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Startup Fervo Energy flipped the switch on its Cape Station power plant in Utah, officially bringing the first next-generation geothermal power to the grid at a utility scale, the Houston-based startup announced Thursday.
The U.S. faces an unprecedented demand surge for power from the AI boom and more, and next-gen geothermal power is now part of the mix. Geothermal offers both clean energy and reliable baseload power without the intermittency issues of wind and solar.
Bill Gates-backed Fervo, which went public in May with the biggest clean-energy IPO ever, touts technology that combines old-school geothermal science with modern oil-drilling and fracking techniques to develop reservoirs and power plants anywhere the customers want—as opposed to traditional geothermal power, dating back over 100 years, which relies on naturally occurring reservoirs.
Fervo focuses on enhanced geothermal systems (EGS, not to be confused with ESG), designed to address the scalability limitations of traditional geothermal with the modern drilling approach.
“This is a gamechanger for the geothermal industry,” said Fervo co-founder and Tim Latimer in a statement Thursday. “It establishes EGS as the defining new power generation technology of our time, and we believe it shows that the commercial and technical maturity of EGS is ready to meet the urgent need for reliable, clean power.”
“We are just getting started,” he added.
The startup of Cape Station in Beaver County, Utah represents the first time a utility-scale, EGS development has reached the first power milestone anywhere in the world. Southern California Edison is the primary customer. Cape Station follows Fervo’s initial pilot, Project Red, which went online in 2023.
Fervo went public in May with an upsized IPO and a market cap that quickly ballooned above $10 billion. But its Wall Street momentum slowed in the months that followed and its market cap plunged to about $5 billion. The company is hoping to trigger an upward trajectory again with the Cape Station startup.
The first phase pf Cape Station is a 100-megawatt project—enough to power about 70,000 homes—comprised of three, 33-megawatt “GeoBlocks.” The first GeoBlock just came online. Fervo said it will continue ramping up the first phase through the end of this year. The next phase, an additional 400 megawatts, is under construction with an expected completion in 2028. A third phase would add another 400 megawatts, growing Cape Station to a 900-megawatt complex.
Scaling next-gen geothermal power up to become economically competitive is the next major challenge.
Cape Station entails drilling wells 10,000 feet deep—about 2 miles—and then directionally drilling horizontally another 7,500 feet to create adequately sized reservoirs, and fracking (hydraulic fracturing) the rock to release the flows of water naturally heated to more than 400 degrees. Utah—and much of the western U.S.—is geographically ideal because the necessary heat levels are accessible at shallower depths than most of the country.
Named from the Latin word meaning “to boil,” Fervo’s technology utilizes water heated underground to generate steam for electricity-producing turbines, then pumps the cooled water back into the subsurface to be reheated and recycled.
“Cape Station works because we treated the subsurface like an engineering challenge,” said Jack Norbeck, Fervo co-founder and chief technology officer. “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.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
