Enhanced Geothermal's Breakthroughs Are the Good News We All Need Right Now
Enhanced geothermal could provide 24/7 clean power. The economics are looking better with each year.
Dear Lord, it has been a month. We’re only a couple weeks into the Trump presidency and it is already about as bad as I could have expected. I’ll have more to say and report on all this in the future, but in today’s newsletter, I want to highlight some good news that hasn’t received much attention in this era of chaos: enhanced geothermal’s recent progress.
In 2023, I wrote about enhanced geothermal—a clean energy technology that was showing early signs of promise. Since then, the evidence that this technology could transform our energy system and decarbonize the grid has only gotten stronger.
Last year, the Department of Energy projected that enhanced geothermal could deliver electricity at $60-70 per megawatt-hour (MWh) by 2030 in many regions of the United States, making it competitive with conventional power sources. In some regions the cost could be even lower.
$60-70 per MWh is cheap for electricity that runs 24 hours a day no matter the weather and doesn’t pump planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere. To put that number in perspective consider that Microsoft recently signed an agreement to pay more than $100 per MWh to help reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant and use its carbon-free electricity in its data centers.
2024 didn’t just bring new studies and projections either. There were also promising field results from enhanced geothermal pilot projects in the Western US. Fervo Energy reported cost reductions of 50% at their Project Red site.
These cost reductions have been driven by improvements in drilling technology. By adapting techniques from the shale gas industry—like horizontal drilling and polycrystalline diamond compact drill bits—companies are dramatically reducing the time it takes to drill wells.
Fervo Energy recently cut drilling times by 60% across eight wells in Nevada and Utah. Cutting drilling times like this is key to reducing cost given that drilling has historically made up about half the cost of geothermal projects.
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Distilled’s readers will be familiar with the famous charts that show the dramatic cost reductions in solar panel costs over the last few decades. Back in the 80s and 90s, close observers saw solar panel “learning rates” and knew something unusual was about to happen. What looked like an absurdly expensive technology, only applicable in those most niche circumstances, was about to become the fastest growing energy technology in human history. (Similar trends played out across other clean energy technologies like lithium-ion batteries and LEDs as I wrote last week).
The wonky chart below—which shows enhanced geothermal learning rates at three sites in the Western US (Red, Cape, and FORGE)—is enhanced geothermal’s equivalent. It’s the kind of data that gets energy and climate nerds really excited about the future.
Last week, a group of researchers published a study in Nature examining enhanced geothermal’s recent learning rates. They wrote:
Advancements in drilling technology commonly follow a learning curve, in which the learning rate is the percentage cost reduction for every doubling of total wells drilled… There was a 60% reduction in drilling days over this series of eight wells, equating to a 35% learning rate.
By comparison, the shale gas industry, which transformed the world’s energy system, geopolitics, and environment saw early learning rates of ~18%. Geothermal’s learning rate is about twice that.
Enhanced geothermal still has a long way to go if it is to transform the world as cheap solar and batteries have. Learning rates will need to continue. Costs will need to continue to fall. And then the difficult work of deployment in an industry that is biased towards fossil fuels will need to begin. A future where hot rocks power factories, data centers, and electric homes is far from certain.
But that future is, without a doubt, one that should inspire all of our imaginations, motivations, and collective political will. It is a future that we desperately need. It is also a future that is a little closer than it was a year ago.
Go deeper on enhanced geothermal
If you liked today’s newsletter, I think you’ll enjoy my much longer explainer on the history of enhanced geothermal.
In that story I covered:
The history of traditional geothermal power
Why traditional geothermal entered a period of stagnation in the 1990s
The story of the nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos who launched a side project that led to the first enhanced geothermal tests in the 1970s
How recent developments in fracking technology led to renewed interest and innovation in geothermal
How current government incentives could pave the way for this technology
The barriers that could prevent geothermal’s growth
I also made a 10 minute video that covers much of the same ground. You can check that out here:
Thanks as always for reading and supporting Distilled!
This is great news! It's strange that conversations about renewable energy are often framed in terms of scarcity, when we're awash in an extreme overabundance of energy both from below (inside our planet) and above (sun irradiation). Our only problem is our incapability so far to harness this abundance. This is why I believe that technological progress will solve our future energy problems and why it should be in the interest of nation states (especially those without lots of fossil fuels at hand) to lavishly fund research in this space.
Nuclear is a far better option.