Tell Congress to pass the FREEDOM Act and Geo POWER Act to unleash U.S. geothermal!

U.S. enhanced geothermal superstar startup Fervo just held a very successful initial public offering (IPO), raising $1.9 billion and valuing the company at $7.7 billion. In the IPO filing, Fervo reports potential to develop 42 GW (42,000 MW!) of 24/7 clean geothermal capacity on the hundreds of thousands of acres it’s already leasing across the American West. (They're already actively working to build 3.65 GW of geothermal projects, with their 500 MW Cape Station project in Utah set to start generating electricity by end-2026). The governors of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico launched a bipartisan pro-geothermal consortium a week after the IPO.

Enhanced geothermal has considerable bipartisan support so far, thanks in part to its use of very similar drilling skills and technology to the oil and gas industry, making it a perfect “off-ramp” for fossil fuel workers. Fervo announced a deal with oilfield services company Baker Hughes to supply equipment for 300 MW of their 500 MW Cape Station project.

Recently, a new desperately-needed bipartisan permitting reform bill, the FREEDOM Act, was introduced in the House. It includes key provisions from the unpassed SPEED Act and GEO Act bills  that would make it much easier to build energy projects in America — especially geothermal, which is much more heavily regulated than the oil and gas industry — without years of bad-faith-litigation-vulnerable red tape. Currently, a single geothermal project might trigger NEPA review requirements six different times, adding years to project development times.

Critically, at a moment when gigawatts of almost-ready-to-go clean power projects are being blocked by the executive branch, the FREEDOM Act also includes extremely badly needed new legal protections to prevent the President abusing executive powers to cancel or pause energy projects.

Permitting reform is badly needed to ensure that that enhanced geothermal has a chance rise on its manifest merits and provide abundant clean electricity without being blocked by politicized bureaucracy.

And as fossil fuel prices skyrocket due to the Iran War, a new bipartisan bill was recently introduced in both the Senate and House: the Geo POWER Act. It would direct the U.S. Energy Department to use their pre-existing grant and conditional loan funding models to help scale up even more innovation in the fast-developing geothermal domain and accelerate clean energy abundance! The Department already does this for most other energy technologies, but enhanced geothermal is brand-new and not well covered. It’s a commonsense bill that might actually have a chance of passing as more and more oil and gas talent and tech across the West moves towards clean drilling.

Tell Congress to pass the FREEDOM Act and Geo POWER Act to unleash U.S. geothermal!