Larry Page and Naivete

My favorite part of this Fortune interview with Google’s Larry Page are his comments on new energy sources: “We’ve been looking a little at geothermal power. And you start thinking about it, and you say, Well, a couple of miles under this spot or almost any other place in the world, it’s pretty darn hot. How hard should it be to dig a really deep hole? We’ve been drilling for a long time, mostly for oil – and oil’s expensive. If you want to move heat around, you need bigger holes. The technology just hasn’t been developed for extracting heat. I imagine there’s pretty good odds that’s possible.”

“How hard should it be to dig a really deep hole?” Exactly.

May 6, 2008