The news, when it broke, had the faintly desperate air of a man who has just discovered his wallet is missing and is now frantically patting his pockets. The UK government, in a move that would have made Lord Kelvin smirk from his grave, has announced a major push into geothermal energy. Yes, geothermal. The same geothermal that has been the quiet, reliable workhorse of places like Iceland and New Zealand while we Britons shivered through windless winter days watching our nuclear reactors age. The plan is to drill deep, two to three miles down, into the hot, dry rock of Cornwall and elsewhere, and extract the heat that has been patiently waiting there since the Earth’s formation. It is, on paper, a magnificent idea. It is also, in practice, a desperate Hail Mary from a nation that has spent decades fumbling its energy policy like a drunkard trying to light a cigarette in a gale.

Let us first dispense with the standard pieties. Yes, geothermal is clean. Yes, it is baseload, meaning it churns out power 24/7 regardless of whether the sun shines or the wind blows. Yes, it is domestic, freeing us from the caprices of Russian gas or Saudi oil. The technology is proven; the heat is there; the potential is immense. But here is the rub: why now? Why, after decades of dithering, of underfunding research, of prioritising wind turbines that spin uselessly on still days, do we suddenly discover the virtue of the Earth’s core? The answer, as with so many things in this late, tired empire, is panic. The war in Ukraine, the energy price crisis, the looming threat of blackouts in a decade’s time: these are the spurs that have finally goaded Whitehall into action. Action, but not foresight. Action, but not wisdom.

The history of British energy is a tragicomedy of missed appointments. We had North Sea oil and gas, and we squandered the windfall on consumption rather than investment. We had a world-leading nuclear industry, and we let it atrophy. We had tidal power, wave power, but we preferred to talk about them in white papers rather than build them. Now, in a final, flailing gesture, we turn to the Deep Hot Biosphere, hoping it will save us. The geologists are excited, and they should be. The potential in Cornwall alone, they say, could power the nation for centuries. But the optimists forget the history of such projects. The last serious geothermal effort in the UK, at Rosemanowes in the 1980s, ended in technical failure and abandoned boreholes. The deep earth is not a tap you can simply turn on. It is a complex, fractured, occasionally seismically active realm. The drilling is expensive, the risk of induced earthquakes is real (though small), and the public relations challenge is immense. Imagine the headlines: ‘Fracking for Heat?’. The anti-fracking brigades will not distinguish between hydraulic fractures and geothermal loops. They will see a drill rig and smell a conspiracy.

But let us be contrarian for a moment. Let us argue that this gamble, however belated, is exactly what we need. The Victorians, after all, did not balk at digging deep. They built sewers, tunnels, and underground railways. They understood that civilization requires the exploitation of nature’s resources, not a feeble paralysis in the face of risk. Geothermal energy is not a silver bullet; it will take years to scale up, and even then it will only supply a fraction of our needs. But it is a start, a token of seriousness in a nation that has lost the habit of seriousness. The real danger is not that geothermal will fail; it is that we will lose our nerve when the first drill string breaks or the first local protest erupts. If we are to reclaim our status as a nation of engineers and innovators, we must see this through, not with frantic haste, but with the patient determination of a Brunel or a Stephenson. We must drill, we must learn, and we must adapt. The Earth’s heat is not going anywhere. The question is whether we have the will to reach it.

In the end, this is not merely an energy policy. It is a test of national character. Are we still a people capable of great, difficult undertakings? Or have we become a nation of hand-wringers, content to shiver in the dark? The geothermal gamble will tell us. Let us hope, for once, that we prove ourselves worthy of the challenge.