Geothermal Fracking Plant Wins Record-Breaking Utah Energy Contract

Just a year ago, Fervo Energy successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of its horizontally oriented geothermal system. Now, the company has won a huge contract to supply clean, virtually endless energy to the California grid.

It’s been just a year since Fervo Energy unveiled a novel geothermal energy concept at its Project Red pilot plant in Nevada. Instead of drilling vertical wells to deliver water to hot rocks beneath the Earth’s surface, it uses techniques from the oil and gas industry to break up the rock, push water through it horizontally and collect the resulting steam to power turbines on the surface.

The company said its new method is set to change the geothermal landscape because it can work in more places — not just where hot rock is close to the surface, as in Iceland and New Zealand. And the new contract proves it was right.

In what the company says is the world’s largest geothermal power purchase agreement, Fervo has signed a 15-year agreement with Southern California Edison to supply 320 MW of power to the utility, which will power about 350,000 homes. The power will be supplied by Fervo’s Cape Station project, which is currently under construction in southwestern Utah, with the first 70 MW expected to be operational in 2026 and the rest in 2028. This brings the total value of the current electricity contract to 373 MW for the 400 MW plant in Beaver County.

The deal was helped by a 2021 mandate from the California Public Utilities Commission to secure 1,000 MW of “weather-independent, battery-free, zero-emissions energy to enhance the reliability of the state’s electric grid,” Fervo’s statement said. Indeed, unlike wind and solar, which can be greatly impacted by the environment, geothermal energy is a much more stable source of energy because the heat it draws is always available, just below the Earth’s surface.

“Enhanced geothermal systems complement our abundant wind and solar resources by providing critical base load when these sources are limited,” said California Energy Commission Chairman David Hochschild. “This is key to ensuring reliability as we transition away from fossil fuels.”

The new deal is the latest in a string of successes for Fervo, which began when its Google-funded Project Red plant began providing power to the tech giant’s Nevada data centers late last year. The company also announced in February that it had been able to speed up its processes, reducing drilling times by 70% and cutting costs by 50% compared to 2022.

“Geothermal is a reliable and flexible solution essential to California’s journey toward a fully decarbonized grid,” said Dawn Owens of Fervo. “As electrification increases and climate change stresses already fragile infrastructure, geothermal will play an increasingly important role in U.S. energy markets.”

The US Department of Energy estimates that by 2050 the amount of energy obtained from geothermal sources could increase 20-fold.

Source: Fervo Energy