We admit that we have no idea at all whether this would work:

Quaise Energy, a startup that just raised a $40 million Series A funding round led by Safar Partners, uses “millimeter wave” drilling systems to go as far as 12 miles underground—that’s 3 to 5 times deeper than typical oil and gas drilling—reaching a layer of rock which is more than 700 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat can be used as a constant power source essentially anywhere on the planet.

We’re not even going to try and work it out either. The reason we don’t drill that far routinely anyway is because it’s not economic. It just takes too long to pull the drill bit up, sharpen it, then send it down for another go. So, if a new drilling method does it, well, why not?

Further, they seem to us to be being sensible. A fossil fuel plant is really a way of getting steam that you can run through turbines. So, if you’ve got a hole with lots of steam, why not make the holes at the fossil fuel plants where you’ve already got the turbines, electrical connections and so on?

Yes, we are alive to the joy deployment of this system would bring. For there would either be all those screaming matches about seismic activity which acommpany fracking - the waste water injection would lead to the same activity - or we’d find out that the screaming wasn’t about seismic activity in the first place.

Our real point here though is that this is the sort of thing that does get tried out with a sensible policy response to climate change and doesn’t with the response to climate change we’ve got. For the system we’ve got depends upon bureaucrats and politicians deciding what gets built and where. This leaving us with Drax burning American woodchips and this being described as carbon neutral - a nonsense. A sensible system - as described by the Stern Review, by Bill Nordhaus in gaining his Nobel and so on - just sets the basic limits to the system then allows ingenuity to explore all the myriad ways of reaching the desired goal.

That planned system also has another difficulty with it. Big Solar and Big Wind now have their lips so firmly grasping the subsidy firehose that they’re not going to allow some potentially competitive technology to get a look in. Vide those seismic restrictions on fracking.

We would end up laughing like drains if geothermal, or fusion say, ended up being the actual answer. After we’d mourned the trillions lost to men of plans and their delusions of course.