Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: July 1, 2024
Unleash U.S. Geothermal Power with the GEO Act!
Solar, wind, and batteries are changing the world - and there’s a new cleantech superstar about to join them!
You can help by supporting faster permitting for enhanced geothermal in America.
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Reasons For Hope
Solar, wind, and battery technologies are growing exponentially: together, they’re set to provide over 90% of America’s new grid capacity in 2024! But while solar, wind, and batteries grew to global preeminence in the 2010s, geothermal never really took off on a large scale. That’s about to change.
In 2023, scrappy startup Fervo Energy made grid-scale enhanced geothermal power generation a reality, pulling off a successful commercial-scale test in Nevada in July 2023 and starting drilling in September 2023 for a 400-MW facility in Utah set to be complete by 2028.
This is a big deal because enhanced geothermal, as opposed to regular geothermal which needs preexisting hot water deposits, could eventually provide 24/7 clean energy in far more locations all over the world.
Enhanced geothermal works by essentially making its own underground hot water deposits, injecting water far enough underground that it heats up, then letting that hot water rise back up another drilled well to turn a turbine to produce electricity.
Even better, it uses a lot of the same well-drilling technologies common in the oil and gas industry, making it an attractive potential “off-ramp” from fossil fuels for workers and small businesses. That’s starting to earn the new technology support from both Republicans and Democrats, including one new bipartisan bill that has the potential to kickstart an American geothermal boom.
The Geothermal Energy Optimization (GEO) Act, recently introduced as S.3954 in the U.S. Senate, is cosponsored by Democrats Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico as well as Republicans Jim Risch of Idaho and Mike Lee of Utah. A similar version was introduced in the House by Representative John Curtis of Utah as H.R.7370, the Geothermal Energy Opportunity Act. Basically, this bill makes it easier to set up new enhanced geothermal projects on U.S. public lands, putting the newborn advanced geothermal industry on an equal footing with oil and gas incumbents which have had years to lobby for an extra-friendly permitting process.
A new major clean energy technology is about to be born, and it could be the perfect partner to help solar, wind, and batteries bring us a 100% clean energy grid! Let’s make it happen as fast as we can. Tell your Senators and Representative to become cosponsors of the GEO Act!
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I was so pleased to see the CAN app on here. I've been using it for a little while, and its great how easy it makes it to take civic action.