Let’s talk about the headline number doing the rounds: 800 GW of next-generation geothermal power installed globally by 2050.

Let’s talk about the headline number doing the rounds: 800 GW of next-generation geothermal power installed globally by 2050.

These numbers were quoted at the MIT Energy Initiative and the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) hosted a geothermal finance summit in March (see article link in comments).

They’re worth putting in context.

The US is the world’s largest geothermal power producer. It accounts for roughly 23% of global installed capacity. Geothermal currently supplies 0.4% of US electricity generation. The rest of the world is doing even less. Global geothermal sits at 0.34% of worldwide electricity output.

That is the baseline from which 800 GW by 2050 is being projected. The IEA’s own NZE scenario has total global installed capacity by 2050 in the range of 35,000-45,000 GW. 800 GW is roughly 2% of that and is a 50x growth from the current baseline.

Fervo’s $1.5B raises and now IPO are held up as the industry template. I think just about everything Fervo has done has been amazing. They’re going to make industrial EGS power a thing, at least in the geology of the western US – hot rock, relatively close to the surface. Without any information on all-in costs and crucially long term performance, I remain skeptical if the EROEI is going to work out. I also worry about the geographic footprint implications of the relative ease of drilling wells and building power plants in the high desert, miles from population density.

Setting aside these concerns, the way that Fervo have built their capital stack – equity, debt, grants, corporate offtaker – is genuinely awesome and very transferable, even if the geology isn’t.

The stronger case – in my view – for geothermal seems to have been largely absent from the conversation. Not electricity. Heat, Cool and Storage. The subsurface doesn’t need to reach usable temperatures to be useful, we have heat pumps to do the work instead. Industrial heat pumps operating today deliver 70°C and above from inlet temperatures available at shallow to intermediate depths. That combination – geothermal source, heat pump amplification – produces continuous, infrastructure-grade heat from geology that exists almost everywhere, at depths that are financeable now.

Take the UK for example. United Downs, the first deep geothermal power plant in the UK that came online in February, is generating about 2-3 MWe from 180 ºC brine produced from 5 km depth. An educated guess at the currently installed capacity of shallow & intermediate geothermal heating and cooling in the UK is 850 MWth. 400x power.

Project Innerspace’s actual deployment vision for the UK is 15 GWth of heat and 1.5–2 GWe of electricity by 2050. That’s 18x growth for heat and more than 600x for power.

The geothermal heat/cool/storage market doesn’t generate 800 GW projections. It probably should.

#geothermal #heatpumps #cleantech #energytransition #industrialheat #geothermalenergy #districtheating #deeptech #energyinfrastructure