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Climate Week in New York City featured plenty of buzz around data centers, with much of the noise focused on opportunities for the natural gas industry. The consensus is that solar and storage are filling the power generation gap for now, but gas, gas, and more gas will be needed to slake the data center thirst for power, power, and more power in the coming years. Even so, geothermal energy is among the non-fossil alternatives with a wild card to play — and US President Donald Trump is among those willing to play it.
Trump Goes Ga-Ga For Geothermal
The latest sign of federal support for the domestic geothermal energy industry came down on September 21, when the US Department of Energy announced a new, $99 million round of funding to support next-generation geothermal energy systems.
“These projects will empower American innovators to unlock the tremendous geothermal resources beneath our feet,” said DOE Under Secretary of Energy Kyle Haustveit in a press statement.
That’s going to be a tough row to hoe, considering that geothermal currently accounts for about 1% of utility scale power generation in the US. However, with an emphasis on “vast” as well as “reliable and affordable,” that’s the idea.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we’re advancing next-generation geothermal technologies that can lower costs, strengthen American energy dominance, and turn more of our vast domestic geothermal resources into reliable and affordable power,” Haustveit emphasized.
The $99 million will be distributed among 21 projects, with the largest pool being 16 projects aimed at exploring and assessing geothermal energy resources that can be tapped by next-generation technologies. Another five projects will involve real-world tests aimed at validating such technologies.
“Together, these efforts will help reduce technical and development risk and provide the information needed to support future commercial projects and investment,” DOE adds.
To ice the geothermal cake, data from the funded projects is not proprietary. The findings will become public-access resources through the DOE Geothermal Data Repository. “Making these data available can extend the value of the projects beyond individual sites by helping inform future technology development and geothermal exploration across the industry,” DOE adds again for good measure.
Unleashing The Geothermal Energy Kraken
The 21 projects have been selected for funding, but the actual award process remains to be negotiated. Still, for members of the geothermal-curious public, DOE makes the list of selected projects available here.
Some of the names on that list are familiar faces on the pages of CleanTechnica. Quaise Energy, for example, is anticipating a lion-sized share of funds, with up to $25 million in support of its geothermal energy showcase in central Oregon, Project Obsidian. Quaise bills the project as “world’s first commercial superhot geothermal power plant.”
As described by Quaise, its superhot system deploys “technology that could unlock firm, clean power from hot rock beneath virtually any geography in the country.” To further keep gas producers up at night, Quaise aims to develop data from the Obsidian operation into a methodology that can be repeated elsewhere, in accord with DOE’s public access plans.
“Our ambition has always been to make superhot geothermal a commercial reality, and Project Obsidian is where we first deliver on that promise,” Quaise Energy CEO and President Carlos Araque emphasized in a press statement.
Follow The Money
CleanTechnica has also been following several geothermal startups that did not win a share of the new $99 million funding pot. However, private sector investors have been picking up the slack. One example is Sage Geosystems, which entered into a strategic agreement with the US-headquartered firm Ormat Technologies back in 2025. Ormat went on to co-lead a $100 million round of Series B financing for Sage earlier this year.
On September 22, Sage announced that its will apply its utility-scale technology to Ormat’s Blue Mountain geothermal power plant in Nevada. Under the title Project Vector, the effort will leverage existing energy infrastructure for rapid deployment, including power plant capacity and access to transmission lines. Sage previously developed the data in support of Project Vector at a site in South Texas.
“By leveraging Blue Mountain’s established assets, Sage can direct its capital, resources and strategic focus toward demonstrating the performance of its proprietary EGS system and validating a development model designed to deliver higher net power output with significantly lower water losses than other EGS systems,” Sage explains, with ESG being short for Enhanced Geothermal Systems.
Sage’s contribution to the ESG field is a two-well system in which fluid absorbs heat in an underground reservoir and ferries it up to the surface, where a power plant converts it to electricity (see more ESG background here).
Sage also brings up the speed-to-power advantage, which was another buzzy topic at Climate Week. Absent any unforeseen permitting or regulatory obstacles, the company expects to begin drilling at the Ormat site before the end of this year and begin producing electricity next year, with full scale-up expected in 2028. In contrast, gas power plants are struggling under a turbine shortage, with a backlog of five years or more being the rule of thumb.
The Upside-Down World Of US Energy Policy
When President Trump’s name comes up in the same breath as renewable energy in any form, some ‘splaining is in order. His well-known antipathy towards wind turbines is, well, well known. To the surprise of nobody, he sailed into office for the second time around on a platform heavily skewed towards fossil fuels, with nuclear tagging along for the ride.
As expected, wind power got the short end of the energy policy stick after the dust of Inauguration Day 2025 settled. Solar power also landed in the same boat, if only to provide cover for excluding wind as an “unreliable” resource that depends on circumstances of weather and time of day.
However, the President’s “American Energy Dominance” policy does not completely dismiss renewable energy. On the contrary, the policy embraces biomass, hydropower (including marine energy), and geothermal energy. While all three face a mountain of obstacles between themselves and scale-up, in recent years the potential for pushing the geothermal industry beyond its current boundaries finally surfaced.
Following a long term R&D program supported by the US Department of Energy, next-generation geothermal systems are forging into new territory, aided in part by methods borrowed from the oilfield services industry along with advanced exploration technologies and speedier, cost-cutting drilling systems.
In the Great Basin region covering most of Nevada, for example, the US Geological Survey recently assessed that 135 gigawatts’ worth of recoverable geothermal energy is lying around, ripe for the taking.
US President Goes Ga-Ga For Geothermal Energy
The President further tipped his geothermal hand shortly after Election Day 2024, when he nominated former Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright to run the Energy Department. Liberty is a leading oilfield services firm, and the company invested $10 million in the geothermal startup Fervo Energy during Wright’s tenure there.
Further support has come from the US Air Force, which successfully applied its early-adopter power to the US solar industry in the early 2000’s. Now USAF is tapping into geothermal as a means of improving energy resiliency and security at its facilities.
In a somewhat less public display of affection, lawsuits filed by several state attorneys general indicate that the Trump administration has added geothermal energy to the list of approved projects in the controversial offshore wind lease buyout program. Whelp, that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms…
Image: Project Obsidian is among 21 next-generation geothermal energy facilities and exploration systems to share a new, $99 million funding pot from the US Department of energy (cropped, courtesy of Quaise Energy).
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