"This incident has pushed the overall GDY risk profile up in my...

"This incident has pushed the overall GDY risk profile up in my estimation, on top of setting the timeline back 6-12 months.
PAX and PTR might be better choices right now."

From my understanding it doesn't increase the risk of GDY over any other geothermal startup, they're going to be using fairly similar techniques right?

The timeline of the pilot plant is all that's been affected, it would seem the critical path timeline of GDY is unaffected. Granted it's important to get the pilot up and running to iron out all the bugs, but the real challenges lie in proving multi fracture stimulation, not the structural integrity of the established wells. At least I've not seen that outlined as a risk factor, I guess in my mind it rates similar to technical issues facing shuttle launches (doesn't make space travel non-viable, just need experience to identify all the design flaws).

Point in case if the pilot plant was running today, I doubt the share price would be significantly higher than $1.25 - any higher would be a by product of sentiment and/or the warm fuzzy feeling felt by investors. The circulation test results had a smaller effect on share price than this news, even though was a far more significant (maybe everyone just assumed would be ok?).

An interesting exercise would be to plot GDY's share movement with all other geothermals in Australia. Assuming a perfect market, if they all moved down as a result of this announcement - then it means an inherent risk in geothermal drilling has been identified that was previously unknown. If only GDY goes down, it means it's more about delaying operations and general sentiment than an actual technical barrier.

I wish I didn't hold so many, otherwise I'd buy more. I might be wrong, but I can't see anything in this setback that will affect the long term performance of GDY (relative to the sector, at least). Too much faith in engineers perhaps? :)