Tell Congress to support fast-progressing geothermal and put coal out of its misery!

Next-generation geothermal, bringing 24/7 clean power generation, looks to be at the beginning of a boom in America. As new startups like XGS and Sage Geosystems build new geothermal designs to join Fervo in the U.S. advanced and enhanced geothermal space, the average price of U.S. public land leases for geothermal clean drilling has risen by 282% this year to reach $127 per acre, up from an average price of $33 per acre in 2024!

A recent auction of geothermal lease rights for 24,000 acres of public land in Idaho fetched an average price of $180 per acre. This reflects strong and increasing bidder interest as geothermal tech keeps advancing! Furthermore, America may have a built-in advantage in scaling up geothermal, as it can use many of the same tools, skillsets, and individual workers as the oil and gas industry. Extraordinary opportunities await.

In contrast, when the president held a coal sale recently, almost nobody came. The biggest new coal mining lease of U.S. federal land in decades recently auctioned the rights to 167 million tons of coal from lands in Montana. It received just 1 bid of $186,000, reflecting almost-complete lack of market interest in the dying technology. That one bid valued the coal to be possibly mined at about one-tenth of one penny per ton. And that looks like a pretty rational market valuation: as coal plants keep closing (despite efforts to shovel more subsidies at them) and digging mines is expensive, it’s wildly unlikely that there will ever again be enough economic demand to make it worthwhile to actually mine this coal.

The current White House energy policy is the opposite of “energy dominance.” It amounts to weighing down America’s successful clean energy industries with red tape and outright attacks (solar and battery storage have been providing supermajorities of new capacity growth for years now, and geothermal could scale up fast to join them!) , while shoveling more and more giveaways to the dying coal industry, which has already failed in the market and only clings to relevance via political influence.

Congressional leaders should face America towards the future and forcibly cut off the executive-branch giveaways to the rotting corpse of the coal industry in upcoming budget talks. Furthermore, Congress should enact supportive regulatory and permitting structures to accelerate a rapid build-out of geothermal power as well as solar and battery storage — the fast-growing, market-preferred, clean, cheap, and reliable sources for U.S. energy!

Tell Congress to support fast-progressing geothermal and put coal out of its misery!