What nuclear fusion and geothermal aim to learn from solar’s mistakes

Higher-ups at US nuclear fusion and geothermal companies have a message to the federal government: Invest in emerging renewables so they can scale up in the US—not China.

Both geothermal and nuclear fusion are on the precipice of being major sources of domestic renewable energy, and both are considered “baseload”—meaning they’re always on and not dependent on weather or other factors. In public statements and in interviews with Tech Brew, executives from both industries have said that for the US to dominate nuclear fusion and geothermal, the federal government needs to back them.

“The role of the federal government right now primarily should be supporting and incentivizing the private sector here in the US to make sure that we’re building out the full [nuclear] fusion economy,” Jackie Siebens, VP of public affairs for Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion company, told Tech Brew. “So that we aren’t—to be blunt—making the same mistakes we’ve made in the past with other technologies like solar, batteries, semiconductors, where we invent here in the US, and then we don’t scale here in the US, and so the factories end up getting built overseas.”

And most overseas production of clean tech takes place in China, which has taken over the green economy. The country’s government has given “unwavering” support, as The Washington Post reported, to solar, wind, and EV and energy storage batteries, as well as granting subsidies to green tech industries. Case in point: More than two-thirds of all global green tech investment last year was in China, and an author of a BloombergNEF report on the data told Tech Brew that there’s “no end in sight” to its dominance.

It’s China’s preeminence that Tim Latimer, the CEO of geothermal developer Fervo Energy, was referring to when he said “it’s going to be very hard at this point in time to pull the center of gravity on solar panel manufacturing [and] battery manufacturing back to the United States” at an NYC Climate Week event last month.

“[Drilling technology] is one of the few areas where the US has built a multi-decade enduring cost advantage in a hardware sector in a way that’s very difficult to replicate, and I think we should learn from that. I think it’s one of the reasons why we should be leaning into geothermal more,” Latimer said. “It’s a very nascent industry, but it’s right here in the US, and with the right investments, at the right speed, that can be that way forever.”