🌋 Hot rocks, new politics
New tech, rising gas-plant costs, and Big Tech demand are giving geothermal its first real shot at going mainstream. Washington is taking notice
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When I moderated a geothermal panel in Washington last March, the vibe wasn’t … great. The Trump administration was preparing to hack away at the clean-energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act (cuts JPMorgan politely described as “draconian”). For a sector still embryonic, this was not the sort of prenatal public policy it wanted.
Yet geothermal emerged from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” in good shape. Its tax credits survived while most others were pared back. For an industry accustomed to being treated as the neglected cousin of the clean energy sector, the reprieve felt like more than a policy fluke. It hinted at shifting political geology.
Unlike nuclear fusion, long the butt of futurist jokes about being forever 30 years away, geothermal has never been dismissed as science fiction. It works — clean and reliable, if also unglamorous. The trouble has been geography. Traditional geothermal depended on a lucky trifecta of heat, water, and permeable rock. That kept the sector confined to volcanic outposts such as Iceland or Northern California. Elsewhere, the heat was tantalizingly out of reach.
Now that constraint is melting away:
Enhanced geothermal systems use the same advanced drilling and fracking techniques that unlocked the shale boom. A Princeton study suggests EGS could supply as much as a fifth of America’s electricity by mid-century if costs fall with scale.
Closed-loop systems promise heat extraction in places where fracking is politically unwelcome or water scarce.
Experimental “superhot rock” designs aim deeper still — down to 400°C and beyond — where energy output can be an order of magnitude higher. Iceland’s prototype well, recently profiled in The New Yorker, suggests tenfold gains over conventional geothermal.
Moreover, costs are falling. For example: Fervo Energy’s Cape Station project in Utah — a 400-megawatt EGS development — has cut drilling time by about 70 percent and reduced per-well costs from approximately $9.4 million to $4.8 million. What once took months now takes weeks.
(Fervo has become geothermal’s commercial leader, having signed a contract with Google in May 2021 to power its Nevada data centers and, more recently, securing a 500-megawatt agreement with Shell and a California utility, with first power from its Cape Station project slated for 2026.)
That technical shift is creating an usual and Up Wing political opening. Geothermal has become one of the few clean-energy technologies attracting genuine bipartisan enthusiasm in Washington. Republicans like it because it a) looks, b) feels, and c) employs people like the oil and gas business. (Energy Secretary Chris Wright has publicly embraced geothermal.)
Drill, baby, drill and all that.
Democrats like it because it is carbon-free. And Big Tech now wants it because data centers need 24/7 clean power. .
Economics is the deeper driver of this bipartisan thaw. Natural-gas turbine shortages — driven in part by soaring power demand from AI data centers — have pushed gas-plant capital costs from under $1,000 per kilowatt to roughly $3,000 per kilowatt, the Wall Street Journal reports, narrowing geothermal’s long-standing cost gap.
And techno-economic modeling from Project InnerSpace shows that a first-of-its-kind, one-gigawatt geothermal project built specifically to power and cool a hyperscale data center could already deliver energy at about $88/MWh under current tax credits, with costs falling toward $50–$60/MWh as drilling speeds improve and projects scale.
But to seize the moment, policy must catch up. Developers say they need three things above all: faster permitting, predictable leasing, and more federal R&D.
Geothermal wells face the same NEPA delays and drilling-permit bottlenecks as oil and gas, making the proposed 60-day deadlines in the Geothermal Energy Opportunity Act particularly appealing.
Regular lease sales on federal land — routine for fossil fuels but rare for geothermal — would create the planning certainty investors crave.
And the Department of Energy’s geothermal R&D budget remains far too small for a technology that could become a national resource rather than a regional curiosity.
For the first time in decades, geothermal’s promise no longer lies far beneath our feet. It’s finally bubbling up to the surface.
⤴⤵ Up Wing/Down Wing
⤴ Up Wing Things
Have we found a greener way to do deep-sea mining? | New Scientist - New Sci
A brain implant that could rival Neuralink’s enters clinical trials - Nature
Trump directs science agencies to embrace AI - POLITICO - Politico
The Golden Age of Humanity? We’re Living in It. - Free Press
⤵ Down Wing Things
GLP-1 Drug Fails to Quell Alzheimer’s in Novo Nordisk Trials - The New York Times - NYT
The signs of educational decline are now impossible to ignore - Wash Post
On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised
