Jo, geothermal is simply a store of enrrgy, as is hydro, and even wind. Using them is not for free, energy is lost with accumulative harmful side effects in every case, There is no such thing as renewable energy, it all comes from the sun. The reason why we are in such a mess is that the profit driven business world has created all of this confusing language, and even confusing science, to mask the real source of energy.
It comes from the sun as live Joules of energy which mathametically convert to everything we know. Thorium doesn't exist yet, nor fusion, they might never do, but even if they did, we would still have to question whether or not they are just more forms of energy by exraction, which would fix nothing, because only the Joules of the sun are pushed to us for free, no extraction needed, so no pollution generated, and since only they come from an extraterrestrial source, only they add anything to Earth, therefore only they can, and absolutely must be monetised. This is really important to fully understand, because until we do, this will just keep getting worse, includinh devaluation of all currencies, we will continue to extract until we expire amidst an exhausted planet.
Right now we are putting tens of GigaJoules per second of energy from the sun into our use in every developed cointry. Those equate to an awful lot of free work done, or materials created, all for free, but we don't see it or formally acknowledge it, because that would require we issue free money, which would devalue all capital, though it was done for a few months, 4tn per month in US, when oil went negatively priced, and we saw the only ever spike of recovery in the environment, and a whole stack of other good results.
But it stopped, and those remarkable events have never been publicly analysed, other than by folk like me.
When we dig deep into this problem, and if we know anything about religions, we have to admit, the whole truth seems to rhyme uncannily with religion, which is probably enough to repel the minds of many scientists, who might find it easier to just sweep under the carpet, rather than follow lines of enqiry that confirms religion was right all along.
All of the rules and guidance of religions are being ignored by our standard business model of money as debt, which ties us into doing the work of extraction, since every promise to pay ultimately ends up as a promise to ectract.
So we keep taking and effectiveky worshiping the false god of energy from below, when we should be accepting the energy from above,
I would say, this is not easy at first to get our heads around, it took me, as practicing Systems Engineer , years more than five years thinking and writing about it, to understand it, and still thete is evidence every day.