First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months

pfdietz

If the coffin needed any more nails, this puts the final kibosh on that cancelled SMR project out there that centered on Utah and Idaho, the one involving NuScale. Geothermal makes much more sense for them now. There's a geothermal project at the Newberry Volcano in Oregon that also looks interesting (different people doing that).

thinkcontext

Certainly a welcome development. Let's hope this pilot can be repeated and scaled.

andruschakartem

23 months to build is impressive, but the number that matters for EGS is thermal drawdown. If the fractured rock cools faster than modeled they have to keep drilling new wells, so I'd like to see Cape's output a few years in.

LikeBeans

I admit I don't know enough, but does it negatively affect the underground water a negative way? I read a while back that geothermal plants (can) use fracking like technique to heat up the water but it has negative effects on the local geology and underground water. But not sure if that's true hencey question here.

maherbeg

This is pretty cool! I wonder if datacenters can get permits to colocate geothermal power + heat transfer. That might make permitting the actual datacenter significantly easier if there isn't a huge additional grid tie in.

idontwantthis

Do they have a conventional drill or does this involve some new technology? They aren’t using the microwave thing are they?

sschueller

They tried to drill for one in Switzerland twice. One in Basel and one in St. Gallen but both times causes earthquakes significant enough that the whole project was scraped.

fghorow

It is a nice field they have. It happens to be right next to the DOE sponsored Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE [1]) site that established the temperature and ability to create permeability at depth using EGS. [1] https://utahforge.com/

jp57

Does "enhanced geothermal" have a definition beyond "drilling deeper", or "whatever anyone does that's different than what what was done before"?

bilsbie

Could this cause earthquakes or canos? How come folks can’t conserve energy?

throwaway2037

Every time I am "forced" to read TechCrunch, I feel like I am reading an LLM summary of a company PR release. Anyone else? This article is so short on facts. Title of the article: "World’s first enhanced geothermal power plant completed..." A quick Wiki search shows a page for "Enhanced geothermal system"[1]. There is a list of projects. There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here? > The power plant synchronized with the grid about a week ago, bringing online the first third of what will soon become a 100-megawatt power plant. They brought 33MW online. Yay. Instead, you hide it behind "first third of 100MW". What about cost? Nothing from TechCrunch. I found better analysis here[2]. Look at this savage quote: > At $7,000 per kW for Phase 1 against the $2,157 per kW Canary Media gives for a 2025 gas plant Initial build cost is 7K USD per kW. Solar plus battery and a touch of wind wins by a long shot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_geothermal_system [2] https://mgrid.org/2026/09/27/fervo-first-power-cape-station-...

NDlurker

As a small time Fervo investor, yay!

Animats

The real news here is that Fervo has made progress in deep drilling. Deep geothermal has been known for decades but almost nobody can get down there. Fervo got down to 15,000 feet in 16 drilling days last year with a test well in Texas. 500F heat. That's where it gets useful. This new one is apparently not as deep but fans out with horizontal drilling. Next step is presumably deep and horizontal fan-out, but the hype and TechCrunch are too vague to tell. Big, cheap synthetic diamonds help. The classic Hughes drill bit, the thing which looks like a set of bevel gears, is not really a cutter at all. It's a rock-crusher. The weight of the drill string on those pointy rotating teeth crushes rock into dust. Modern diamond drill bits are brutally simple things that claw through rock.[2] Fervo says they got 3200 feet on one drill before they had to pull it out. The less often that has to be done, the cheaper deep drilling becomes. There's probably a really good description of what Fervo is doing in some publication for oil drillers. TechCrunch isn't it. [1] https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-pushes-envelope/ [2] https://fervoenergy.com/how-modern-drill-bits-are-accelerati...

DrProfresher

Extremely happy more geothermal power plants are being created!In my opinion it is the best and most reliable renewable energy resource in geothermal active places.