Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: October 15, 2024
Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: October 15, 2024
The GEO Act has passed the House - now tell the U.S. Senate to pass the GEO Act!
In July 2024, we wrote a Daily Dose post with an action urging legislators to pass the GEO Act to allow faster permitting for enhanced geothermal in America. Now, the GEO Act has passed the U.S. House!
You can help get this much-needed reform across the finish line. Tell the U.S. Senate to pass the GEO Act!
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Reasons For Hope
Here’s a reminder on what the GEO Act is and why passing it is important!
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.
On September 24, 2024, the GEO Act passed the U.S. House and moved on to the Senate. 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 U.S. Senators to pass the GEO Act!
There's still time to get out the vote before November! Join Climate Action Now and League of Conservation Voters for a special letter-writing event on Thursday, Oct. 17 at 7:30 pm ET. We will learn about the Vote Forward platform and work on crafting messages to add a personal touch to prewritten letters.
If you can, we also recommend registering with Vote Forward by Tuesday, Oct. 15. This will allow you to adopt 5 voters and print your letters before the event. Of course, this step is optional—whether you register ahead of time or not, we encourage anyone who wants to learn more about letter-writing with Vote Forward to participate!