First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months

If the coffin needed any more nails, this puts the final kibosh on that cancelled SMR project out there that centered on Utah and Idaho, the one involving NuScale. Geothermal makes much more sense for them now. There's a geothermal project at the Newberry Volcano in Oregon that also looks interesting (different people doing that).

• billjive · 23 hours ago

  Yes! It's near where I live, very excited to see this come online.

• toomuchtodo · 23 hours ago

  Does this support improved availability and economics of district heating?

  • pfdietz · 22 hours ago

    I don't think district heating had anything to do with the CFPP.

    • toomuchtodo · 22 hours ago

      I was referring to enhanced geothermal in general for district heating, as I believe you are potentially a subject matter expert and qualified to opine.

      • chneu · 21 hours ago

        District heating doesn't make much sense in the US west. The distances are too large.

        • brudgers · 20 hours ago

          And summers tend to be hot in many of the places people live.

  • 325 · 20 hours ago

    DISTRICT HEATING? WHERE?

  • thinkcontext · 15 hours ago

    In theory it could. The advantage of enhanced geothermal is it allows for a much wider variety of sites to be used compared to conventional geothermal. So, it may be possible to create one near an existing district heating system and use the excess heat for it.

• jakebol · 19 hours ago

  I don't see why necessarily, they are in the same ballpark LCOE cost wise. The advantage of enhanced geothermal is that you can potentially build it relatively quickly but that is more a policy choice.

  • pfdietz · 17 hours ago

    One should be careful to not equate LCOE from demonstrated construction costs, vs. LCOE from projected construction costs in sales presentations. I don't think when all is said and done SMRs will be anywhere close to the cost of energy from this kind of geothermal.

  • adrianmonk · 15 hours ago

    The other advantage is political feasibility. Rational or not, people freak out the moment they hear the word "nuclear". Whether people should be this way is irrelevant if your goal is to have a project that succeeds. What's relevant is that they are.

    • pfdietz · 2 minutes ago

      That doesn't seem to describe the trajectory of the Carbon Free Power Project. It appears to have foundered due to economics, not the public "freaking out". The local small utilities, who presumably would be closer to the public, really tried to make it work, but without large utility interest it didn't hit subscriber targets. Nuclear fans have a blindness to this situation, which occurs all the time with nuclear ideas. They get proposed, people run the numbers, and the project stalls. This appears to be happening with SMRs in Canada, for example.

Certainly a welcome development. Let's hope this pilot can be repeated and scaled.

23 months to build is impressive, but the number that matters for EGS is thermal drawdown. If the fractured rock cools faster than modeled they have to keep drilling new wells, so I'd like to see Cape's output a few years in.

• ceejayoz · 23 hours ago

  Is there any reason to believe this is likely?

  • floatrock · 22 hours ago

    If it wasn't, enhanced geothermal would be everywhere, which it isn't. (Yet, this company would say.) Op is really just describing a core breakeven metric on the energy source. In the same way you measure an oil well with half-life of useful output, this is basically saying "EGS can prove to be useful if they can make sure they extract more economically useful heat than the economic costs of constantly drilling new wells." Since no one has really made EGS widespread yet, that suggests no one has yet cracked this nut.

    • ceejayoz · 22 hours ago

      > If it wasn't, enhanced geothermal would be everywhere, which it isn't. That seems like a fallacy.

      • jerf · 21 hours ago

        It may be a deductive fallacy, but it's perfectly reasonable inductively.

        • ceejayoz · 21 hours ago

          "World's first" implies this is fairly experimental, surely? "If the internet was useful, everyone would use it" is something that wouldn't stand the test of time, right?

          • brudgers · 20 hours ago

            I am most likely the world’s first brudgers. And at the time I write this, it breaks the world record for HN comments by the world’s first brudgers. The internet expanded as the result of semi-conductor break throughs made by thousands of engineers with access to semi-conductor break throughs. There was a ‘virtuous’ cycle. That is not the same thing as a press release. ‘World’s first,’ ‘New Record,’ and ‘Scientists’ correlate with press releases. Press releases make for easy news content and news sites are attracted to them.

      • brudgers · 20 hours ago

        It is a heuristic regarding the scaling of a business idea based on conventional industrial processes presented as a technological breakthrough. It is premised on a belief that a significant number of smart motivated professionals have been trying to solve the same problem with substantially the same budgets and technologies for many years and that experience has led them to an informed belief that more practical solutions exist. You might say it is a stronger belief in engineering practice and economic efficiency than in press releases. [note: I agree it would not be “everywhere” because the practicality of drilling into bedrock varies significantly between locations. But that is not a point in favor of scaling the proposed technique]

  • olau · 22 hours ago

    It is not an uncommon problem with geothermal.

• needSomeCoffee · 21 hours ago

  Would the deep-drilling approach enabled by Quaise alleviate this issue ?? I was super-interested when Quiase was first announced, but not sure if they are moving towards viability. Insights appreciated. Thx, NSC

  • jakebol · 20 hours ago

    Not really, it is more the limiting physics of extracting heat through conductive transfer in the rock. The rate of heat extraction through fluid convection has to be less than the rate of conductive replenishment though the basement rock to not get thermal drawdown and these rates are often not economical.

• jakebol · 20 hours ago

  Fervo engineers for thermal drawdown up front, it is well known that for EGS to maintain constant power output you need to periodically re-stimulate the field after a period of some number of years. What matters for the economics is the rate of eventual drawdown. The nameplate 100MW is also a bit misleading as it represents gross power output without taking into account the parasitic load of pumping which for an EGS plant is quite high. There was a ~60% parasitic load for their test facility and IIRC Fervo is eventually targeting 30-40% for the commercial power plant.

  • Teever · 13 hours ago

    What does re-stimulate mean in this context?

I admit I don't know enough, but does it negatively affect the underground water a negative way? I read a while back that geothermal plants (can) use fracking like technique to heat up the water but it has negative effects on the local geology and underground water. But not sure if that's true hencey question here.

• tonyarkles · 22 hours ago

  Huh, my first reaction was to say that Enhanced Geothermal is actually just a polite way of saying fracked geothermal but it turns out that's not quite accurate. Hydro-shearing (which EGS uses) doesn't intentionally create new cracks in the rock, which fracking does, but will cause existing cracks to grow. Potentially still negative local effects for sure but not as violently, hopefully.

• floatrock · 21 hours ago

  Every project has risks, of course. EGS projects are basically two wells making a circulation loop: inject cold water down one well under pressure, circulate it through hot rocks using the fracked channels, and pull out hot water up the other well. Theoretically, a leak into groundwater aquifers would make keeping the system pressurized harder or would dillute the amount of heat they're extracting, so seems like a stronger commercial incentive not to f up the groundwater. In oil fracking they're just trying to pull the oily goo up from underground. And in theory you could do heat extraction using just water instead of shale goo solvents so any contamination would be less impactful? I dunno, I'm just internet armchair quarterbacking this until a real geologist chimes in, but I can see how this is a somewhat different beast that shale fracking wells.

This is pretty cool! I wonder if datacenters can get permits to colocate geothermal power + heat transfer. That might make permitting the actual datacenter significantly easier if there isn't a huge additional grid tie in.

Do they have a conventional drill or does this involve some new technology? They aren’t using the microwave thing are they?

• cousinbryce · 21 hours ago

  They’re using tech invented for fracking, so very conventional. The application for geothermal is what’s new.

• thinkcontext · 21 hours ago

  The new thing is using new-ish fracking drilling techniques to create a geothermal resource. Conventional geothermal relies on finding very specific geology which is why its so rare. Enhanced geothermal can (in theory) work in many more places since it can create the geology needed to produce electricity.

• floatrock · 21 hours ago

  Fervo was previously discussed on hn a couple months ago when they were hyping up this project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903945 Some good info about what's different in there.

They tried to drill for one in Switzerland twice. One in Basel and one in St. Gallen but both times causes earthquakes significant enough that the whole project was scraped.

• api · 20 hours ago

  Well that's it. One attempt failed. Scrap the entire idea.

  • Tade0 · 20 hours ago

    Well, yeah. Earthquakes bad, don't cause them.

    • pixl97 · 19 hours ago

      Lol, never stopped the nat gas industry in the US.

      • Tade0 · 18 hours ago

        Yeah, sadly true. But it did stop it in the Netherlands.

• jlhawn · 15 hours ago

  Just to clarify, neither of those projects (2006 and 2013) was done by Fervo. Fervo wasn't even founded until 2017. The Basel project caused earthquakes because it used a single, vertical well to pump high-pressure water into dense granite all at once, which accidentally over-pressurized and lubricated a major existing fault line. In St. Gallen, the earthquake happened when drillers unexpectedly hit a high-pressure methane gas pocket. The rapid injection of heavy drilling mud used to control the gas kick built up intense, localized pressure that triggered a nearby fault. Fervo's modern method avoids these issues by using horizontal drilling to distribute fluid pressure gently across miles of rock rather than spiking it in one spot. They also use advanced fiber-optic cables for real-time micro-seismic monitoring, allowing them to sense tiny rock movements and adjust fluid rates instantly before a felt earthquake can ever develop.

It is a nice field they have. It happens to be right next to the DOE sponsored Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE [1]) site that established the temperature and ability to create permeability at depth using EGS. [1] https://utahforge.com/

• throwaway2037 · 20 hours ago

  Wiki page for that project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Observatory_for_Resea...

Does "enhanced geothermal" have a definition beyond "drilling deeper", or "whatever anyone does that's different than what what was done before"?

• jakebol · 19 hours ago

  Enhanced geothermal are engineered geothermal systems in naturally hot dry rock where natural fluid convection and permeability are not found. The term comes from the fact that conventional geothermal power plants are often tapping into natural near surface convective systems with high water permeability. Bringing that heat to the near surface also heats the surrounding rock over hundreds of thousands of years so one way to "enhance" the output of traditional geothermal power plants was to theoretically engineer permeability into these surrounding rock formations. Fervo's facility is built next to an existing conventional geothermal power plant.

Could this cause earthquakes or canos? How come folks can’t conserve energy?

• bryan_w · 20 hours ago

  No.

• p1mrx · 18 hours ago

  > How come folks can’t conserve energy? The whole economy runs on energy, and we have a lot of fossil fuels to replace.

Every time I am "forced" to read TechCrunch, I feel like I am reading an LLM summary of a company PR release. Anyone else? This article is so short on facts. Title of the article: "World’s first enhanced geothermal power plant completed..." A quick Wiki search shows a page for "Enhanced geothermal system"[1]. There is a list of projects. There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here? > The power plant synchronized with the grid about a week ago, bringing online the first third of what will soon become a 100-megawatt power plant. They brought 33MW online. Yay. Instead, you hide it behind "first third of 100MW". What about cost? Nothing from TechCrunch. I found better analysis here[2]. Look at this savage quote: > At $7,000 per kW for Phase 1 against the $2,157 per kW Canary Media gives for a 2025 gas plant Initial build cost is 7K USD per kW. Solar plus battery and a touch of wind wins by a long shot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_geothermal_system [2] https://mgrid.org/2026/09/27/fervo-first-power-cape-station-...

• testing22321 · 19 hours ago

  Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else by such a wide margin it boggles my mind we’re even still talking about, or contemplating anything else. By the time you finish reading this, solar panels got cheaper

  • cyberax · 19 hours ago

    > Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else Except that they don't. Why do you think new datacenters are using natgas turbines and not wind+solar?

    • pixl97 · 19 hours ago

      Honestly a lot of different reasons. One they can put natgas on a private disconnected grid direct on the same property. The other big ones is states ignoring the environmental rules of all the negative side effects of said generation. DC's better be careful or any government change and their choices now will bite them in the ass.

    • qlte · 17 hours ago

      Physical footprint fits in limited available space, well understood turnkey commercial off the shelf solution, and lack of grid scale flexibility/redundancy to best exploit available capacity at different times of day/year.

    • legulere · 17 hours ago

      Because they don’t want to wait for a grid connection that can take years and they need backup generation capacity anyways. You’ll see them all connecting to the grid in the following years simply because it’s cheaper

      • cyberax · 14 hours ago

        Indeed. And the problem with grid connections is that the grid can't carry arbitrary streams of energy. So you can't just connect a bunch of remote panels to the grid and YOLO it on the scale of the large datacenters. This problem does not go away, though. It's still an issue for renewable generation, especially for northern areas.

    • stonogo · 15 hours ago

      Because behind-the-meter generation bypasses many municipal permitting processes and now also skips NEPA review. As diesel keeps climbing it'll get more expensive to truck fuel in and you'll start to see operators begging for the grid connections they scoffed at before.

      • fragmede · 6 hours ago

        Is there actually evidence of them scoffing at grid connections, or merely being realistic that the grid connection takes a lot of time to establish, so the jet turbines are the "right now" solution while they wait for the grid connection permitting bureaucracy to take its time.

  • SoftTalker · 17 hours ago

    But the volume of solar panels you'd need and especially the volume of batteries you'd need don't exist, nor is the supply there for anything but a gradual build-out.

  • legulere · 17 hours ago

    Only in some regions that’s enough. A lot of regions have winters where solar output is greatly diminished and wind can stop for days. Batteries are too expensive to store electricity for days to weeks. On top of that you have higher demand if you have electrified space heating.

    • testing22321 · 13 hours ago

      In virtually all regions. I’m in Canada in a tight valley with tons of snow. The 7.2kw on my roof will profit me $25k-$30k over their life. It works very well, even here

      • legulere · 2 hours ago

        PV making sense and PV+batteries being enough are two different things though. I have 10 kW on my roof as well here in Germany, in winter there’s not enough sun for heating with a heat pump though.

    • throwaway2037 · 1 hour ago

      Utah and Southern California have insanely high PV energy per sqm, even in the winter.

  • usrnm · 15 hours ago

    Humanity actually has millennia of experience with solar energy, we just call it agriculture. Plants literally are natural solar panels. And you know what all this experience tells us? It varies from place to place, like, a lot. In some places it works nice and in some places it just doesn't.

    • testing22321 · 11 hours ago

      And, traditionally, in California, the location in TFA, has this solar thing worked, or not worked?

      • usrnm · 6 hours ago

        It needs two things: sun and water. Water has been solved and California is doing pretty great, don't you think? Let's take a look at another example: I live in the Netherlands and I like having berries with breakfast. Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, all kinds of them. And you can buy them all year round in any supermarket, but just for a few months in summer they will have a proud label "made in the Netherlands". Plants had hundreds of millions of years of evolution, millennia of human selection, and still growing berries is not viable here for most of the year. Maybe we will start producing electricity in Morocco and shipping it here one day, just like berries, but producing it domestically using solar will never be effective

        • throwaway2037 · 1 hour ago

          Hey berry lover: Cool post. When not local, where do they come from?

          • usrnm · 21 minutes ago

            Places with a lot more sunshine. Morocco is a big one. The ones in my fridge right now are from South Africa and Peru

• kieranmaine · 19 hours ago

  This article also provides good analysis: https://powerstack.currence.ai/p/powerstack-post-ipo-fervo-c... . The tldr > If we look at our Fastest MW analysis, the fastest way to get power to the grid right now is solar+BESS with existing interconnection agreements in ERCOT. This setup gives a 27-month or less time-to-COD, and can come in at $40/MWh PPAs, a price and speed Fervo can't catch. So, per the above, the right way to think about it is that Fervo competes for a different customer than the ones looking at solar+BESS. Are they required to procure geo? Are they in the West? Do they need fully baseload power? For sure, that’s a smaller niche. But if Fervo's anticipated 38GW resource base materializes even a little, the niche is huge.

  • jakebol · 19 hours ago

    A lot of geothermal energy investment happened after the California Public utilities commission issued procurement mandates for clean firm power after SB 100 passed.

• masfuerte · 16 hours ago

  Does the build cost matter? After you've built the gas plant you still need to buy gas in perpetuity. The marginal cost of the energy from the geothermal plant must be very much less.

  • usrnm · 15 hours ago

    And yet, when the same argument is made about nuclear, all hell breaks lose

    • stubish · 12 hours ago

      This plant became operational after 2 years and has started paying back the investment. If your project is going to take 20 years before it comes online, you are going to need much, much higher returns to justify the investment. There is also a lot more risk involved in keeping a project alive and viable over a 20 year period, again pumping the expected returns needed before investors will invest.

      • throwaway2037 · 6 hours ago

        High level, you raise a good point. However: > This plant became operational after 2 years and has started paying back the investment. Do we know if this project is currently cash-flow positive? One way that this project could be initially loss-making: the labour and maintenance costs exceed revenues from selling electricity.

• thinkcontext · 15 hours ago

  > There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here? First commercial operation with a grid connection. You'll notice that those 50+ are listed under the "research and development" section.

  • throwaway2037 · 1 hour ago

    The last project in that table is this project! Really, we have no way of knowing that all those other projects were never connected to the grid, except some company PR.

As a small time Fervo investor, yay!

The real news here is that Fervo has made progress in deep drilling. Deep geothermal has been known for decades but almost nobody can get down there. Fervo got down to 15,000 feet in 16 drilling days last year with a test well in Texas. 500F heat. That's where it gets useful. This new one is apparently not as deep but fans out with horizontal drilling. Next step is presumably deep and horizontal fan-out, but the hype and TechCrunch are too vague to tell. Big, cheap synthetic diamonds help. The classic Hughes drill bit, the thing which looks like a set of bevel gears, is not really a cutter at all. It's a rock-crusher. The weight of the drill string on those pointy rotating teeth crushes rock into dust. Modern diamond drill bits are brutally simple things that claw through rock.[2] Fervo says they got 3200 feet on one drill before they had to pull it out. The less often that has to be done, the cheaper deep drilling becomes. There's probably a really good description of what Fervo is doing in some publication for oil drillers. TechCrunch isn't it. [1] https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-pushes-envelope/ [2] https://fervoenergy.com/how-modern-drill-bits-are-accelerati...

Extremely happy more geothermal power plants are being created!In my opinion it is the best and most reliable renewable energy resource in geothermal active places.