Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Energy: It used to be that drawing heat from deep in the Earth was practical only in geyser-filled places such as Iceland. But new approaches may have us on the cusp of an energy revolution. (Rivka Galchen, November 17, 2025, The New Yorker)
There aren’t gates of Hell just anywhere. A kilometre below ground in Kamchatka is considerably hotter than a kilometre below ground in Kansas. There is also readily accessible geothermal energy in Kenya (where it provides almost fifty per cent of the country’s energy), New Zealand (about twenty per cent), and the Philippines (about fifteen per cent)—all volcanic areas along tectonic rifts. But in less Hadean landscapes the costs and uncertainties of drilling deep in search of sufficient heat have curtailed development. This partly explains why, in the field of clean energy, geothermal is often either not on the list or mentioned under the rubric of “other.” For decades, both private and government investment in geothermal energy was all but negligible.
That has now changed. In the past five years, in North America, more than a billion and a half dollars have gone into geothermal technologies. This is a small amount for the energy industry, but it’s also an exponential increase. In May, 2021, Google signed a contract with the Texas-based geothermal company Fervo to power its data centers and infrastructure in Nevada; Meta signed a similar deal with Texas-based Sage for a data center east of the Rocky Mountains, and with a company called XGS for one in New Mexico. Microsoft is co-developing a billion-dollar geothermal-powered data center in Kenya; Amazon installed geothermal heating at its newly built fulfillment center in Japan. (Geothermal energy enables companies to avoid the uncertainties of the electrical grid.) Under the Biden Administration, the geothermal industry finally received the same kind of tax credits given to wind and solar, and under the current Trump Administration it has received the same kind of fast-track permitting given to oil and gas. Donald Trump’s Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, spoke at a geothermal conference and declared, in front of a MAGA-like sign that read “MAGMA (Making America Geothermal: Modern Advances),” that although geothermal hasn’t achieved “liftoff yet, it should and it can.” Depending on whom you speak with, either it’s weird that suddenly everyone is talking about geothermal or it’s weird that there is a cost-competitive energy source with bipartisan appeal that no one is talking about.
Scientific work that has been discarded or forgotten can return—sometimes through unknowing repetition, at other times through deliberate recovery. In the early nineteen-seventies, the U.S. government funded a program at Los Alamos that looked into developing geothermal energy systems that didn’t require proximity to geysers or volcanoes. Two connected wells were built: in one, water was sent down into fractured hot, dry rock; from the other, the steam that resulted from the water meeting the rock emerged. In 1973, Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, which aimed to develop energy sources outside of fossil fuels. “But when Reagan came into office, he changed things,” Jefferson Tester, a professor of sustainable energy systems at Cornell University, who was involved in the Los Alamos project, told me. The price of oil had come down, and support for geothermal dissipated. “People got this impression that it was a failure,” Tester said. “I think if they looked a little closer, they would see that a lot of the knowledge gained in those first years could have been used to leverage what is happening now.”
Boreholes at the Krafla Geothermal Station.Photograph by Victor Bouchentouf / Hans Lucas / Redux
Tester went on to help establish the M.I.T. Energy Lab (now called the Energy Initiative), which focusses on advancing clean-energy solutions. He and his colleagues felt that students needed to know the history of the research into diverse energy sources, so they put together a course and a textbook called “Sustainable Energy: Choosing Among Options.” In 2005, the Department of Energy, under George W. Bush, commissioned a group consisting of Tester and some seventeen other experts and researchers—including drilling engineers, energy economists, and power-plant builders—to investigate what it would take for the U.S. to produce a hundred thousand megawatts of geothermal energy, a bit more than one-fifth of the energy the U.S. had consumed that year. (Geothermal energy production in the U.S. at that time was around three or four thousand megawatts.) The experts avoided framing their support for geothermal in environmental terms. “The feeling was that you weren’t supposed to talk about carbon, because then it would be perceived as about climate change,” Tester said.
It’s about abundance and independence.
