Pete Massie
@petemassie
Energy systems, geothermal power, and occasionally football.
Market signals can drive behaviour, but volatility is a big issue in electricity. People like stable prices. Even small changes in the price of gas elicit huge emotional responses. But electricity can 10X in a minute - just look at Alberta. It's hard for people to understand why.
Couldn't make the launch of the Deep Geothermal Roadmap? Check out what was said at the Kick Off workshop in the latest report from the Canadian Deep Geothermal Coalition. Link below
Value capture for renewables is a real issue. But timing of price spikes - as solar generation fades - suggests solar is creating value, even if it's difficult to capture.
People often think about hydro as baseload - and that can be true. But hydro's role is more complex. If we look at Alberta's largest hydro facility - we see output can double over the course of a week. So it's providing ~120 MW of power, and up to another 100 MW at peak.
If anywhere is going to figure out how to manage the cost of data centres - it's going to be Alberta. 40%+ of demand is already met with cogen from large industrial plants.
Wholesale electricity prices in Alberta over the past 24 hours are a great example of how market signals could drive storage deployment. Low almost all day, and shooting up ~ 10X for an hour. Incredible arbitrage opportunity for V2G or basement batteries.
It's out! New CER Energy Futures report looks at four scenarios to explore a range of possible futures for Canada's energy sector. TLDR: We need moar electricity. www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-anal...
To be clear, I'm not anti-solar. There's a major role for it in future energy systems. And greater energy security *could* be a benefit. But we're allowing China to seize leadership on solar and other key energy technologies.
You can't control the sun! About 20% of oil and LNG trade flows through the Strait of Hormuz. We're seeing the consequences of that today. But over 75% of key phases across the solar supply chain are in one country (guess which one). So no, you can't control the sun. But you don't need to.
Second - software innovation will compound hardware advances. AI is already being used to improve oil and gas drilling. And given the scale of the industry, the training data that's being generated is *enormous*. Maybe AI productivity improvements are showing up in places
The IEA Geothermal TCP released a new report, and there's a few points I think deserve attention. First - excitement around drilling isn't contingent on a silver bullet. There's a broad portfolio of solutions emerging - from incremental to radical.
Why do new technologies look chaotic? Because we don't know what works. So engineers must explore the entire design space. That variety makes it hard to generalize about emerging technologies. Airborne wind energy is a perfect example. New piece: petermassie.substack.com/p/why-new-te...
Nope. It's more of an accounting issue in the model. Taxes are lumped in to LCOE. So the project looks more expensive, but is actually generating higher returns.
I think optimizing reservoir creation is vital - achieving high flow rates across different geologies is key to scale. We've seen relentless improvement in shale productivity that's driven down capex through learning by doing. If geothermal can replicate that, things get interesting fast.
Next-gen geothermal might be cheaper than you think. Independent modelling based on Fervo suggests capex is just US$5600/kW, with LCOE of US$85/MWh. That's present costs, not projected. Massive implications for the future of energy. softwareengineerprogrammer.github.io/GEOPHIRES/Fe...
The labs formerly known as NREL just released their 2025 Geothermal Market Report. This chart on EGS costs jumps out immediately. Massive and rapid cost decline in just five years.
Will Venezuelan oil compete with Canada's? I'm not so sure. Both are heavy oil, but: Heavy oil is capital intensive and takes years to build out. Canada's oil sands build out was an incredible feat, supported by a historic super cycle where oil prices 3X'd. It's not clear we'll see that again.
Oil demand set to increase just under 1 million barrels per day in 2026 - according to @iea.org's oil market report: www.iea.org/reports/oil-... Interesting to note that growth is increasingly dominated by petrochemical feedstocks. Demand is increasing - but it's profile is changing too.
Amazing how reasonable, informed people can look at a complex system and see two completely different things. Underscores that there's no easy answers, and we need to stay curious.
Canada's energy sector directly employs over 300,000 people - of which two thirds are in petroleum. Geothermal projects use the same expertise and skills as the ~200,000 people working in Canada's conventional energy sector. This is a space where Canada can compete - and win.
Baseload power has value - but it isn't absolute. People often focus on technology costs but context matters to (maybe more!). Northern climates face unique challenges that make firm power more valuable - especially as we reduce emissions.
Flow rates are key to geothermal economics. Higher flow => more energy => more power. So even if capex is fixed, higher flow rates can drive down unit costs. And flow rates are getting better thanks to innovation that improves performance (vs. reducing capex alone)
That feeling when you learn a new skill in Excel - even if it's not all that impressive
"It's too small-scale" is not a useful criticism of new technology. The ZEEP reactor - the forerunner to CANDU - produced less than 10 Watts. Two decades later, these designs produced 100s of millions of Watts. Two decades after that, they scaled to nearly a billion Watts.
One of the key concerns about fracking is induced seismicity. So I took a look at data from Northeast BC. What I found surprised me: Only a very small share of induced seismicity can be felt at the surface.
This might be the most important chart for understanding geothermal project economics. Power increases nonlinearly with temperature, all else being equal. A ~2.5X increase in temp from 160F to 375F yields ~8X more power.