Who needs to burn any fuel when the Earth itself is burning beneath us and we can tap into it to ran massive turbines?
OMG! THE. PLANET. HAS. A. FEVER!
Who needs to burn any fuel when the Earth itself is burning beneath us and we can tap into it to ran massive turbines?
Nicaragua already runs 10% of its electricity on geothermal heat. They are trying to move totally to wind, hydro and geothermal. Not because of the climate change. But because the oil spike in 2007 left them with very little electricity.
If the hot-side temperature is only 100°C, the turbines really would have to be massive to produce electricity at economically sustainable rates.
Everything would have to be big; condensers, pipes, boilers. The only thing that wouldn't be oversized would be the generator at the end of the shaft.
The Titanic had a low-pressure steam engine to run its center propeller; it was driven by exhaust steam from the low-pressure side of the two triple-expansion steam engines. The rotor of this turbine was twelve feet long and twelve feet in diameter, with the turbine blades adding another four feet of diameter. It's rated power output was 16000 horsepower, or about 12000 kW.
Modern high-pressure steam turbines are about the same size (though smaller in diameter) and generate more like 300,000 kW, or 25 times the power in about the same space. Of course, the Titanic turbine was primitive compared to modern units, with no advanced alloys, low-precision machining, etc.
Granted, in New Zealand they can probably find hotter reservoirs if they look, but economical electric generation requires fairly high temperatures, at least with current technology.