Advanced geothermal startups warm up

When Congress Republicans brought a hammer to the inflation reduction law last summer, the advanced geothermal startups were largely spared. Drilling for renewable energies seems to be one of the few things that causes bipartisan support.

Now, with the regulated uncertainty, geothermal companies announce agreements that promise to open the way to a wider deployment of their technology.

Fervo Energy, based in Houston, said on Tuesday that she had chosen a supplier for key parts of his power plants, reporting that the second phase of the CAPE Station project in UTAH advanced steam. The startup said Baker Hughes would design and deliver five steam turbines. In total, they will generate 300 megawatts of electricity 24/7, enough to supply around 180,000 houses.

Fervo is one of the many startups that pursue deeper and warmer geothermal wells. The company has adapted directional drilling techniques used by the petroleum and gas industry to type rocks at nearly 16,000 feet below the surface. At this depth, temperatures should maintain a 520˚ F.

Behind the Baker Hughes Deal, $ 206 million in funding that Fervo obtained in June, which is divided between $ 100 million in equity privileged at the project of the pierced energy catalyst, a bump of 60 million dollars to an existing loan from Mercuria and 45.6 million dollars in financing for the bridge debt from a rural capital of the rural capital of. Trump’s energy secretary Chris Wright supervised an investment in Fervo in 2022 when he was CEO of Liberty Energy.

Meanwhile, colleagues Sage Geosystems Startups said last week that it had signed an agreement with the geothermal developer Ormat Technologies to deploy its technology in one of the existing power plants in Ormat.

If everything goes as planned, Ormat will lead the technology of the “geothermal pressure” of Sage, which injects water into a rock fractured under pressure, where it absorbs heat. When the water returns to the surface, the sage harvests both heat and pressure, using both to run the turbines to produce electricity.

Because geothermal power plants generate heat 24 hours a day, they attracted the interest of data centers developers. A recent analysis has indicated that technology could generate enough electricity to provide almost two thirds of the request from the data center by 2030.