Trump’s Geothermal Energy Time Bomb Is About To Explode

The federal government is putting new money and organization behind geothermal energy, the technology that taps heat from underground to generate electricity. The Department of Energy just launched a Geothermal Center of Excellence, based at a national lab in Colorado, that will pull together research from labs across the country to speed up large-scale geothermal projects. This comes from an administration that has otherwise favored coal, oil, and gas, but officials increasingly see geothermal as a reliable, always-on power source that can compete with fossil fuels rather than depending on weather like wind or solar.

The push has real momentum behind it. New drilling techniques, borrowed partly from the oil and gas industry, are letting companies build geothermal plants in places that never had the right underground conditions before. Fervo Energy just signed a deal to supply Google with power from a Utah project expected to come online in 2028. Another company, Mazama Energy, is preparing to drill a large commercial project in Oregon. A timber company is also exploring geothermal development on its land in Washington and Oregon.

None of this changes anything for homeowners right away — there's no new rebate, tax credit, or program tied to this news. It matters mainly as a sign of where electricity generation may be headed. If geothermal scales up as its backers hope, it could add more steady power to the grid in the coming years, alongside solar, wind, and storage, and gradually squeeze out coal-fired plants in some regions.