Enhanced geothermal power is finally a reality
Geothermal developer Fervo Energy has successfully brought online the first ever full-scale commercial power plant sourcing from enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) — a groundbreaking development both literally and figuratively. In this episode, Fervo CEO Tim Latimer discusses the company’s accomplishment and where flexible geothermal is headed.
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David Roberts
Traditional geothermal power, which has been around for over a century, exploits naturally occurring fissures underground, pushing water through them to gather heat and run a turbine. Unfortunately, those fissures only occur naturally in particular geographies, limiting geothermal’s reach.
For decades, engineers and entrepreneurs have dreamed of creating their own fissures in the underground rock, which would allow them to drill geothermal wells almost anywhere.
These kind of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) have been attempted again and again since the 1970s, with no luck getting costs down low enough to be competitive. Despite dozens of attempts, there has never been a working commercial enhanced geothermal power plant.
Until now.
Last week, the geothermal developer Fervo Energy announced that its first full-scale power plant passed its production test phase with flying colors. With that, Fervo has, at long last, made it through all the various tests and certifications needed to prove out its technology. It now has a working, fully licensed power plant, selling electricity on the wholesale market, and enough power purchase agreements (PPAs) with eager customers to build many more.
EGS is now a real thing — the first new entrant into the power production game in many decades.
Here at Volts we are unabashed geothermal nerds, so naturally I was excited to discuss this news with Fervo co-founder and CEO Tim Latimer, an ex-oil-and-gas engineer who moved into geothermal a decade ago with a vision of how to make it work: he would borrow the latest technologies from the oil and gas sector. Ten years later, he’s pulled it off.
I talked with Latimer about how EGS works, the current geographical and size limitations, how he plans to get his technology on a rapid learning curve to bring down costs, the value of clean firm power, the future of flexible geothermal, and much more. This is a juicy one.
All right then, with no further ado, Tim Latimer. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Tim Latimer
Thank you for having me.
David Roberts
Tim, this has been a long time coming. I've been tracking your adventures from afar for a few years now, and now you've reached a real milestone here, a real milestone for you, a real milestone for your company, a real milestone for geothermal power, which Volts listeners are like me, big fans of. So to help us appreciate the significance of the milestone in question, I want to back up a little bit and do some background first for listeners who have not, for whatever bizarre reason, heard my previous geothermal pods. So a couple of times we've talked and you've told me kind of this short, potted history of geothermal, the last couple of decades of geothermal, the sort of struggle to align the money and the attention and the technology and everything.
So maybe by way of starting just share that with our listeners, sort of like geothermal's struggles to take off in, say, like a post-2000 context.
Tim Latimer
Absolutely. Well, to do that, I probably have to explain a little bit about how geothermal works, which is straightforward in the idea, difficult in the implementation, but geothermal has been around for forever. The first geothermal power plant was built in Italy over 100 years ago. Major places like New Zealand, Iceland, and northern California built massive utility-sca
