I worked on geothermal control systems a decade or so back. There are some less obvious applications for geothermal that reduce electric use (as opposed to generating electricity).
The systems I worked on were for cooling larger structures like commercial greenhouses, gov installations and mansions. 64° degree water would be pumped up from 400' down, run thru a series of chillers (for a/c) and then returned underground - about 20° or 25° warmer.
I always thought this method could be used to provide a/c for neighborhoods, operated as a neighborhood utility. I've not seen it done tho. I've seen neighborhood owned water supplies and sewer systems; it tells me the ownership part seems feasible.
In the nordics it is common to have ground source heat pumps (brine in closed circuit pipe or bore hole) that are run backwards in summer to cool the house while actually assisting in storing heat back in the ground to extract in the winter. It’s a bit like regenerative breaking on electric cars.
There was a new in 1988 house in Champaign, Illinois, USA that used the same system, and i mention that because it was a normal modern house, and it's the only one i've heard of with that system.
Shallow geothermal works fine for heating. And you can use the ground as a heat sink. But if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water. That's deeper than most oil wells. Fervo Energy claims to have found 270C at 3350 meters well depth. That's progress.
I think this looks interesting, but still very early stage. The “150 GW revolution” sounds more like theoretical potential, not something we will see soon in real deployment.
Main problems: drilling is still expensive, managing induced seismic activity is not trivial, permitting can take long time, and you also need transmission infrastructure. Also not yet proven that companies like Fervo can scale this in reliable and low-cost way.
Nope. To efficiently tap geothermal energy, you need to boil something but not necessarily water. Isopentane, for example, boils at 28º at standard pressure, so they pressurize the secondary loop to raise the boiling point close to whatever the primary loop temperature is.
The idea that geothermal only works well at steam temperatures is outdated 20th-century thinking.
The water at these temperature / depths has a lot of dissolved salts and minerals so it's not (human / ag) usable. Modern designs are closed loop systems where production wells bringing the hot water to the surface go through a heat exchanger to a different working fluid to drive the turbine and then is re-injected back into the reservoir. There is consumptive water use for fracking the reservoirs in these types of enhanced geothermal systems, but beyond that it's more water redistribution in the area around the well systems where re-injection and production lead to different pressurization from pumping / natural ground water replenishment rates.
I don't know how economical that is, but just as an anecdote - the town I'm from in Poland has district heating to all single family homes, town of about 20k people. And coincidentally, I now live in the UK and a new estate near me has district heating to all the houses they are building, not apartment blocks. So it must make some sense to someone, or they wouldn't be outfitting 100+ houses this way.
Heat pumps require a specific temperate differential to work. So they work in zones with are a bit hotter or colder than you would like and so require moderate amounts of heating or cooling. They don't work in temperate zones nor in very hot or cold places. So Santa Fe or Minneapolis for example they work but Mexico City or San Francisco they don't. If you are in a place where they work and that isn't too dense or has earthquakes, go for it. If not, don't. There are businesses that will help you understand when they do and don't make sense. Those businesses don't sell heat pumps though (the businesses that sell things will almost always tell you it works, even when it doesn't, for example PV in the UK doesn't work).
Oh, Fervo Energy again. They're trying to IPO, hence the hype.
Wikipedia's warning: This article reads like a press release or a news article and may be largely based on routine coverage. (February 2026)
This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments, a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view.
This isn’t really an evaluation of the company, just explaining how they had to use different financing approaches as they grew and derisked their technology (which makes sense).
Compared to some other new approaches for getting clean base load power, it seems like they’ve been pretty grounded and methodical.
They're way ahead of the microwave drilling people.
There's no reason why this shouldn't work. But they've been at it for 9 years, with considerable funding, and it doesn't really work yet. That's a concern.
According to google, this would be almost 30% of total US energy production (135gw-150gw) and nearly 5% of total US energy consumption.
But what is the "breakthrough" if there is one? The article doesn't really suggest any breakthrough that is unlocking this potential energy? Or maybe I'm looking for a technological breakthrough where there isn't one.
There isn't one. They are trying to politically pressure a utility to build some geothermal plant. But utilities have engineers who will tell their bosses that this plan doesn't work. So the companies selling the geothermal plant are trying to politically pressure the utility to do yet another thing that they know won't work. PG&E for example has several geothermal plants which have been economic disasters and were and are being shutdown.
The core breakthroughs were working with partners to develop PDC bits that enable high rates of penetration in drilling out these horizontal wells in high temp granitic rock and then demonstrating plug / perf fracture networks that have a high engineered permeability in these source rocks to support economical flow rates and heat transfer. These were considerable advances over previous efforts.
There will be other learning by doing advances in how you structure your power plant design to take advantage of these to make practical long term power production possible (well spacing and injection / production placement / flow rate and temperature decline management).
> Several companies are now building upon existing techniques for accessing geothermal resources by integrating enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) into operations. While conventional geothermal systems produce energy using hot water or steam, pumped from naturally occurring hydrothermal reservoirs trapped in rock formations underground, EGS use innovative drilling technologies, such as those used in fracking operations, to drill horizontally and create hydrothermal reservoirs where they don’t currently exist.
Drilling horizontally doesn’t magically reduce the depth, nor the problem that drilling in to hot rock is like drilling in to plasticine, at least for temperatures worth working with.
EGS has been around for at least 15 years. See AltaRock Energy as an example (I’m sure there are others). They started almost 20 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaRock_Energy
My understanding is that it's due to better drilling techniques. The industry learned a fair bit from fracking and they're learning more from experience as they apply it to geothermal.
No particular breakthrough, but there's a learning curve and they learn more as they do more. Other industries sometimes work that way, too.
Here is an article that is a bit old but discusses the start of things [1]. It would be a bit ironic if fracking tech helped get us further from using natural gas. I think the reality will be if this gets established we will see rapid improvement as scale comes on line so if it is remotely economical now it will be massively better in 5-10 years. Of course the 'if' applies.
Solar and wind, with battery storage, can get you to say 90%, and then you only need 10% from other sources like geothermal and nuclear to fully decarbonize.
Newberry Volcano is too good to be true in that there are few (outside of Yellowstone) equivalent sources of geothermal awesomeness at similar depths in the USA. Good for research bad for generalization of drilling costs to hit similar temperatures. There are federal protections for geothermal drilling anywhere near Yellowstone.
"It really is off-brand for this administration. They are only interested in energy sources you pull out of the ground, burn, and turn into CO2/pollution."
They are pro nuclear and that alone means their energy policy is more environmentally friendly than the previous one. Renewables are a dodge for those who either don't look at industry numbers or are scientifically illiterate. It isn't an accident that the last 2 governors of CA came from very big oil money and spoke a lot about renewables.
Pretty sure they’re interested in collapsing the cost of domestic energy production in a way that’s resilient to adversarial supply chain risk since energy production is the base of the economic pyramid - energy availability is upstream of nearly all economic output.
It has exclusivity which might be enough, you can't own the sun (modulo Simpsons episode) but you might be able to "own" geological hotspots for this purpose, the same way you can "own" a coal mine or an oil well. Remember the goal here is to create poverty. I mean, obviously you say you want to create "wealth" but only in a relative sense.
You know how the United Arab Emirates are known as the Emirates, how the United Mexican Sates are known as Mexico and how the United States of America is known as America? Are you unfamiliar with what synecdoche is?
I worked on geothermal control systems a decade or so back. There are some less obvious applications for geothermal that reduce electric use (as opposed to generating electricity).
The systems I worked on were for cooling larger structures like commercial greenhouses, gov installations and mansions. 64° degree water would be pumped up from 400' down, run thru a series of chillers (for a/c) and then returned underground - about 20° or 25° warmer.
I always thought this method could be used to provide a/c for neighborhoods, operated as a neighborhood utility. I've not seen it done tho. I've seen neighborhood owned water supplies and sewer systems; it tells me the ownership part seems feasible.
In the nordics it is common to have ground source heat pumps (brine in closed circuit pipe or bore hole) that are run backwards in summer to cool the house while actually assisting in storing heat back in the ground to extract in the winter. It’s a bit like regenerative breaking on electric cars.
There was a new in 1988 house in Champaign, Illinois, USA that used the same system, and i mention that because it was a normal modern house, and it's the only one i've heard of with that system.
It seems so smart.
5 replies →
Shallow geothermal works fine for heating. And you can use the ground as a heat sink. But if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water. That's deeper than most oil wells. Fervo Energy claims to have found 270C at 3350 meters well depth. That's progress.
> if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water. That's deeper than most oil wells.
That’s going to be very dependant on location.
Here in NZ there are regions where water is boiling at surface level.
According to the below, 18% of our power is produced with it.
https://www.eeca.govt.nz/insights/energy-in-new-zealand/rene...
3 replies →
I think this looks interesting, but still very early stage. The “150 GW revolution” sounds more like theoretical potential, not something we will see soon in real deployment.
Main problems: drilling is still expensive, managing induced seismic activity is not trivial, permitting can take long time, and you also need transmission infrastructure. Also not yet proven that companies like Fervo can scale this in reliable and low-cost way.
Nope. To efficiently tap geothermal energy, you need to boil something but not necessarily water. Isopentane, for example, boils at 28º at standard pressure, so they pressurize the secondary loop to raise the boiling point close to whatever the primary loop temperature is.
The idea that geothermal only works well at steam temperatures is outdated 20th-century thinking.
3 replies →
One of the problems with the data center boom is its use of fresh water. How does geo-thermal plants use water and how much?
The water at these temperature / depths has a lot of dissolved salts and minerals so it's not (human / ag) usable. Modern designs are closed loop systems where production wells bringing the hot water to the surface go through a heat exchanger to a different working fluid to drive the turbine and then is re-injected back into the reservoir. There is consumptive water use for fracking the reservoirs in these types of enhanced geothermal systems, but beyond that it's more water redistribution in the area around the well systems where re-injection and production lead to different pressurization from pumping / natural ground water replenishment rates.
I think you're describing what is known as "district energy" systems.
Whisper Valley in Austin Texas is one example of a neighborhood geothermal installation: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/texas-whispe...
Maybe not quite exactly what you envision.
Framingham, MA has a geothermal system using ground source heat pumps like what you are describing
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/first-networked-geother...
District heating and chilled water is uneconomical for single-family homes. It does work well in medium to high density areas.
I don't know how economical that is, but just as an anecdote - the town I'm from in Poland has district heating to all single family homes, town of about 20k people. And coincidentally, I now live in the UK and a new estate near me has district heating to all the houses they are building, not apartment blocks. So it must make some sense to someone, or they wouldn't be outfitting 100+ houses this way.
5 replies →
Isn't that similar to how neighborhood heat pumps work?
https://www.araner.com/blog/district-heating-in-sweden-effic...
Heat pumps require a specific temperate differential to work. So they work in zones with are a bit hotter or colder than you would like and so require moderate amounts of heating or cooling. They don't work in temperate zones nor in very hot or cold places. So Santa Fe or Minneapolis for example they work but Mexico City or San Francisco they don't. If you are in a place where they work and that isn't too dense or has earthquakes, go for it. If not, don't. There are businesses that will help you understand when they do and don't make sense. Those businesses don't sell heat pumps though (the businesses that sell things will almost always tell you it works, even when it doesn't, for example PV in the UK doesn't work).
3 replies →
Oh, Fervo Energy again. They're trying to IPO, hence the hype. Wikipedia's warning: This article reads like a press release or a news article and may be largely based on routine coverage. (February 2026) This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments, a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view.
Here's a more realistic evaluation of Fervo.[1]
[1] https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/what-fervos-approach-says...
That's Wikipedia warning about the quality of the Wikipedia page, not about the company.
This isn’t really an evaluation of the company, just explaining how they had to use different financing approaches as they grew and derisked their technology (which makes sense).
Compared to some other new approaches for getting clean base load power, it seems like they’ve been pretty grounded and methodical.
They're way ahead of the microwave drilling people.
There's no reason why this shouldn't work. But they've been at it for 9 years, with considerable funding, and it doesn't really work yet. That's a concern.
4 replies →
According to google, this would be almost 30% of total US energy production (135gw-150gw) and nearly 5% of total US energy consumption.
But what is the "breakthrough" if there is one? The article doesn't really suggest any breakthrough that is unlocking this potential energy? Or maybe I'm looking for a technological breakthrough where there isn't one.
There isn't one. They are trying to politically pressure a utility to build some geothermal plant. But utilities have engineers who will tell their bosses that this plan doesn't work. So the companies selling the geothermal plant are trying to politically pressure the utility to do yet another thing that they know won't work. PG&E for example has several geothermal plants which have been economic disasters and were and are being shutdown.
The core breakthroughs were working with partners to develop PDC bits that enable high rates of penetration in drilling out these horizontal wells in high temp granitic rock and then demonstrating plug / perf fracture networks that have a high engineered permeability in these source rocks to support economical flow rates and heat transfer. These were considerable advances over previous efforts.
There will be other learning by doing advances in how you structure your power plant design to take advantage of these to make practical long term power production possible (well spacing and injection / production placement / flow rate and temperature decline management).
> PG&E for example has several geothermal plants which have been economic disasters and were and are being shutdown.
Those are very different from EGS
4th paragraph of TFA:
> Several companies are now building upon existing techniques for accessing geothermal resources by integrating enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) into operations. While conventional geothermal systems produce energy using hot water or steam, pumped from naturally occurring hydrothermal reservoirs trapped in rock formations underground, EGS use innovative drilling technologies, such as those used in fracking operations, to drill horizontally and create hydrothermal reservoirs where they don’t currently exist.
Sounds like marketing hype to me.
Geothermal reservoirs exist at depth.
Drilling horizontally doesn’t magically reduce the depth, nor the problem that drilling in to hot rock is like drilling in to plasticine, at least for temperatures worth working with.
1 reply →
EGS has been around for at least 15 years. See AltaRock Energy as an example (I’m sure there are others). They started almost 20 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaRock_Energy
So it basically says nothing useful other than try to generate hype and make them look good.
1 reply →
My understanding is that it's due to better drilling techniques. The industry learned a fair bit from fracking and they're learning more from experience as they apply it to geothermal.
No particular breakthrough, but there's a learning curve and they learn more as they do more. Other industries sometimes work that way, too.
https://www.austinvernon.site/blog/geothermalupdate2026.html
Here is an article that is a bit old but discusses the start of things [1]. It would be a bit ironic if fracking tech helped get us further from using natural gas. I think the reality will be if this gets established we will see rapid improvement as scale comes on line so if it is remotely economical now it will be massively better in 5-10 years. Of course the 'if' applies.
[1] (2023) https://time.com/6302342/fervo-fracking-technology-geotherma...
What is the point of building energy outside of solar farms? I'm sincerely asking
Night time? But batteries! Several cloudy days in a row? More batteries! Cost? -> a mix of sources becomes attractive
https://imgur.com/a/dV8gk3R
can you find curves like this for any other power source?
also batteries are getting exponentially cheap too
1 reply →
Would be great to see this in our lifetime
Is 150GW enough for a “revolution”? That’s about 10% of current total power production.
Solar and wind, with battery storage, can get you to say 90%, and then you only need 10% from other sources like geothermal and nuclear to fully decarbonize.
Solar is at 7%. It's very significant.
There's one of those sites near where I live. The numbers would be amazing if true, but feel a lot like "to good to be true" to me
https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/06/super-hot-rocks-geoth...
Newberry Volcano is too good to be true in that there are few (outside of Yellowstone) equivalent sources of geothermal awesomeness at similar depths in the USA. Good for research bad for generalization of drilling costs to hit similar temperatures. There are federal protections for geothermal drilling anywhere near Yellowstone.
[dead]
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You might be joking, but he might just be that simple. Today he seemed to conflate capital punishment with crimes committed in a capital city.
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"It really is off-brand for this administration. They are only interested in energy sources you pull out of the ground, burn, and turn into CO2/pollution."
They are pro nuclear and that alone means their energy policy is more environmentally friendly than the previous one. Renewables are a dodge for those who either don't look at industry numbers or are scientifically illiterate. It isn't an accident that the last 2 governors of CA came from very big oil money and spoke a lot about renewables.
1 reply →
Pretty sure they’re interested in collapsing the cost of domestic energy production in a way that’s resilient to adversarial supply chain risk since energy production is the base of the economic pyramid - energy availability is upstream of nearly all economic output.
26 replies →
It has exclusivity which might be enough, you can't own the sun (modulo Simpsons episode) but you might be able to "own" geological hotspots for this purpose, the same way you can "own" a coal mine or an oil well. Remember the goal here is to create poverty. I mean, obviously you say you want to create "wealth" but only in a relative sense.
1 reply →
They're pretty friendly to nuclear which comes out of the ground.
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Seriously, I wonder about why it's supported. Maybe the drillers are from the fossil fuel extraction industry.
> Seriously, I wonder about why it's supported.
$$$.
The whole continent of America made a breakthrough?
There is no continent called “America”.
You know how the United Arab Emirates are known as the Emirates, how the United Mexican Sates are known as Mexico and how the United States of America is known as America? Are you unfamiliar with what synecdoche is?
Yes. North America.
United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (formerly NAFTA)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Mexico%E...
https://www.ghy.com/trade-compliance/guidance-on-us-energy-i...
https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/analysis-the-united-st...
Now USMCA (if you are American) or CUSMA (if you are Canadian) or T-MEC (if you are Mexican).
Canadian United States Mexico Agreement.
It is up for review July 1st I believe.
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Or, as you've presented, three of the twenty three independent states and territories of North America.