Comment by throwaway2037
6 hours ago
Every time I am "forced" to read TechCrunch, I feel like I am reading an LLM summary of a company PR release. Anyone else? This article is so short on facts.
Title of the article: "World’s first enhanced geothermal power plant completed..."
A quick Wiki search shows a page for "Enhanced geothermal system"[1]. There is a list of projects. There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here?
> The power plant synchronized with the grid about a week ago, bringing online the first third of what will soon become a 100-megawatt power plant.
They brought 33MW online. Yay. Instead, you hide it behind "first third of 100MW".
What about cost? Nothing from TechCrunch. I found better analysis here[2]. Look at this savage quote:
> At $7,000 per kW for Phase 1 against the $2,157 per kW Canary Media gives for a 2025 gas plant
Initial build cost is 7K USD per kW. Solar plus battery and a touch of wind wins by a long shot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_geothermal_system
[2] https://mgrid.org/2026/09/27/fervo-first-power-cape-station-...
> There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here?
First commercial operation with a grid connection. You'll notice that those 50+ are listed under the "research and development" section.
This article also provides good analysis: https://powerstack.currence.ai/p/powerstack-post-ipo-fervo-c....
The tldr
> If we look at our Fastest MW analysis, the fastest way to get power to the grid right now is solar+BESS with existing interconnection agreements in ERCOT. This setup gives a 27-month or less time-to-COD, and can come in at $40/MWh PPAs, a price and speed Fervo can't catch. So, per the above, the right way to think about it is that Fervo competes for a different customer than the ones looking at solar+BESS. Are they required to procure geo? Are they in the West? Do they need fully baseload power? For sure, that’s a smaller niche. But if Fervo's anticipated 38GW resource base materializes even a little, the niche is huge.
A lot of geothermal energy investment happened after the California Public utilities commission issued procurement mandates for clean firm power after SB 100 passed.
Does the build cost matter? After you've built the gas plant you still need to buy gas in perpetuity.
The marginal cost of the energy from the geothermal plant must be very much less.
And yet, when the same argument is made about nuclear, all hell breaks lose
Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else by such a wide margin it boggles my mind we’re even still talking about, or contemplating anything else.
By the time you finish reading this, solar panels got cheaper
Only in some regions that’s enough. A lot of regions have winters where solar output is greatly diminished and wind can stop for days. Batteries are too expensive to store electricity for days to weeks. On top of that you have higher demand if you have electrified space heating.
Humanity actually has millennia of experience with solar energy, we just call it agriculture. Plants literally are natural solar panels. And you know what all this experience tells us? It varies from place to place, like, a lot. In some places it works nice and in some places it just doesn't.
> Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else
Except that they don't.
Why do you think new datacenters are using natgas turbines and not wind+solar?
Because they don’t want to wait for a grid connection that can take years and they need backup generation capacity anyways.
You’ll see them all connecting to the grid in the following years simply because it’s cheaper
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Physical footprint fits in limited available space, well understood turnkey commercial off the shelf solution, and lack of grid scale flexibility/redundancy to best exploit available capacity at different times of day/year.
Honestly a lot of different reasons. One they can put natgas on a private disconnected grid direct on the same property.
The other big ones is states ignoring the environmental rules of all the negative side effects of said generation.
DC's better be careful or any government change and their choices now will bite them in the ass.
Because behind-the-meter generation bypasses many municipal permitting processes and now also skips NEPA review. As diesel keeps climbing it'll get more expensive to truck fuel in and you'll start to see operators begging for the grid connections they scoffed at before.
But the volume of solar panels you'd need and especially the volume of batteries you'd need don't exist, nor is the supply there for anything but a gradual build-out.