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If you read about the energy industry in the ’00s and ’10s, you probably caught some excited, hopeful stories about geothermal, the renewable energy source that harnesses heat hundreds of meters below the earth’s surface. “Enhanced geothermal” — a novel approach in which fluids are poured deep underground, heat up, and then are recovered for their steam heat and used to generate electricity — got particular attention, because it promised a geothermal technique that could work most places on earth, not just in volcanic areas like Iceland or Indonesia.

Enhanced geothermal is “increasingly being eyed as an enormous potential source of pollution-free energy,” science journalist David Biello wrote all the way back in 2008. Enhanced geothermal has “often been touted as the answer to the tepid growth of the geothermal industry,” reporter Megan Geuss wrote in Ars Technica in 2014, already with a bit of jaded weariness that the promises were yet unfulfilled. Startups like AltaRock Energy got press for their promises of a clean energy source, deployable in any geography, that still worked when the sun wasn’t shining and the wind wasn’t blowing.

But as of 2022, a mere 0.4 percent of US electricity generation came from geothermal. That’s some eight times less than solar, 25 times less than wind, and 45 times less than nuclear. If that weren’t depressing enough, consider those numbers still meant the US produced more geothermal electricity than any other country that year, even surpassing heavily volcanic Indonesia.

But some significant breakthroughs have recently earned geothermal renewed attention. Fervo Energy, an enhanced geothermal company, announced that it was able to build and perform tests on a well in Nevada for 30 days, which it claims is capable of generating 3.5 megawatts of power. That’s not a lot (a typical natural gas power block produces over 800 megawatts), and it’s still much more expensive to produce than solar or gas power, but it’s the furthest an enhanced geothermal project has gotten to date. Last year, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a major initiative promising to slash the cost of geothermal generation by 90 percent by 2035. That announcement put the current cost at about $450 per megawatt-hour, compared to around $30 to $50 for onshore wind and solar.

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Fervo’s test well in Nevada. Fervo Energy

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