After well over a hundred years bearing the scrawny “emerging technology” tag, is geothermal energy about to pop off?
Earlier this year, Tech Brew reported that despite being pioneered at the start of the 20th century, geothermal energy is still considered emerging tech in the US. Geothermal expert and Cornell University Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems Jefferson Tester told us at the time that geothermal struggled to compete with other renewable energy sources like wind and solar because “you can’t look at a geothermal system underground like you can look at a wind turbine or a solar field.”
What a difference a couple of months makes: After the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” kickstarted a rapid sunset of clean energy tax credits for solar and wind power, but preserved production and investment subsidies for geothermal, all eyes are on the underground energy resource. And geothermal pros we talked with said they’re ready to take advantage of the tech’s big moment.
“We’re at an inflection point for geothermal,” Dawn Owens, Fervo Energy’s head of project development and commercial markets, told Tech Brew. “It’s finally ready to take off.”
Owens said that the ethos at Fervo, a Houston-headquartered geothermal company with a development in Utah that’s been getting congressional attention, has always been that “geothermal was going to massively take off in the United States.” Now, she thinks it’s happening because the energy source is at “perfect confluence of both market and technology readiness coming together.”
Baseload power
The US energy market is in desperate need of baseload power: Data centers, increasing electrification, and general rising energy demand have led the Trump administration and Congress to turn toward always-on energy sources like geothermal and nuclear power (which also kept its tax credits).
“Geothermal has always been a bipartisan resource. It was just bipartisanly forgotten about before,” Owens said. “It really is a win-win-win solution here for the moment that we’re in.”
Matthew Houde, chief of staff at geothermal company Quaise Energy, told Tech Brew that “there’s a strong reason to spur investment in geothermal” because it can do what mature, albeit intermittent, sources of energy like wind and solar can’t. (Solar and wind, however, can be made less intermittent by using battery storage, and doing so has been shown to meaningfully support the grid.) Under Trump’s budget bill, tax credits for wind and solar power implemented as part of the Inflation Reduction Act are quickly being phased out.
“[The tax credits are] a tailwind for geothermal to begin to derisk and expand the scale [on] which geothermal operates today,” Houde said. “Comparing wind and solar to geothermal installations over the past 10 years, geothermal is like a fraction of a fraction of the amount of capacity we’ve installed with wind and solar.”
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Quaise Energy is a geothermal developer that’s working to harvest energy from superhot geothermal resources—think 300 to 400 degrees Celsius—and “developing millimeter wave drilling technology,” which uses “high powered microwaves to blast through rock” and create multiple geothermal wells. Because of the increased demand for geothermal power, Quaise is focused on developing its first geothermal project in the Western US while continuing to work on its new drilling technology.
“In this industry, say, about eight years ago…there wasn’t as much optimism that there was going to be large growth for geothermal,” Houde said.
Geothermal heating
Now, there are some big changes afoot in the geothermal heating industry. Though homeowners are losing the 25D residential clean energy tax credit, which could be applied to geothermal heat pumps as well as battery or solar systems, among others, geothermal heating systems can now be leased due to provisions in Trump’s budget bill. Previously, home builders were unable to benefit from the clean energy production tax credits because they wouldn’t own the geothermal heating system for long enough. The systems can now be leased through a third party, which can pass on the tax credit savings to both the home builder and owner.
“We predict it could have a huge positive impact on the home builder market,” Kathy Hannun, founder and president of residential geothermal heating company Dandelion Energy, told Tech Brew. “We can still give homeowners a mechanism for monetizing that tax credit. You’ll just have to accept a lease, which not every homeowner will want to do.”
Hannun said the next step for Dandelion is to figure out how geothermal heating leases should work—but they’re not looking to reinvent the wheel; rather, they’ll seek advice from the solar industry, which has long offered leasing models. And her hope is that geothermal power can be deployed at the level that solar is now, with the help of its surviving tax credit.
“Geo won’t benefit from the misfortune of the other clean tech players, but I think the fact that we’ve been largely spared with [the 48E tax credit] will be essential to preserving our future and allowing us to continue to scale,” Hannun said. “Geo has had a lot less time than wind and solar to do that.”