Iceland where there is so much geothermal heat they can use pipes. In CA, they can't so it doesn't work there.
Fervo uses engineered reservoirs in granitic basement rock so this is less of an issue. Hot rock in a working fluid can still dissolve silicates out of the granite and lead to scaling / degradation of the flow rates through the reservoir and that is a risk but chemical anti scaling treatments are used to reduce this.
CA has the worlds largest geothermal power complex in the Geysers. That one field produces an equivalent amount of power as all the geothermal in Iceland and there are others.