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.
No it's not. It exists but it's certainly not common for individual dwelling to use ground source heat pumps, at least in Norway. It is more common in Sweden[1] but still far less common than air source and over 90% of heat pump installations in Norway are air source[2].
The only ground source installations I can think of in Norway serve large office buildings and similar. The largest heat pump installation I know of in Norway is actually a third kind: water source[3]. It takes heat from the Drammen river to provide heat for a district heating system and for keeping the town centre clear of ice in the winter as well as supplying the new hospital with heat.
I imagine that the rest of the Nordic region is similar.
If by Nordics you mean Norway, Sweden and Finland, then the most correct way to say would be that ground source heat pumps for redidential heating are (very) common in Sweden and Finland, especially in newer and larger buildings. Norway is somewhat different in energy and climate perspective than its eastern neighbours.
The biggest reason to not install ground source heat pump is high installation cost. This means that it makes more sense for larger residential buildings. Also If you have district heating available then this might be more economical in the long run.
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.
Our house came with one and we upgraded the unit a few years ago. It's very efficient in terms of units of energy consumed, but in my area of the world gas is significantly cheaper than electricity so it ends up being expensive to run.
That said, we will install solar at some point and then it'll be "free" HVAC.
There's a pretty significant upfront cost in getting them drilled, and many homes need the vertical drilling if they don't have sufficient yard space for a horizontal system. It gets harder if you have your own septic drain field too, as that will complete for yard space.
The cost difference is pretty massive- 3-10x for a vertical system. If you live in a city or a suburb with tiny lots, that's your only option though.
I paid about EUR 4500 for a 114 meter drill hole including installation of brine (ethanol in my case actually) and removal of spoils. My 8kW heat+water pump was about EUR 7000.
I can spec out a gas burner for about EUR 4000 and a central AC for EUR 5000, but I bet the efficiency of the ground source heater would quickly trump the cost of buying gas regularly.
That's insanely cheap compared to what we can get around here. Most installs I've heard of from people in the US are in the $20-50,000 range, depending on the size of their home and number of wells needed.
Yet it did not feel very cheap to me. The price of the pump had increased from 4800 only a year earlier due to the war in Ukraine.
There were a number of steps I had to go through. First I had to file for permission at the County Office, where they verify that drilling in the area is acceptable and that the intended pump follows regulations with respect to cooling media, and that the drilling company was certified to drill for my needs. It did cost about 70 euros.
I needed effective zero plumbing work in the house as it was already prepared to accept heating from a pump like that. Perhaps that is one of the major costs in USA?
I don’t know what’s going on with this kind of stuff in the US - similarly I’ve heard stories of people getting quotes in the States for anything from US$10-15K for the kind of air source mini-split heat pumps you can have supplied and installed for US $1200-2000 in Australia! (That is ~3.5 to 7 kW range - super common and cheap as chips here).
Can't prove it, but it seems vendors collude in (very hot) Arizona on all sorts of necessities (plumbing, A/C, electricians). they all seem to know what each charges, and the prices seem not kept in check by any real competition.
Although if you needed a new septic field, I would think ground source thermal would be significantly deeper than a drain field which is only like a foot or so down so you could stack them.
Air source heat pumps are insanely more efficient and just plain better these days too. It used to be that if the air was below 40F you couldn't heat your house with a heat pump. Now, you can heat your house even when it's -10F
If you can tolerate the price, I am _confident_ that you will pretty much always have better results using the Earth as your thermal exhaust, because you don't have to dig very far to find a large region that's pretty much always at 50 F.
The price of things - heat pumps and alternatives - in different regions - even different regions within the US - varies by what people are prepared to pay not what they cost to produce.
The nordics have traditionally had cheap heat pumps whereas piped gas is only in the biggest cities and I’ve never seen bottled gas in the countryside. The competitor used to be cheap electricity and wood. Ground source heat pumps for rural install have been priced to compete with wood.
In the US the market could be shaped by regulation and taxation etc. It’s the choice of the US to have cheap fossil fuels and not embrace tech instead.
> Air source heat pumps are insanely more efficient
Citation needed?
Efficient how? I'm sure a heat pump designed for a narrow range of input temperatures AND working with water which can transport a lot more heat should easily be more efficient.
I assuming he means insanely more efficient than they used to be, not more efficient than ground-source (awkward wording though). I suppose they can also be described as more efficient in installation time, cost and equipment than ground source, but clearly not in operating efficiency.
Yes air source are really good value in cost effectiveness terms, especially when a house has an existing central heating system they can connect to. But their COP - whilst dramatically improving in the last 10-20 years - is still behind ground source, particularly in the north during winter
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.
"New Zealand has an abundant supply of geothermal energy because we are located on the boundary between two tectonic plates. ... Total geothermal electricity capacity in New Zealand stands at over 900 MW, making us the fifth largest generator of geothermal in the world. It has been estimated that there is sufficient geothermal resource for another 1,000 MW of electricity generation."
That's not all that much. That total would be about equal to the 75th largest nuclear plant in the world.
Good sites where high temperatures are near the surface are rare. California has a few, but no promising locations for more.
May not be much in world terms but here in NZ national demand maxes out at around 5.5GW so bringing another GW on stream would be quite handy. Most of the geothermal is a lot closer to Auckland* than our hydro is so so that would be another positive aspect.
* Auckland has 25% of the population so a corresponding amount of energy has to be pushed its way.
We don’t have many people. It gets worse’s though, we burn coal and are looking to fund a gas terminal. We have abundant other ways of generating power and subsidise an aluminium smelter for some reason.
There are also places in the US with boiling water at the surface. I live near one of those places so always curious about geothermal. There's a spot near my house in a creek bed where snow always melts even in deep winter so apparently I have some potential heat source. Our well water is cold though.
You don't necessarily have to choose one or the other. The Blue lagoon in Iceland is a famous example. The water comes from a power plant nearby.
You're not required to site them that close either, because of how regional the conditions usually are. A couple miles plus or minus doesn't change things too much.
> But if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water.
Why is that the case? Can't you go down to where it's like 70-80 deg C and close the gap using heat pumps? Yes, you need to put some energy in, but I would expect that the whole process would still be energy-positive at some temperature that's lower than 100C?
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.
Yes, the efficiency is worse, but as is also the case for solar power you need to get used to not caring much about efficiency. It is nuclear energy where the primary side is provided free of charge. The Carnot efficiency is almost without relevance.
In geothermal there is still a lot of interest in efficiency and exploring different working fluids because binary systems now have efficiencies of 10-20%. That is why you see companies like Sage Geosystems working on developing / deploying supercritical CO2 turbines to try and boost practical power densities.
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.
There are so many ways around this - for a start, you can use some other working fluid that boils at a lower temperature. Or you can choose a different thermodynamic cycle that doesn't involve phase change.
> 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 read this several times in the context of _geothermal_ energy, and had no clue what you were talking about.
Then I realised, you must be an American and use 'freedom units', coupled with a misunderstanding of what geothermal means.
I'm too zonked to pick out the method from the article - but I'll offer that geo methods can be region specific. What I described fits the SE US, with our 13 month summers and abundant underground water.
13 month summers lol :) Yeah, definitely if your interested neighborhood geothermal Whisper Valley seems to be the largest by far in the US, you might check it out.
> 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.
I keep thinking this would be a great municipal code change: any time the roads are being built or ripped up for water/sewer maintenance, put in a ground loop and subsidize household connections for heat pumps so instead of having to deal with the marginal difference between 20℉ winter air you'd be working with 50-60℉ ground temperatures.
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).
I’ve never heard a claim that heat pumps won’t work well in a climate like San Francisco and, from looking at the annual temperature patterns, it seems like both air source and ground source heat pumps should work extremely well as they do in the “shoulder seasons” here in New England.
Heat pumps have gotten a lot better, you need a pretty extreme climate for them to start to struggle, even the air-source ones.
(And PV works well enough in the UK for it to be a no-brainer to put on residentials roofs, which is on the whole the most expensive way to deploy it. Though this is in large part due to the way that it competes with retail prices and not wholesale prices)
This is nonsense, heat pumps are more efficient at smaller temperature differentials. I suspect we don't see them much in San Francisco only because there is so little need for heating and cooling the potential savings are smaller.
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.
At least in parts of Eastern Europe (especially the former GDR) district heating systems were introduced as a response to the oil crises of the 70s, resulting price shocks and the transport of coal to households being very labor and resource incentive [1].
It’s uneconomical in an already built out area or a non central planned economy, and also the US is special case since we have dirt cheap natural gas that is used for heating.
Digging up streets to run distribution lines, running service drops to every existing house, installing a heat exchanger and valves in every house is astronomically expensive given the amount of energy used by a single residence.
If you’re building out a new neighborhood on a greenspace plot, installing the district heating/cooling piping is much cheaper since you’re already laying electric, water, sewer, and mane gas lines.
Sure you do. Think about it. Its just drilling a hole and making electricity from the heat. We have been able to do this for a very long time. So if people aren't really doing it much, its not economical. If it was now becoming economical, the article would describe some new way of doing it that makes it economical. The article doesn't, so you "know" it isn't.
PS This has been tried many time, it only works in very specific situations, usually places where building a full PP doesn't make sense or where you are making a lot of electricity for some other purpose (mining usually).
Sometimes district heating and electricity generation does combine though:
> Wärtsilä’s combined power generation and heat recovery plant offering comprises solutions for combined heat and power (CHP) including dynamic district heating (DDH), district cooling and power (DCAP) and trigeneration for applications that require both heating and cooling.
Not always, but as the sibling noted, there are plenty of combined heat and power plants. They recover as much of the energy as possible from the exhaust gas streams and run pretty efficiently.
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.
> 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?
Baring leaks, ground source heat pump geo will consume no water at all. Water is pumped from one layer of the aquifer and is returned to a slightly higher layer.
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.
> 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.
It does work. They've had a pilot project producing 3 megawatts since 2023. But scaling takes a lot of time and money, particularly when it's something new and you have to go through a lot of operational learning.
Shale took something like 30 years to become a thing. 9 years is nothing in the energy space.
It does work technically I think it is still an open question if it can work economically. There are issues of commercially viable flow rates / thermal decline rates that are harder physical limits you run up against and the pilot design doesn't address. In human timescale terms it's more like heat mining rather than renewable heat due to thermal depletion rate vs replenishment rate. These systems have a targeted lifetime of ~20-30 years and net power will decline over this timespan.
Geothermal has had the same problem for its entire history. That problem is that the water being heated goes through the ground (not in a pipe) to "gather" more energy. But this means that when the water comes back up, it has a lot of weird salts in it (and other things). Those salts cause corrosion, lots and lots of corrosion, far more than even a maritime environment. So the plant needs to be shutdown a lot of the time for repairs. And that's what makes it uneconomical. Also, the salts often contain things that require special handling which also increases costs.
PS This is why geothermal works in Iceland where there is so much geothermal heat they can use pipes. In CA, they can't so it doesn't work there.
Fervo uses engineered reservoirs in granitic basement rock so this is less of an issue. Hot rock in a working fluid can still dissolve silicates out of the granite and lead to scaling / degradation of the flow rates through the reservoir and that is a risk but chemical anti scaling treatments are used to reduce this.
CA has the worlds largest geothermal power complex in the Geysers. That one field produces an equivalent amount of power as all the geothermal in Iceland and there are others.
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).
They're adapting fracking techniques to use for geothermal, which opens up many more sites. Historically geothermal has had limited potential, and the best sites have already been developed. So geothermal + fracking creates a lot more viable land.
Traditional geothermal is you dig a really deep well and get a geyser of hot water or steam to come up.
Fervo is doing "Enhanced" or "Engineered" geothermal where you dig two wells: an injection and an extraction well. You frack the rock in between, creating lots of small channels for water to flow between them. The water absorbs the heat from the rocks as its circulating from the injection well to the extraction well.
The kind of rock that's good at this heat transfer is different from shale rock that oil & gas frackers have experience with... it's harder, less porous, not partial-dino-juice. So they're taking a lot of the same core concepts from the oil & gas industry (horizontal drilling, geology simulations, etc), but their IP is in adopting the techniques to work with geothermal-favorable rock.
Another interesting concept I heard Fervo researching: this kind of geothermal is not "baseload" style power, so there's a few tricks they can do to get better cost efficiency and peaker-like or battery-like behavior. Remember the two wells that form the circulation loop: injection and extraction? Well, you need pumps on both sides (remember, this isn't "geyser-style" geothermal where natural pressure and geology do all the work). Pumps take energy to run, something like 20-30% of the overall extraction output (you put a unit of energy in to run the pumps and you get 3-5 units of energy back out the other end). Not great, not terrible either... it's an energy return comparable to solar and wind. But what you can do is run the injection pump when power prices are low (ie when there's an excess of solar on the grid), pressurize all your fracked channels underground (the reservoir), and then when grid prices rise in the evening you run just the extraction pump to pull out the pre-heated, pre-pressurized water. You're still at a 3-5x energy return, but the time-shifting has made the cost multiplier more favorable.
My understanding is it's still in research phase, but Fervo is piloting this technique. Like another thread said, they're pre-IPO now, so they've been flooding the renewables media with all these stories. They filed an S-1 recently, but always read the eventual S-3 before considering your investment options blahblahblah.
> 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.
In traditional fault hosted (not magmatic) geothermal the convection of the water up the fault brings the thermal energy closer to the surface where drilling depths are economical. This convection heats the surrounding rock and over hundred thousand - million of years brings the background temperature around a large volume at depth surrounding these systems considerably above traditional background geothermal gradients. By drilling into a much larger volume of impermeable hot rock surrounding a very small permeable fault hosted section you can considerably enhance the power potential of a traditional fault hosted geothermal system (the E in EGS). That is what Fervo is doing and why their projects are situated right next to traditional geothermal power plants.
The assumption is that if you can increase drilling efficiencies enough then you don't even need a fault hosted or similar system to bring that energy close to the surface, you can just drill down deep enough to get at similar temperatures. That is a big assumption in the economics.
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
No. Current geothermal projects need very specific geology to work, its very rare which is why geothermal is such a small blip in the overall energy picture. Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), the technique Fervo is using, can create the conditions to be able to generate electricity. The hope is this will greatly expand the number of projects that can be developed.
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.
It’s a stupid ploy by oil drillers to try and expand their existing capex to something more future proof. Their theory is to randomly frack the ground and hope superheated water shows up there. It’s probably just going to end up ruining existing groundwater sources.
The Casa Diablo geothermal facility in the eastern Sierra Nevada of California has been a success. I also remember reading years back about ideas surrounding how to extract energy from Yellowstone both to provide clean energy but also to decrease risk of another massive explosion. If I recall they were proposing digging a massive horizontal tunnel to come in deep and extract heat without compromising the roof.
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.
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.
With all the exotic drilling tech making fracking work, it seems like geothermal is a natural pivot since much of the challenge is controlling the cost of drilling deeply.
this looks like a search for fluffy money durring an energy crisis.
Turbines are completly mature, and nothing dealing with some new deap drilling breakthrough or heat exhanger advancement, or more efficient and durable pumps, crittical CO², or H²O ?, not yet.
Existing geothermal plants use the same generation technology as a coal plant, but use near surface heat assosiated with volcanoes and hot springs, and there is a distinct limit on more of that.
Cost is like 90-99% of what matters. Last year, China installed 300GW of new renewables and 0GW of geothermal, despite geothermal being "an inexhaustible 24/7 production capable".
Geothermal will compete with solar if they can get the cost low enough. I hope they succeed!
These are typically representative of cost performance per watt of one part of a more complex deployed energy system. Things like the aluminum / steal for the container / framing, copper / aluminum for the transmission and wiring, land and labor for installation decline at much less aggressive rates or increase over time.
In almost all pareto optimal least cost energy system models that I've seen, high penetration of solar, wind, batteries plus some minority amount of (clean) baseload power is the most capital efficient energy system.
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.
Just make everything part of the mix, even dam to dam hydro on rural hillsides plays a part in stabilising grid edges.
The more interesting use of geothermal power, IMO, is pushing heat underground with excess solar while the sun is high and the days are long, and pulling out electricity from heat in the darker times .. done large enough that carries across summer to winter.
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.
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.
They have spent immense effort blocking huge amounts of domestic solar and wind production, even paying off developers to simply not build planned power plants.
Didn’t know there were significant domestic supply chains for wind, solar, and battery tech. Thought a lions share of that was ultimately coming from China.
There aren't, and there certainly won't be if we keep blocking the industry at every turn. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point but I don't see how this is relevant. Blocking a developer that wants to buy wind turbines from another country and install them in the US does not make domestic energy cheaper or make domestic supply chains more resilient. It's a one-time import, once it's installed the wind is domestic and free, the most reliable possible supply chain, much more than domestic oil or gas.
> Blocking a developer that wants to buy wind turbines from another country and install them in the US does not make domestic energy cheaper or make domestic supply chains more resilient.
On the other hand, there are, what, approximately zero examples of where wind / solar market penetration is worth writing about and electricity has gotten cheaper.
Australian households will be able to access free electricity for three hours every day, in an effort to encourage energy use when excess solar power is being fed into the grid.
The federal government scheme will require retailers to offer free electricity to households for at least three hours in the middle of the day, when there is often more electricity generated than is being used, leading to very cheap or even negative wholesale prices.
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said the scheme would share around the benefits of solar panels, including to those without panels or who rented their homes.
Which claims: This could save families up to $300 per year off their energy bills, and up to $1,070 if they have solar panels and batteries. Victoria’s Midday Power Saver offer will be available from 1 October 2026.
Oh look, you may save more if you already have solar and batteries. Yet another wealth transfer from the have-nots to the haves. Typical.
If you’re poor you could save up to less than a dollar a day.
I'm also confused, I thought the US was the leader in basically everything, so much so that they were constantly accusing other countries of stealing technology. now, basic manufacturing is a mysterious unknowable box for which we'd need to depend on foreign suppliers.
Seems fairly measured to say that it’s not in the interest of the U.S. to build its economic foundation (energy production) on top of a technology it’s incapable of producing without the assistance of a country that’s been fairly open about its plans to take kinetic action against the US sometime in the next 48 months.
Really a couple of key points. The first is that the US isn't "incapable" of producing renewable energy infrastructure, we've just largely chosen not to for various reasons and are certainly capable of doing so if there was a good reason to.
But the second and more important point is that relying on another country to produce renewable energy technology is not analogous to relying on another country to supply your actual energy. If I bought solar panels from China and tomorrow a US-China war started, my solar panels keep producing energy just fine. I might have imported the panels from China, but that's not where the actual energy is coming from. Sure, eventually I'll need to replace them, but that's not for decades. Assuming a conflict with China lasts long enough to prevent me from ever buying Chinese solar panels again, that's plenty of time to develop US capacity to produce them. And in the meantime, my solar panels keep importing energy from the Sun, which I'm told is very hard to blockade, embargo, or tariff.
Renewable energy tech actually has another major advantage over fossil fuels in a conflict situation. As the current Middle Eastern unpleasantness has demonstrated, fossil fuels are a global commodity and their price everywhere is impacted by restriction on their trade anywhere. Sufficient domestic production of fossil fuels may prevent a country from literally running out in a war, but that's unlikely to actually keep the country's economy healthy. China obviously isn't sitting on top of a fossil fuel producing region the way Iran is, but it seems pretty obvious a US-China war will dramatically impact fossil fuel energy prices given that blockading fossil fuel trade will be an obvious weapon in such a conflict.
When it comes to the impact conflicts have on the price of your energy, you might be better off relying on your Chinese solar panels than American oil. Especially if you can replace them with American solar panels when the time comes. China clearly understands the strategic value of renewable energy, which is why they've invested so much in becoming the major source of that technology.
Just wanted to say thanks for this. You connected two trains of thought I had never put together.
Don’t have a rebuttal.
I’m long on last mile energy production. Solar/battery for domestic, nuclear for industrial, etc. It creates resilience through decentralization. It also is likely to happen organically (no central planning necessary, markets will likely naturally converge here as they drive down prices).
Haven’t spent much time reconciling that with my stance _against_ centralized wind/solar/battery in critical infrastructure in the U.S.
> their price everywhere is impacted by restriction on their trade anywhere.
That’s entirely a human fabrication.
Any country can decide at any time to simple give their fossil fuel reserves away.
Australia does, so I don’t see why any other country can’t do the same.
Also, your plan relies on the power electronics and industrial control systems used in solar / wind deployments not being backdoored, which isn’t a bet I’d be willing to make.
Giving their fossil fuel reserves away isn't exactly solving anything is it though?
They happen to be giving the reserves away to foreign investors and thus driving domestic prices significantly higher then they aught to be.
I saw an amusing analysis which said that Trump will go down in history as the clean energy president. No administration will ever do so much to prove the necessity of having renewable energy.
When one leader can cause a global energy crisis, seems obvious the world will go running towards any solution which can mitigate this in the future.
Did Saudi Arabia wait until it could manufacture oil drills before it started exploiting its oil?
Solar panels are oil drills. The oil is in the sky. If your supplier stops selling you oil drills you have several years to find another supplier or start building your own.
So if something goes wrong between the US and China, the US has 10 years to develop it's own supply. It's not like existing panels and batteries are going to suddenly stop working.
That's fair: as a 3rd party it seems like there's miscommunication leading to impasse, help me understand:
> skeptical of the U.S. being able to develop domestic supply chains for this under current conditions
Right, but, the presupposition there is war, and we have to build it ourselves, presupposes differing conditions. Then there are ameliorations that bridge to your desired conditions mentioned by your interlocutors (stuff still works, 10 year head start)
> “Kinetic action” does imply large swaths of U.S. infrastructure will in fact “suddenly stop working” and need to be rebuilt to maintain capacity
This relies on a maximal reading of the already-maximal "[They have open] plans to take kinetic action against the US [in next 4 years].". I assume they is China, and you are referring to a Taiwan scenario. I haven't seen anyone claim China is going to attack the US in the next 4 years. It is extremely unlikely China ends up knocking out tons of stateside power infrastructure over Taiwan.
If you install solar panels, you have 10 years or more of lifetime to develop your domestic supply chain for replacements. This doesn't sound like a problem.
The IRA had enormous incentives to develop on shore renewable manufacturing. All of that was gutted in the BBB. Many of those burgeoning companies may have died in the interim as they saw that funding dry up, and realized they were working in an uphill regulatory environment.
I thought a lot of manufactured goods come from China. Including many of the tools and equipment for drilling oil. Is oil not a secure energy supply either then?
The incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act greatly increased US domestic battery production capacity. It went from 7 GWh per year in 2023 to 70 GWh per year in early 2026 and is expected to reach 1400 GWh per year by the end of the decade.
Domestic solar cell manufacturing was also growing rapidly, although I believe that may have slowed due to Trump.
I don't know about wind turbine production because I can't convince the !@#$%&?ing search engine to tell me about manufacturing rather than installation.
The sector has also seen its share of oversupply and price drops this year, with surprising reports of a fall below $50/kWh for two-hour battery systems made in China. Nameplate battery manufacturing capacity in China alone reached 2.2 TWh at the end of 2023, almost double the 1.2 TWh of global demand that analyst BloombergNEF (BNEF) is expecting for 2024.
When you have a supply chain failure on solar or wind power, you stop adding capacity. When you have a supply chain failure on oil and gas, you stop generating power. These are not the same problem.
We can build capacity to manufacturer renewable power domestically. But I suspect this administration is more interested in protecting the business interest of those that gave them the largest campaign donations than they are in long term energy sustainability.
They're interested in protecting the profits of industries that line their pockets. It's the most corrupt administration in US history and it isn't even close. Theres some far right ideology mixed in. Particularly from Stephen Miller, but mostly it's grift and graft
Saying solar power is dependent on China because panels come from China is like saying fracking is dependent on China because some pumps and drilling equipment come from China.
"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.
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.
No it's not. It exists but it's certainly not common for individual dwelling to use ground source heat pumps, at least in Norway. It is more common in Sweden[1] but still far less common than air source and over 90% of heat pump installations in Norway are air source[2].
The only ground source installations I can think of in Norway serve large office buildings and similar. The largest heat pump installation I know of in Norway is actually a third kind: water source[3]. It takes heat from the Drammen river to provide heat for a district heating system and for keeping the town centre clear of ice in the winter as well as supplying the new hospital with heat.
I imagine that the rest of the Nordic region is similar.
See:
[1] http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JR...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221313882...
[3] https://energiteknikk.net/2023/11/drammen-fjernvarme-storst-...
If by Nordics you mean Norway, Sweden and Finland, then the most correct way to say would be that ground source heat pumps for redidential heating are (very) common in Sweden and Finland, especially in newer and larger buildings. Norway is somewhat different in energy and climate perspective than its eastern neighbours.
The biggest reason to not install ground source heat pump is high installation cost. This means that it makes more sense for larger residential buildings. Also If you have district heating available then this might be more economical in the long run.
In Finland around 50% of new single-family homes use ground source heat pumps. So it's definitely popular here.
3 schools in my neighborhood (barneskole, ungdomsskole & videregående) all use ground source heat pumps.
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.
It's expensive. A relative has one in the northern Great Lakes, they wouldn't have installed it if their house had access to natural gas.
Our house came with one and we upgraded the unit a few years ago. It's very efficient in terms of units of energy consumed, but in my area of the world gas is significantly cheaper than electricity so it ends up being expensive to run.
That said, we will install solar at some point and then it'll be "free" HVAC.
There's a pretty significant upfront cost in getting them drilled, and many homes need the vertical drilling if they don't have sufficient yard space for a horizontal system. It gets harder if you have your own septic drain field too, as that will complete for yard space.
The cost difference is pretty massive- 3-10x for a vertical system. If you live in a city or a suburb with tiny lots, that's your only option though.
Nat gas and central AC are way cheaper.
I paid about EUR 4500 for a 114 meter drill hole including installation of brine (ethanol in my case actually) and removal of spoils. My 8kW heat+water pump was about EUR 7000.
I can spec out a gas burner for about EUR 4000 and a central AC for EUR 5000, but I bet the efficiency of the ground source heater would quickly trump the cost of buying gas regularly.
That's insanely cheap compared to what we can get around here. Most installs I've heard of from people in the US are in the $20-50,000 range, depending on the size of their home and number of wells needed.
Yet it did not feel very cheap to me. The price of the pump had increased from 4800 only a year earlier due to the war in Ukraine.
There were a number of steps I had to go through. First I had to file for permission at the County Office, where they verify that drilling in the area is acceptable and that the intended pump follows regulations with respect to cooling media, and that the drilling company was certified to drill for my needs. It did cost about 70 euros.
I needed effective zero plumbing work in the house as it was already prepared to accept heating from a pump like that. Perhaps that is one of the major costs in USA?
I don’t know what’s going on with this kind of stuff in the US - similarly I’ve heard stories of people getting quotes in the States for anything from US$10-15K for the kind of air source mini-split heat pumps you can have supplied and installed for US $1200-2000 in Australia! (That is ~3.5 to 7 kW range - super common and cheap as chips here).
Can't prove it, but it seems vendors collude in (very hot) Arizona on all sorts of necessities (plumbing, A/C, electricians). they all seem to know what each charges, and the prices seem not kept in check by any real competition.
Although if you needed a new septic field, I would think ground source thermal would be significantly deeper than a drain field which is only like a foot or so down so you could stack them.
Air source heat pumps are insanely more efficient and just plain better these days too. It used to be that if the air was below 40F you couldn't heat your house with a heat pump. Now, you can heat your house even when it's -10F
If you can tolerate the price, I am _confident_ that you will pretty much always have better results using the Earth as your thermal exhaust, because you don't have to dig very far to find a large region that's pretty much always at 50 F.
The downvotes are unfair.
The price of things - heat pumps and alternatives - in different regions - even different regions within the US - varies by what people are prepared to pay not what they cost to produce.
The nordics have traditionally had cheap heat pumps whereas piped gas is only in the biggest cities and I’ve never seen bottled gas in the countryside. The competitor used to be cheap electricity and wood. Ground source heat pumps for rural install have been priced to compete with wood.
In the US the market could be shaped by regulation and taxation etc. It’s the choice of the US to have cheap fossil fuels and not embrace tech instead.
> Air source heat pumps are insanely more efficient
Citation needed?
Efficient how? I'm sure a heat pump designed for a narrow range of input temperatures AND working with water which can transport a lot more heat should easily be more efficient.
https://www.energysage.com/heat-pumps/compare-air-source-geo... Seems to disagree
I assuming he means insanely more efficient than they used to be, not more efficient than ground-source (awkward wording though). I suppose they can also be described as more efficient in installation time, cost and equipment than ground source, but clearly not in operating efficiency.
Yes air source are really good value in cost effectiveness terms, especially when a house has an existing central heating system they can connect to. But their COP - whilst dramatically improving in the last 10-20 years - is still behind ground source, particularly in the north during winter
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...
"New Zealand has an abundant supply of geothermal energy because we are located on the boundary between two tectonic plates. ... Total geothermal electricity capacity in New Zealand stands at over 900 MW, making us the fifth largest generator of geothermal in the world. It has been estimated that there is sufficient geothermal resource for another 1,000 MW of electricity generation."
That's not all that much. That total would be about equal to the 75th largest nuclear plant in the world.
Good sites where high temperatures are near the surface are rare. California has a few, but no promising locations for more.
> That's not all that much
May not be much in world terms but here in NZ national demand maxes out at around 5.5GW so bringing another GW on stream would be quite handy. Most of the geothermal is a lot closer to Auckland* than our hydro is so so that would be another positive aspect.
* Auckland has 25% of the population so a corresponding amount of energy has to be pushed its way.
> That's not all that much.
We don’t have many people. It gets worse’s though, we burn coal and are looking to fund a gas terminal. We have abundant other ways of generating power and subsidise an aluminium smelter for some reason.
Coming up next, data centres.
‘Clean, Green New Zealand.’
>no promising locations for more.
Isn't there a super volcano in the middle of the country? Maybe there are some adjacent hot spots outside of the national park?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_National_Park
Is there any earthquake risk from drilling near tectonic plates?
There are also places in the US with boiling water at the surface. I live near one of those places so always curious about geothermal. There's a spot near my house in a creek bed where snow always melts even in deep winter so apparently I have some potential heat source. Our well water is cold though.
Not near me, but hot water spring, rivers and beaches made for a nice soak every now and again.
Turning them all into power plants would be a shame, but there is plenty of space for both.
You don't necessarily have to choose one or the other. The Blue lagoon in Iceland is a famous example. The water comes from a power plant nearby.
You're not required to site them that close either, because of how regional the conditions usually are. A couple miles plus or minus doesn't change things too much.
You brought the conversation in a circle, since the point of this new technology is the geology you speak of is rare.
> But if you want to generate power, you need to get down to where temperatures can boil water.
Why is that the case? Can't you go down to where it's like 70-80 deg C and close the gap using heat pumps? Yes, you need to put some energy in, but I would expect that the whole process would still be energy-positive at some temperature that's lower than 100C?
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.
But the energy in boiling isopentane would be less right?
Yes, the efficiency is worse, but as is also the case for solar power you need to get used to not caring much about efficiency. It is nuclear energy where the primary side is provided free of charge. The Carnot efficiency is almost without relevance.
In geothermal there is still a lot of interest in efficiency and exploring different working fluids because binary systems now have efficiencies of 10-20%. That is why you see companies like Sage Geosystems working on developing / deploying supercritical CO2 turbines to try and boost practical power densities.
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.
There are so many ways around this - for a start, you can use some other working fluid that boils at a lower temperature. Or you can choose a different thermodynamic cycle that doesn't involve phase change.
> 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 read this several times in the context of _geothermal_ energy, and had no clue what you were talking about.
Then I realised, you must be an American and use 'freedom units', coupled with a misunderstanding of what geothermal means.
Framingham, MA has a geothermal system using ground source heat pumps like what you are describing
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/first-networked-geother...
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.
> Maybe not quite exactly what you envision.
I'm too zonked to pick out the method from the article - but I'll offer that geo methods can be region specific. What I described fits the SE US, with our 13 month summers and abundant underground water.
13 month summers lol :) Yeah, definitely if your interested neighborhood geothermal Whisper Valley seems to be the largest by far in the US, you might check it out.
> 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.
I keep thinking this would be a great municipal code change: any time the roads are being built or ripped up for water/sewer maintenance, put in a ground loop and subsidize household connections for heat pumps so instead of having to deal with the marginal difference between 20℉ winter air you'd be working with 50-60℉ ground temperatures.
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).
> pv in the UK doesn't work
tell that to 6% of UK electric production https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz947djd3d3o (up from 5% in 2024
Solar is surprisingly useful in the UK since it is anti-correlated with wind power, the UK's largest electricity source.
Solar peaked at 42% of UK electricity generation the other day:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...
I’ve never heard a claim that heat pumps won’t work well in a climate like San Francisco and, from looking at the annual temperature patterns, it seems like both air source and ground source heat pumps should work extremely well as they do in the “shoulder seasons” here in New England.
Heat pumps have gotten a lot better, you need a pretty extreme climate for them to start to struggle, even the air-source ones.
(And PV works well enough in the UK for it to be a no-brainer to put on residentials roofs, which is on the whole the most expensive way to deploy it. Though this is in large part due to the way that it competes with retail prices and not wholesale prices)
Wait Minneapolis is definitely very cold for about half the year.
This is nonsense, heat pumps are more efficient at smaller temperature differentials. I suspect we don't see them much in San Francisco only because there is so little need for heating and cooling the potential savings are smaller.
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.
At least in parts of Eastern Europe (especially the former GDR) district heating systems were introduced as a response to the oil crises of the 70s, resulting price shocks and the transport of coal to households being very labor and resource incentive [1].
[1] https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Windkraft-und-Erd...
It’s uneconomical in an already built out area or a non central planned economy, and also the US is special case since we have dirt cheap natural gas that is used for heating.
Digging up streets to run distribution lines, running service drops to every existing house, installing a heat exchanger and valves in every house is astronomically expensive given the amount of energy used by a single residence.
If you’re building out a new neighborhood on a greenspace plot, installing the district heating/cooling piping is much cheaper since you’re already laying electric, water, sewer, and mane gas lines.
> It’s uneconomical in an already built out area or a non central planned economy
I mean, true. But it was new developments I had in mind for a neighborhood geo install.
"I don't know how economical that is"
Sure you do. Think about it. Its just drilling a hole and making electricity from the heat. We have been able to do this for a very long time. So if people aren't really doing it much, its not economical. If it was now becoming economical, the article would describe some new way of doing it that makes it economical. The article doesn't, so you "know" it isn't.
PS This has been tried many time, it only works in very specific situations, usually places where building a full PP doesn't make sense or where you are making a lot of electricity for some other purpose (mining usually).
> Its just drilling a hole and making electricity from the heat
District heating does not involve making electricity.
Sometimes district heating and electricity generation does combine though:
> Wärtsilä’s combined power generation and heat recovery plant offering comprises solutions for combined heat and power (CHP) including dynamic district heating (DDH), district cooling and power (DCAP) and trigeneration for applications that require both heating and cooling.
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/engine-power-plant-solutions...
Not always, but as the sibling noted, there are plenty of combined heat and power plants. They recover as much of the energy as possible from the exhaust gas streams and run pretty efficiently.
The “new” way is plasma drilling.
That's still a science project, they are piloting zapping a small hole to 100m. Very uncertain whether it will amount to anything.
>>Sure you do. Think about it. Its just drilling a hole and making electricity from the heat
...what? What does that have to do with district heating? The one in Poland is coal fired, the one in the UK is electric.
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.
> The water at these temperature / depths has a lot of dissolved salts and minerals so it's not (human / ag) usable.
To clarify, our 400' water source is the same aquifer that supplies drinking water to the state.
The water management districts will rubber-stamp permits for these wells. No one else gets off that easy.
> 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?
Baring leaks, ground source heat pump geo will consume no water at all. Water is pumped from one layer of the aquifer and is returned to a slightly higher layer.
I dont know why this keeps coming up? It is a closed loop system. The water aren't used at all.
It's a closed loop on the geo side sure.
How do you cool the steam off enough to condense so it can go and be boiler feed water again?
Lots of power plants use cooling towers for this which are typically evaporative. Some are dry, sure, but most are wet.
> It is a closed loop system. The water aren't used at all.
Our method is open on both ends. It draws from one layer of the aquifer and then returns the water to an adjacent layer.
Many data centers use evaporative cooling.
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.
> 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.
It does work. They've had a pilot project producing 3 megawatts since 2023. But scaling takes a lot of time and money, particularly when it's something new and you have to go through a lot of operational learning.
Shale took something like 30 years to become a thing. 9 years is nothing in the energy space.
It does work technically I think it is still an open question if it can work economically. There are issues of commercially viable flow rates / thermal decline rates that are harder physical limits you run up against and the pilot design doesn't address. In human timescale terms it's more like heat mining rather than renewable heat due to thermal depletion rate vs replenishment rate. These systems have a targeted lifetime of ~20-30 years and net power will decline over this timespan.
"There's no reason why this shouldn't work."
Geothermal has had the same problem for its entire history. That problem is that the water being heated goes through the ground (not in a pipe) to "gather" more energy. But this means that when the water comes back up, it has a lot of weird salts in it (and other things). Those salts cause corrosion, lots and lots of corrosion, far more than even a maritime environment. So the plant needs to be shutdown a lot of the time for repairs. And that's what makes it uneconomical. Also, the salts often contain things that require special handling which also increases costs.
PS This is why geothermal works in Iceland where there is so much geothermal heat they can use pipes. In CA, they can't so it doesn't work there.
Fervo uses engineered reservoirs in granitic basement rock so this is less of an issue. Hot rock in a working fluid can still dissolve silicates out of the granite and lead to scaling / degradation of the flow rates through the reservoir and that is a risk but chemical anti scaling treatments are used to reduce this.
CA has the worlds largest geothermal power complex in the Geysers. That one field produces an equivalent amount of power as all the geothermal in Iceland and there are others.
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
They're adapting fracking techniques to use for geothermal, which opens up many more sites. Historically geothermal has had limited potential, and the best sites have already been developed. So geothermal + fracking creates a lot more viable land.
Traditional geothermal is you dig a really deep well and get a geyser of hot water or steam to come up.
Fervo is doing "Enhanced" or "Engineered" geothermal where you dig two wells: an injection and an extraction well. You frack the rock in between, creating lots of small channels for water to flow between them. The water absorbs the heat from the rocks as its circulating from the injection well to the extraction well.
The kind of rock that's good at this heat transfer is different from shale rock that oil & gas frackers have experience with... it's harder, less porous, not partial-dino-juice. So they're taking a lot of the same core concepts from the oil & gas industry (horizontal drilling, geology simulations, etc), but their IP is in adopting the techniques to work with geothermal-favorable rock.
Another interesting concept I heard Fervo researching: this kind of geothermal is not "baseload" style power, so there's a few tricks they can do to get better cost efficiency and peaker-like or battery-like behavior. Remember the two wells that form the circulation loop: injection and extraction? Well, you need pumps on both sides (remember, this isn't "geyser-style" geothermal where natural pressure and geology do all the work). Pumps take energy to run, something like 20-30% of the overall extraction output (you put a unit of energy in to run the pumps and you get 3-5 units of energy back out the other end). Not great, not terrible either... it's an energy return comparable to solar and wind. But what you can do is run the injection pump when power prices are low (ie when there's an excess of solar on the grid), pressurize all your fracked channels underground (the reservoir), and then when grid prices rise in the evening you run just the extraction pump to pull out the pre-heated, pre-pressurized water. You're still at a 3-5x energy return, but the time-shifting has made the cost multiplier more favorable.
My understanding is it's still in research phase, but Fervo is piloting this technique. Like another thread said, they're pre-IPO now, so they've been flooding the renewables media with all these stories. They filed an S-1 recently, but always read the eventual S-3 before considering your investment options blahblahblah.
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.
In traditional fault hosted (not magmatic) geothermal the convection of the water up the fault brings the thermal energy closer to the surface where drilling depths are economical. This convection heats the surrounding rock and over hundred thousand - million of years brings the background temperature around a large volume at depth surrounding these systems considerably above traditional background geothermal gradients. By drilling into a much larger volume of impermeable hot rock surrounding a very small permeable fault hosted section you can considerably enhance the power potential of a traditional fault hosted geothermal system (the E in EGS). That is what Fervo is doing and why their projects are situated right next to traditional geothermal power plants.
The assumption is that if you can increase drilling efficiencies enough then you don't even need a fault hosted or similar system to bring that energy close to the surface, you can just drill down deep enough to get at similar temperatures. That is a big assumption in the economics.
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.
No. Current geothermal projects need very specific geology to work, its very rare which is why geothermal is such a small blip in the overall energy picture. Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), the technique Fervo is using, can create the conditions to be able to generate electricity. The hope is this will greatly expand the number of projects that can be developed.
Doesn't that sound useful to you?
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
It’s a stupid ploy by oil drillers to try and expand their existing capex to something more future proof. Their theory is to randomly frack the ground and hope superheated water shows up there. It’s probably just going to end up ruining existing groundwater sources.
The Casa Diablo geothermal facility in the eastern Sierra Nevada of California has been a success. I also remember reading years back about ideas surrounding how to extract energy from Yellowstone both to provide clean energy but also to decrease risk of another massive explosion. If I recall they were proposing digging a massive horizontal tunnel to come in deep and extract heat without compromising the roof.
Long Valley Caldera Geothermal Area | Open Energy Information https://share.google/5DvljMhL3EVMDeIAL
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...
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.
While I’m not extremely bullish on large scale geothermal, much like with Housing, we need any and all types of it.
Those geothermal plants up by Mammoth Lakes are looking like a great idea right now
With all the exotic drilling tech making fracking work, it seems like geothermal is a natural pivot since much of the challenge is controlling the cost of drilling deeply.
this looks like a search for fluffy money durring an energy crisis.
Turbines are completly mature, and nothing dealing with some new deap drilling breakthrough or heat exhanger advancement, or more efficient and durable pumps, crittical CO², or H²O ?, not yet. Existing geothermal plants use the same generation technology as a coal plant, but use near surface heat assosiated with volcanoes and hot springs, and there is a distinct limit on more of that.
What is the point of building energy outside of solar farms? I'm sincerely asking
An inexhaustible 24/7 production capable plant has many advantages over solar and maintaining large most types of battery banks.
Cost is like 90-99% of what matters. Last year, China installed 300GW of new renewables and 0GW of geothermal, despite geothermal being "an inexhaustible 24/7 production capable".
Geothermal will compete with solar if they can get the cost low enough. I hope they succeed!
Some people don't really want the planet covered in solar panels. Others are cool with it so long as they don't have to see it.
Night time? But batteries! Several cloudy days in a row? More batteries! Cost? -> a mix of sources becomes attractive
Batteries? You mean like digging a hole/making a wall and pumping water?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...
Or we could just spin some rocks around.
https://www.torus.co/torus-flywheel
Rather have solar/wind and this than shipping depleting goop from foreign nations.
https://imgur.com/a/dV8gk3R
can you find curves like this for any other power source?
also batteries are getting exponentially cheap too
These are typically representative of cost performance per watt of one part of a more complex deployed energy system. Things like the aluminum / steal for the container / framing, copper / aluminum for the transmission and wiring, land and labor for installation decline at much less aggressive rates or increase over time.
In almost all pareto optimal least cost energy system models that I've seen, high penetration of solar, wind, batteries plus some minority amount of (clean) baseload power is the most capital efficient energy system.
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.
That’s my point. Solar is on track to eclipse that amount way before we would build all of this speculative geothermal.
Just make everything part of the mix, even dam to dam hydro on rural hillsides plays a part in stabilising grid edges.
The more interesting use of geothermal power, IMO, is pushing heat underground with excess solar while the sun is high and the days are long, and pulling out electricity from heat in the darker times .. done large enough that carries across summer to winter.
In case you didn't know, geothermal energy extraction works on cooling our planet's core. It's not 'free', or 'clean', or 'green'.
IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE LESS IDIOTIC WAY OF ENERGY PRODUCTION
Would be great to see this in our lifetime
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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 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.
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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.
They have spent immense effort blocking huge amounts of domestic solar and wind production, even paying off developers to simply not build planned power plants.
Didn’t know there were significant domestic supply chains for wind, solar, and battery tech. Thought a lions share of that was ultimately coming from China.
Have any sources I can learn from?
There aren't, and there certainly won't be if we keep blocking the industry at every turn. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point but I don't see how this is relevant. Blocking a developer that wants to buy wind turbines from another country and install them in the US does not make domestic energy cheaper or make domestic supply chains more resilient. It's a one-time import, once it's installed the wind is domestic and free, the most reliable possible supply chain, much more than domestic oil or gas.
> Blocking a developer that wants to buy wind turbines from another country and install them in the US does not make domestic energy cheaper or make domestic supply chains more resilient.
On the other hand, there are, what, approximately zero examples of where wind / solar market penetration is worth writing about and electricity has gotten cheaper.
Australian households will be able to access free electricity for three hours every day, in an effort to encourage energy use when excess solar power is being fed into the grid.
The federal government scheme will require retailers to offer free electricity to households for at least three hours in the middle of the day, when there is often more electricity generated than is being used, leading to very cheap or even negative wholesale prices.
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said the scheme would share around the benefits of solar panels, including to those without panels or who rented their homes.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-03/energy-retailers-offe...
Free electricity in the middle of the day.
That’ll come in handy for the, actually way too many people, who are home during the middle of the day.
And how does that help people who already have solar? Free electricity in the middle of the day doesn’t really help them.
And, actually, has this been implemented yet? It’s been 6 months since it was announced.
It starts on July 1st of this year: https://www.dcceew.gov.au/about/news/solar-sharer-offer-help...
Moving the goalposts.
Well, has it been implemented?
I found this https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/three-hours-free-power-every-...
Which claims: This could save families up to $300 per year off their energy bills, and up to $1,070 if they have solar panels and batteries. Victoria’s Midday Power Saver offer will be available from 1 October 2026.
Oh look, you may save more if you already have solar and batteries. Yet another wealth transfer from the have-nots to the haves. Typical.
If you’re poor you could save up to less than a dollar a day.
I'm also confused, I thought the US was the leader in basically everything, so much so that they were constantly accusing other countries of stealing technology. now, basic manufacturing is a mysterious unknowable box for which we'd need to depend on foreign suppliers.
Seems fairly measured to say that it’s not in the interest of the U.S. to build its economic foundation (energy production) on top of a technology it’s incapable of producing without the assistance of a country that’s been fairly open about its plans to take kinetic action against the US sometime in the next 48 months.
Help me understand.
Really a couple of key points. The first is that the US isn't "incapable" of producing renewable energy infrastructure, we've just largely chosen not to for various reasons and are certainly capable of doing so if there was a good reason to.
But the second and more important point is that relying on another country to produce renewable energy technology is not analogous to relying on another country to supply your actual energy. If I bought solar panels from China and tomorrow a US-China war started, my solar panels keep producing energy just fine. I might have imported the panels from China, but that's not where the actual energy is coming from. Sure, eventually I'll need to replace them, but that's not for decades. Assuming a conflict with China lasts long enough to prevent me from ever buying Chinese solar panels again, that's plenty of time to develop US capacity to produce them. And in the meantime, my solar panels keep importing energy from the Sun, which I'm told is very hard to blockade, embargo, or tariff.
Renewable energy tech actually has another major advantage over fossil fuels in a conflict situation. As the current Middle Eastern unpleasantness has demonstrated, fossil fuels are a global commodity and their price everywhere is impacted by restriction on their trade anywhere. Sufficient domestic production of fossil fuels may prevent a country from literally running out in a war, but that's unlikely to actually keep the country's economy healthy. China obviously isn't sitting on top of a fossil fuel producing region the way Iran is, but it seems pretty obvious a US-China war will dramatically impact fossil fuel energy prices given that blockading fossil fuel trade will be an obvious weapon in such a conflict.
When it comes to the impact conflicts have on the price of your energy, you might be better off relying on your Chinese solar panels than American oil. Especially if you can replace them with American solar panels when the time comes. China clearly understands the strategic value of renewable energy, which is why they've invested so much in becoming the major source of that technology.
Just wanted to say thanks for this. You connected two trains of thought I had never put together.
Don’t have a rebuttal.
I’m long on last mile energy production. Solar/battery for domestic, nuclear for industrial, etc. It creates resilience through decentralization. It also is likely to happen organically (no central planning necessary, markets will likely naturally converge here as they drive down prices).
Haven’t spent much time reconciling that with my stance _against_ centralized wind/solar/battery in critical infrastructure in the U.S.
Will think about this for a while, thanks!
> their price everywhere is impacted by restriction on their trade anywhere.
That’s entirely a human fabrication.
Any country can decide at any time to simple give their fossil fuel reserves away.
Australia does, so I don’t see why any other country can’t do the same.
Also, your plan relies on the power electronics and industrial control systems used in solar / wind deployments not being backdoored, which isn’t a bet I’d be willing to make.
Giving their fossil fuel reserves away isn't exactly solving anything is it though? They happen to be giving the reserves away to foreign investors and thus driving domestic prices significantly higher then they aught to be.
It’s definitely solving for making someone else richer.
I’m lead believe it makes LNG less expensive for Japanese industry, which probably effects the price of goods manufactured in Japan.
I saw an amusing analysis which said that Trump will go down in history as the clean energy president. No administration will ever do so much to prove the necessity of having renewable energy.
When one leader can cause a global energy crisis, seems obvious the world will go running towards any solution which can mitigate this in the future.
It's a lesson the US won't be able to learn until it has administration capable of learning.
Did Saudi Arabia wait until it could manufacture oil drills before it started exploiting its oil?
Solar panels are oil drills. The oil is in the sky. If your supplier stops selling you oil drills you have several years to find another supplier or start building your own.
So if something goes wrong between the US and China, the US has 10 years to develop it's own supply. It's not like existing panels and batteries are going to suddenly stop working.
Fair point. But, simultaneously:
* I’m skeptical of the U.S. being able to develop domestic supply chains for this under current conditions
* “Kinetic action” does imply large swaths of U.S. infrastructure will in fact “suddenly stop working” and need to be rebuilt to maintain capacity
That's fair: as a 3rd party it seems like there's miscommunication leading to impasse, help me understand:
> skeptical of the U.S. being able to develop domestic supply chains for this under current conditions
Right, but, the presupposition there is war, and we have to build it ourselves, presupposes differing conditions. Then there are ameliorations that bridge to your desired conditions mentioned by your interlocutors (stuff still works, 10 year head start)
> “Kinetic action” does imply large swaths of U.S. infrastructure will in fact “suddenly stop working” and need to be rebuilt to maintain capacity
This relies on a maximal reading of the already-maximal "[They have open] plans to take kinetic action against the US [in next 4 years].". I assume they is China, and you are referring to a Taiwan scenario. I haven't seen anyone claim China is going to attack the US in the next 4 years. It is extremely unlikely China ends up knocking out tons of stateside power infrastructure over Taiwan.
If you install solar panels, you have 10 years or more of lifetime to develop your domestic supply chain for replacements. This doesn't sound like a problem.
More like 25 years.
The IRA had enormous incentives to develop on shore renewable manufacturing. All of that was gutted in the BBB. Many of those burgeoning companies may have died in the interim as they saw that funding dry up, and realized they were working in an uphill regulatory environment.
I thought a lot of manufactured goods come from China. Including many of the tools and equipment for drilling oil. Is oil not a secure energy supply either then?
The incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act greatly increased US domestic battery production capacity. It went from 7 GWh per year in 2023 to 70 GWh per year in early 2026 and is expected to reach 1400 GWh per year by the end of the decade.
Domestic solar cell manufacturing was also growing rapidly, although I believe that may have slowed due to Trump.
I don't know about wind turbine production because I can't convince the !@#$%&?ing search engine to tell me about manufacturing rather than installation.
1400 GWh of Li-ion batteries would require consuming the entire planets known Li reserves plus a bit more.
Got a citation from mining monthly for that?
Meanwhile, on the supply side:
~ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/02/the-battery-boom-of-2024...That's 2,200 GWh produced in China in 2023.
For past / present / future data on Lithium-ion battery manufacturing capabilities, see: Lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity, 2022-2030 from the IEA - https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b...
When you have a supply chain failure on solar or wind power, you stop adding capacity. When you have a supply chain failure on oil and gas, you stop generating power. These are not the same problem.
We can build capacity to manufacturer renewable power domestically. But I suspect this administration is more interested in protecting the business interest of those that gave them the largest campaign donations than they are in long term energy sustainability.
> When you have a supply chain failure on oil and gas, you stop generating power.
Only if all oil and gas > energy production has one single point of failure.
In reality it’s much more distributed than that.
They're interested in protecting the profits of industries that line their pockets. It's the most corrupt administration in US history and it isn't even close. Theres some far right ideology mixed in. Particularly from Stephen Miller, but mostly it's grift and graft
Saying solar power is dependent on China because panels come from China is like saying fracking is dependent on China because some pumps and drilling equipment come from China.
"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.
As far as I can tell, every president in the US since the Clinton administration has been in favor of nuclear power.
Is there something important that I am missing?
They're pretty friendly to nuclear which comes out of the ground.
So do Renewables.
Sure, technically.
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.
$$$.
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There is no continent called “America”.
Surprisingly, this depends on your culture.
Depending on where you're from you'll have been taught a different set of continents (North + South America / America, Europe + Asia / Eurasia).
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?
> how the United Mexican Sates are known as Mexico
I can’t believe I didn’t know that’s Mexico’s official name! TIL!
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.
It expires in 2036
Or, as you've presented, three of the twenty three independent states and territories of North America.