By Phil McKenna , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: KEN CARYL, Colo.—A new residential development south of Denver is the testing ground for an unusual partnership that could transform home heating and cooling across the country. Dandelion Energy, a geothermal startup, and Lennar, one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, recently completed construction of nearly 100 homes at the base of Colorado’s Front Range, each equipped with its own ground-source heat pump. The systems use less electricity than even the most efficient air-source heat pumps, potentially helping Colorado meet its climate goals while reducing peak energy demand and eliminating the need for new gas pipelines.  Ground-source heat pumps draw on steady temperatures belowground to help heat and cool buildings. ...Installing the devices across dozens of similar new homes at once also eliminates the need for custom plans for each building and avoids potentially costly retrofits to the buildings’ heating, ventilation a...

Fervo Energy press release.  Excerpt: Fervo Energy (Nasdaq: FRVO), a global pioneer of next-generation geothermal energy, today announced that Cape Station , its flagship geothermal development in Beaver County, Utah, has achieved First Power, marking the first time a utility-scale enhanced geothermal development has reached this milestone anywhere in the world....Fervo uses horizontal drilling techniques adapted from the oil and gas industry, allowing multiple wells to be drilled from a single pad and unlocking geothermal resources that were previously inaccessible with traditional technology.  “Cape Station works because we treated the subsurface like an engineering challenge,” said Jack Norbeck, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Fervo Energy. “Years of drilling, completion design, subsurface modeling, and flow testing led to this moment, and this is the validation that matters most. First Power is proof the science works.” ...Enhanced geothermal draws continu...

By Phil McKenna , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: GRAND JUNCTION, Colo.—The discussions started roughly a decade ago, when an account manager at Xcel Energy, the electricity and gas utility provider, expressed confusion, officials at Colorado Mesa University recalled. A public school on the state’s remote western slope, Colorado Mesa had recently doubled in size, but its energy usage had hardly budged as it began installing an advanced geothermal heating and cooling system. Since its geothermal buildout began in 2008, the university has saved more than $15 million in energy costs, money it has passed on to students through lower tuition and more scholarship funding.  Hundreds of boreholes drilled approximately 500 feet beneath athletic fields and parking lots tap low-temperature thermal energy to help heat and cool campus buildings in what is now one of the largest such networks in the nation. ...A boiler that provides backup heat is rarely used. A bigger challenge is...

By Callie Patteson , Washington Examiner.  Excerpt: Just below the Earth’s surface, there is an abundant source of heat that can be used to generate highly reliable and emissions-free geothermal  energy . ...technology developed by the  oil and gas  industries over the past two decades is now making it possible to tap into geothermal energy all across the globe. ...Geothermal energy can provide electricity, heating, and cooling, and store excess energy under the surface, just from extracting heat from underground reservoirs of hot, typically porous, rocks saturated with water. To generate energy, the heat is used to produce steam, which travels through piping and turbines to create electricity. ...Roughly 20 years ago, the United States saw what is most commonly described as the “shale boom” or “shale revolution.” This was driven by technological developments in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, which made it easier for producers to drill deeper and...

By Theo Burman , Newsweek.  Excerpt: Geothermal energy from Nevada's Great Basin could supply as much as 10 percent of the United States' electricity needs, according to a newly released assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The report estimates the area, which covers the majority of Nevada and extends into parts of Arizona, California, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming, could generate 135 gigawatts of baseload power, if enhanced geothermal systems are deployed at scale. ...The USGS evaluation was conducted under the 2020 Energy Act, which saw the agency explore new ways of generating efficient energy from untapped resources. ... The report, published on Wednesday,  includes newly developed maps of underground heat flows and refined extraction models that suggest geothermal deployment could increase the basin's productivity. Under the proposed model, water would be pumped as deep as 3.7 miles underground, heated by natural geological formations, and returned to the...

By Umair Irfan ,  Benji Jones ,  Adam Clark Estes , and  Sam Delgado , Vox.  Excerpt: Technologies that can power our lives and jobs while doing less harm to the global climate — wind, solar, batteries, etc. — are getting cheaper, more efficient, and more abundant. The pace of progress on price, scale, and performance has been so extraordinary that  even the most optimistic forecasts  about green tech in the past have turned out to be too pessimistic. Clean energy isn’t just powering our devices, tools, and luxuries — it’s  growing the global economy , creating a whole suite of new jobs, and reshaping trade. And despite what  headlines may say , there’s no sign these trends will reverse.  Political  and  economic  turmoil may slow down clean energy, but the sector has built up so much momentum that it’s become nigh unstoppable. ...Texas utilities have come to realize that investing in clean energy is not just good for the envir...

By Michelle Lewis , Elektrek.  Excerpt: Renewable energy – solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower, biomass – accounted for more than 90% of total US electrical generating capacity added in 2024, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and reviewed by the SUN DAY campaign. Solar alone accounted for over 81% of the new capacity. Moreover, December was the 16th month in a row in which solar was the largest source of new capacity. ...In its latest monthly  “Energy Infrastructure Update” report  (with data through December 31, 2024), FERC says 105 “units” of solar totaling 4,369 megawatts (MW) came online in December, along with two units of wind (324 MW) and two units of biomass (45 MW). Combined, they accounted for 86.9% of all new generating capacity added during the month. Natural gas provided the balance: 717 MW....  Full article at https://electrek.co/2025/02/07/renewables-90-percent-new-us-capacity-2024-ferc/ ....

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 pres...

By Phil McKenna , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: FRAMINGHAM, Mass.—After years of planning and months of drilling, a first-in-the-nation, neighborhood-scale geothermal heating and cooling project came online here on Tuesday. Geothermal energy—using the steady temperature below ground—to heat and cool buildings is nothing new. What’s new in Framingham is the fact that climate advocates and a utility company, Eversource, devised the plan together. ...Rather than build individual systems, the Framingham project ties together 31 residential and five commercial buildings that now share the underground infrastructure needed to heat and cool them. ...it may offer a new lease on life for gas utilities without squeezing low income individuals. ...air-source heat pumps that pull heat out of the surrounding air, like an air conditioner run in reverse ...can be costly.... “If we only have the people who can afford it, who have the know-how transitioning, it’s kind of spotty,” said An...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/climate/geoexchange-climate-colleges-heat.html By Cara Buckley , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Princeton University ... is using the earth beneath its campus to create a new system that will keep buildings at comfortable temperatures without burning fossil fuels. The multimillion dollar project, using a process known as geoexchange, marks a significant shift in how Princeton gets its energy, and is key to the university’s plan to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2046. ...the more than 2,000 boreholes planned for the campus will be undetectable, despite performing an impressive sleight of hand. During hot months, heat drawn from Princeton’s buildings will be stored in thick pipes deep underground until winter, when heat will be drawn back up again. The change is significant. Since its founding in 1746, Princeton has heated its buildings by burning carbon-based fuels, in the form of firewood, then coal, then fuel oil, then natura...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/climate/geothermal-energy-projects.html By Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: In a sagebrush valley full of wind turbines and solar panels in western Utah, Tim Latimer gazed up at a very different device he believes could be just as powerful for fighting climate change — ...a drilling rig, of all things, transplanted from the oil fields of North Dakota ...drilling for heat. Mr. Latimer’s company, Fervo Energy, is part of an ambitious effort to unlock vast amounts of geothermal energy from Earth’s hot interior, a source of renewable power that could help displace fossil fuels that are dangerously warming the planet. “There’s a virtually unlimited resource down there if we can get at it,” said Mr. Latimer. “Geothermal doesn’t use much land, it doesn’t produce emissions, it can complement wind and solar power....” ...Traditional geothermal plants ...work by tapping natural hot water reservoirs underground to power turbines that can generate ...