eli5: If we’re all sitting above the magma and heat in Earth’s mantle, what are the barriers to tapping that heat in each municipality to provide local affordable electricity?

Question

eli5: If we’re all sitting above the magma and heat in Earth’s mantle, what are the barriers to tapping that heat in each municipality to provide local affordable electricity?

In: 43

Answer 1

You would have to drill very deep to reach a point where the heat is strong enough to generate power.

Then you would need to build a system that can take large amounts of water all the way down there, heat it up until it is high pressured steam, and then send it all the way back up to the surface to spin turbines without it losing too much heat.

This would cost too much and be too inefficient compared to other sources of power available. Geothermal power is only practical in areas where there are magma chambers close to the surface that can be more easily accessed to heat water.