Hot rocks

Four kilometers down below the orange earth of Australia's Cooper Basin lies some of the hottest nonvolcanic rock in the world-rock that the geothermal industry had never seriously considered using to make electricity. But next month Geodynamics, an eight-year-old company based in Milton, Queensland, will prove otherwise when it turns on its 1-megawatt pilot plant here. The company has done more to harness this unconventional form of geothermal energy than anyone else in the world.