Why the 'redheaded stepchild' of renewable energy is poised to rise under Trump
AUSTIN, Texas — Even as President Trump slashes support for wind and solar energy, another renewable energy source is finding unexpected favor under his second administration.
In early February, newly confirmed Secretary of Energy Chris Wright named geothermal energy, which uses underground heat to generate clean heat and electricity, as one of the prime areas for department research and development.
And geothermal advocates see Trump's own pledges to "drill, baby, drill" — even if primarily intended to benefit the oil and gas industry — as offering both rhetorical and practical support for the nascent enhanced geothermal industry, which uses technologies like fracking to extract the heat from the earth.
The sector is still “10 to 15 years” behind where wind and solar are, and raising capital is tough, Cindy Taff, chief executive of geothermal company Sage Geosystems, told The Hill.
But now, as momentum grows and money begins to pour in, she said, “it’s going to be the decade of geothermal.”
With bipartisan political support behind its efforts and skyrocketing energy demand from data centers bolstering the potential market for its offerings, the geothermal industry is getting excited.
Geothermal proponents interviewed by The Hill argue it could soon offer heating, cooling and electric power in a form that combines the cheap, pollution-free aspects of wind and solar power combined with the on-demand security of fossil fuels.
Those advantages, they argue, make the industry particularly well placed to help meet the demand of the new data centers, which require massive quantities of electricity to run and cool off their servers: A November McKinsey study found that data center electricity demand would more than quadruple by the end of the decade — requiring additional electricity about equal to all the power the state of Texas used in 2024.
For one thing, they noted, geothermal energy is nearly as plentiful as solar. Last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) found that there is enough accessible heat within the Earth to increase global electricity demand by a factor of 140.
It can also be produced on a more consistent basis. Geothermal plants on average ran 75 percent of the time in 2023, according to the IEA — far more than solar.
Unlike fossil fuels, the main contributor to global emissions, geothermal energy also offers on-demand heating, cooling and electricity without heating the planet or releasing toxins into the air.
The Trump administration's embrace of geothermal is a rare silver lining in an era of record heat, Jamie Beard of the geothermal advocacy group Project InnerSpace argued. If the climate movement “wants to hand-wring about what we’ve lost” as Trump turns against the Biden administration’s climate goals, he said, then geothermal’s acceptance among Republicans “is something you can grab onto.”
Over the short term, Beard foresaw a rough ride for the geothermal industry: It could lose access to Inflation Reduction Act tax credits if Republican efforts to cut them — in whole or in part — go through. And most federal geothermal programs are housed in the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, a potential target of a staunchly pro-fossil fuel administration.
But over the medium term, Beard said she was “cautiously optimistic” that “geothermal is going to shine under Trump” — an attitude widely shared by geothermal entrepreneurs.
Many were tentatively excited about Trump’s pick of Wright, pointing to his deep experience — as head of oilfield services company Liberty Energy — with oil and gas drilling, which has significant overlap with geothermal technology. While generally focused on oil and gas, Wright's company, Liberty Energy, invested $10 million in Houston-based geothermal startup Fervo Energy.
Wright "wants to unleash base load power, and we think geothermal really fits the bill," Charlotte “Coco” Wallace, who leads policy and business development for geothermal startup Quaise, told The Hill.
Others saw hope in Trump's announcement of a new "National Energy Council," to be headed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, which would encircle the whole energy supply chain — from permitting to production to distribution — under one hub.
“For geothermal, that is potentially HUGE,” Beard wrote to The Hill. Most of the hottest, most accessible rock in the country is in the West, nearly half of which is federally owned. In those regions, “red tape” has made geothermal projects a “slog,” she said.
Much of the energy in geothermal is currently based in Houston, Texas, site of the nation’s biggest oil and gas industry workforce and home to billions in energy capital. Many oil giants now have geothermal divisions, and Texas leads in startups.
There’s so much going on in the state, even industry insiders struggle to keep up with what’s happening, said Matt Welch of the Texas Geothermal Energy Alliance, the local industry trade group.
In December, for example, Fervo — the company that Liberty Energy invested in — announced it had raised more than a quarter-billion dollars in a single funding round, bringing its capital to well more than half a billion dollars.
Once considered too expensive and geographically limited — dependent on rare underground geyser systems of naturally heated water — geothermal is now being reimagined using drilling techniques pioneered in the oilfields like the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas and the Dallas-area Barnett Shale, two of the original proving grounds of the country's oil and gas boom.
Houston-based companies like Fervo, Sage Geosystems and Quaise are testing new methods to exploit the western U.S.’s underground heat, securing record-breaking funding rounds and striking deals with tech giants like Google and Meta.
Fervo, the first company to apply fracking to geothermal, has a deal with Google to supply 115 megawatts of clean power to the Nevada grid by 2026.
“We don't think the world is going to be solely powered by geothermal because, you know, the world has never been solely powered by one energy resource,” Fervo chief executive Tim Latimer told The Hill last year.
But he thinks that by midcentury, the grid could be 80 percent solar — with the remaining 20 percent offered by geothermal, serving as that “base load backbone to a flexible, functioning type of grid.”
Sage, meanwhile, raised $35 million in December and just finished construction on a prototype pressure battery in South Texas — a new form of energy storage which uses underground cavities to store energy generated by solar farms or windmills.
Sage has also signed a deal with tech company Meta to provide 150 megawatts of geothermal electricity to a company data center by 2027 — the largest such deal inked for a project east of the geologically active Rocky Mountains.
Then there is Quaise, another Houston-based company that has raised nearly $100 million. Its founder wants to use microwave beams to vaporize rock that — at 500 degrees Celsius (about 1000 degrees Fahrenheit) — would melt conventional drills.
Because such technology would also significantly cut the time, and therefore cost, of drilling — much of which is consumed with laboriously pulling drill bits out of the hole every time they wear out — it could potentially bring geothermal to the densely populated Northeast, where the kind of heat usable for electricity sits inaccessible beneath miles of old, cold rock.
In a January demo for journalists and investors, Quaise engineers shined a flashlight-like beam on a shoebox-sized block of basalt and melted a two-inch hole in it. The company says the technology can ultimately be loaded onto standard drilling rigs.
Support from the administration helps get geothermal past the point where it’s theoretically abundant but “too expensive,” Taff told The Hill.
“We need to drive that cost down,” she said. Republican support, particularly in a sector dependent on capital and know-how from the fossil fuel industry, helps “get the industry to the point where we can be cost-competitive with other forms of electricity generation."
Beard worries that geothermal risks becoming partisan and ultimately being dropped or facing significant regulatory scrutiny under a future administration. In an interview with The Hill last year, she warned that “the redheaded stepchild of renewables’” place as a neutral ground in American energy politics — the site of a kind of refreshing comity that is increasingly rare — would be key to its success.
But it was also, she said, an asset that could easily be squandered.
"Here's my fear: We go full bore the next two years with a Republican Congress and a Republican president, geothermal becomes a Republican flag — right alongside natural gas and oil, right? And then as soon as there's a change in Congress or the administration, geothermal gets dumped,” she said.
In an effort to head off such a possibility, Beard’s group is co-running a series of gatherings that bring together representatives of the left and right, Big Oil and the climate movement, in an effort to secure the technology’s future by “bringing everyone along.”
Taff offered a rosier view. "Electricity is the great equalizer, right?” she said.
“Everyone needs cheap electricity. And if geothermal can bring that, I just can't see why it's not going to be supported by both sides of the aisle."
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