It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. We have an enormous clean energy source beneath our feet,

way beneath our feet, in the core of the earth. But making geothermal energy available to tap, extract, and harvest is trickier.

In her talk at Ted Monterey in 2021,

the technologist and climate activist Jamie C. Beard

offers a surprising solution to getting scalable clean energy anywhere in the world.

It's going to sound like an unlikely alliance, but she's pretty persuasive.

The core of the Earth is 6,000 degrees Celsius.

It's the same temperature as the surface of the sun.

But it's not 94 million miles away, like the extraterrestrial sun is.

It is right here beneath our feet.

Really, literally, right there.

But we don't think about this, right?

I mean, when you go outside, you walk barefoot, you don't burn your feet.

The earth's crust is an incredible insulator,

and it keeps this massive, inexhaustible heat source beneath us invisible.

But if you've ever visited Iceland or an active volcano,

you've got geysers and steam vents and lava,

these are surface manifestations of the incredible amount of heat that lies beneath us,

anywhere and everywhere in the world.

And we don't have to drill very far to reach temperatures that far exceed what we would need

to power the world thousands of times over for all of civilization.

Pretty cool, right?

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