Nearly four years ago, Google announced a partnership with enhanced geothermal company Fervo Energy. In 2023, the companies successfully put carbon-free energy on the grid that serves Google’s Nevada data centers. And by the end of 2024, Fervo had secured $255 million in new funding and capital availability, its second quarter-billion-dollar fundraiser in less than a year.
Meanwhile, Meta is betting on a different approach to geothermal for data centers, via a partnership with the startup Sage Geosystems, which also builds long-duration energy storage. The two signed a partnership in August 2024.
These startups and their peers may soon have even more interest — and Google and Meta may have some competition for securing enhanced geothermal power. According to a new Rhodium Group report, behind-the-meter enhanced geothermal energy could meet up to 64% of the forecasted growth in electricity demand at hyperscale facilities across the U.S.
This would amount to between 15 and 17 gigawatts of new data center and geothermal capacity; that estimate is based on a growth scenario that predicts that roughly 80 GW of total data center peak demand will be online in 2030, including around 27 GW from hyperscale facilities.
The 64% figure is calculated assuming that data centers will keep developing in large clusters “based on proximity to population, available land, and the fiber optic network.” Historically, this has led to a high concentration of data centers in regions including Northern Virginia, New York and its suburbs, and the San Francisco area.
If this siting pattern continues — and geothermal technologies are used not only to provide electricity, but also to provide “direct cooling” for the data centers using heat pumps — then geothermal could “meet 100% of anticipated data center demand growth in 13 of the 15 largest markets…and at least 15% of power needs in 20 of 28 markets nationally.”
Enhanced geothermal would be particularly effective in the West, according to the report. Of all major markets in the United States, only Atlanta and New York City aren’t conducive to behind-the-meter geothermal.
But geothermal energy holds even more promise if developers decide where to put their data centers based on energy access rather than fiber access — an approach that Google seemed to take in its new partnership with Intersect Power and TPG Rise Climate. If hyperscalers build data centers “wherever they have access to the most affordable geothermal energy,” the report found that “geothermal could easily meet all projected data center load growth in the early 2030s.”
And developers and operators would face even lower electricity costs by taking this approach, Rhodium Group found, with an average levelized cost of electricity up to 45% lower than when data centers are developed in clusters. Western states such as California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Oregon would benefit most from geothermal-driven siting choices.
Policy support for geothermal
Today, there are about four GW of mostly traditional geothermal capacity on the U.S. grid. So for geothermal to actually live up to the expectations that Rhodium Group researchers outlined, the amount of installed geothermal power generating capacity would need to increase by two to seven times in less than 10 years.
That’s an ambitious timeline, even though enhanced geothermal has been having something of a moment lately, as hyperscalers explore options for clean firm power for artificial intelligence operations. Such a dramatic increase in the speed and scale at which facilities are built would require policy help, including to streamline permitting and clarify resource rights and behind-the-meter regulations, among other things.
Luckily for geothermal developers, the technology has landed on the Trump administration’s good side. Alongside nuclear and hydropower, geothermal is included as a priority in President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring a “national energy emergency.”
And the geothermal industry sees Chris Wright, the new Secretary of Energy, as a potential ally. He not only echoed Trump in naming geothermal as a priority for DOE’s research and development efforts, but his fracking company Liberty Energy is actually an investor in Fervo.
