Hungry for Clean Energy, Facebook Looks to a New Type of Geothermal
By Brad Plumer, The New York Times.
Excerpt: Big tech companies across the United States are struggling to find enough clean energy to power all the data centers they plan to build. Now, some firms are betting on a novel solution: harvesting the heat deep beneath the Earth’s surface to create emissions-free electricity, using drilling techniques from the oil and gas fracking boom. On Monday, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, announced an agreement with a start-up called Sage Geosystems to develop up to 150 megawatts of an advanced type of geothermal energy that would help power the tech giant’s expanding array of data centers. That is roughly enough electricity to power 70,000 homes. Sage will use fracking techniques similar to those that have helped extract vast amounts of oil and gas from shale rock. But rather than drill for fossil fuels, Sage plans to create fractures thousands of feet beneath the surface and pump water into them. The heat and pressure underground should heat the water to the point where it can be used to generate electricity in a turbine, all without the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming....