I am not convinced by the super aggressive timeline but I am also rooting for them. It would be a massive step forward to a fully renewable energy future. Right now it sounds like a battery breakthrough article but maybe I am just overly cynical.
You are.
The physical principle of using microwaves for drilling is a sound concept, the application, refitting coal plants as geothermal, is a very good idea.
Predicting the future is always error-prone. Simply predicting failure is a cheap cop-out.
I am not saying they are going to fail but claiming to drill farther than ever before (which was an outrageously expensive research project) and do that at controlled prices is an extraordinary claim. So my hope is they can show it can be done at any price. Then surely it will create a path for this to become economically viable eventually.
Article overlooks the Sakhalin-I 2011 record well:
"The Odoptu OP-11 well reached a total measured depth of 40,502 feet (12,345 meters or 7.67 miles) to set a world record for extended-reach drilling (ERD)."
ERD wells are very long (laterally) but not necessarily deep (vertically). The vertical component is the important one when assessing geothermal heat gradient. "Total measured depth" includes the lateral component, and so can be misleading when considering vertical depth. The wells you've referenced are very long, but less than 3,000 meters in vertical depth. https://www.drillingcontractor.org/erd-advances-push-limits-...
Silly question: how much continuous power transfer has been reliably demonstrated today with a 1MW millimeter-wave source through a 20km waveguide for more than an hour?
The problem with geothermal, as with nukes, has been that (whatever way you drill) it costs more to produce the power than solar or wind, and that cost is not falling, unlike solar or wind.
So, for it to be competitive, storage would need to be more expensive than anybody could reasonably expect.
It's not just about a different way to drill. It's about a) going much deeper than existing geothermal ad thus having supercritical steam as a heat source which can directly replace fossil fuels, and b) using existing infrastructure for everything except the source of heat, thus having relatively small up-front cost. Wind and solar have significant up-front cost, require changes to distribution infrastructure, etc., and on the scale needed replace all existing fossil fuel infrastructure they run into significant resource bottlenecks. This doesn't suffer any of these problems... there may be (and likely will be) obstacles they haven't thought of yet, but if things go more-or-less according to their plan, there can be little question that this would be a huge game changer, and unless something even better comes along, theirs is the best option for rapid de-fossilization of electricity production. By far.
There are, in fact, no "significant resource bottlenecks" in building out solar, wind, and storage to replace fossil fuel infrastructure. All the materials needed are abundant, most of them extremely abundant.
Up-front cost of wind and solar are low and falling rapidly. Their ratio to operating cost is high just because operating cost is very close to zero.
Systems that depend on steam turbines, such as nukes and geo, have high recurring maintenance cost as the turbines must be overhauled regularly: superheated steam is very corrosive. Since this tech is mature, such costs are not decreasing. Tech that depends on them gets continually less competitive, and will until solar and wind costs bottom out.
Heat engines are a method to turn low-grade heat energy into high-grade electrical energy. You are always better off staying in the domain of high-grade electrical, mechanical, pneumatic, chemical, elastic, or gravitational energy, without a detour through heat.
The claim seems to be that future grid costs would be minimized by using new heat sources to drive existing turbines, which then don't need to be built. Unfortunately, making and operating these heat sources is itself expensive, and keeping turbines working is expensive.
Turbines, particularly combined-cycle gas turbines, have a definite place in the future grid, as backup for cheaper generation. A turbine used only on some days needs less maintenance, so the grid will be designed to avoid need to run them most of the time.
If you had read the article rather than just the headline, you'd know that the tech they're talking about using is not fusion but a tool for generating beams of millimeter wave energy.
The connection to fusion is clickbait. The tool, a gyrotron, was developed by the Soviets and is a well understood way to heat up plasma.
The company in the article was spun out of MIT to create drilling rigs which would use it to vaporize rock in places where conventional drilling is too difficult, ie super deep geothermal.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32342501
Those discussions clear up some confusions that are likely to recur.
This particular New Atlas article has also been submitted more than once, garnering a few comments.