First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months | Hacker News Reader

First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months

techcrunch.com

149 pointshochmartinez69 comments

The real news here is that Fervo has made progress in deep drilling. Deep geothermal has been known for decades but almost nobody can get down there. Fervo got down to 15,000 feet in 16 drilling days last year with a test well in Texas. 500F heat. That's where it gets useful.

This new one is apparently not as deep but fans out with horizontal drilling. Next step is presumably deep and horizontal fan-out, but the hype and TechCrunch are too vague to tell.

Big, cheap synthetic diamonds help. The classic Hughes drill bit, the thing which looks like a set of bevel gears, is not really a cutter at all. It's a rock-crusher. The weight of the drill string on those pointy rotating teeth crushes rock into dust. Modern diamond drill bits are brutally simple things that claw through rock.[2] Fervo says they got 3200 feet on one drill before they had to pull it out. The less often that has to be done, the cheaper deep drilling becomes.

There's probably a really good description of what Fervo is doing in some publication for oil drillers. TechCrunch isn't it.

[1] https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-pushes-envelope/

[2] https://fervoenergy.com/how-modern-drill-bits-are-accelerati...

They tried to drill for one in Switzerland twice. One in Basel and one in St. Gallen but both times causes earthquakes significant enough that the whole project was scraped.

Well that's it. One attempt failed. Scrap the entire idea.

Well, yeah. Earthquakes bad, don't cause them.

Lol, never stopped the nat gas industry in the US.

Yeah, sadly true. But it did stop it in the Netherlands.

Just to clarify, neither of those projects (2006 and 2013) was done by Fervo. Fervo wasn't even founded until 2017.

The Basel project caused earthquakes because it used a single, vertical well to pump high-pressure water into dense granite all at once, which accidentally over-pressurized and lubricated a major existing fault line. In St. Gallen, the earthquake happened when drillers unexpectedly hit a high-pressure methane gas pocket. The rapid injection of heavy drilling mud used to control the gas kick built up intense, localized pressure that triggered a nearby fault.

Fervo's modern method avoids these issues by using horizontal drilling to distribute fluid pressure gently across miles of rock rather than spiking it in one spot. They also use advanced fiber-optic cables for real-time micro-seismic monitoring, allowing them to sense tiny rock movements and adjust fluid rates instantly before a felt earthquake can ever develop.

23 months to build is impressive, but the number that matters for EGS is thermal drawdown. If the fractured rock cools faster than modeled they have to keep drilling new wells, so I'd like to see Cape's output a few years in.

Is there any reason to believe this is likely?

If it wasn't, enhanced geothermal would be everywhere, which it isn't. (Yet, this company would say.)

Op is really just describing a core breakeven metric on the energy source. In the same way you measure an oil well with half-life of useful output, this is basically saying "EGS can prove to be useful if they can make sure they extract more economically useful heat than the economic costs of constantly drilling new wells."

Since no one has really made EGS widespread yet, that suggests no one has yet cracked this nut.

> If it wasn't, enhanced geothermal would be everywhere, which it isn't.

That seems like a fallacy.

It may be a deductive fallacy, but it's perfectly reasonable inductively.

"World's first" implies this is fairly experimental, surely?

"If the internet was useful, everyone would use it" is something that wouldn't stand the test of time, right?

I am most likely the world’s first brudgers.

And at the time I write this, it breaks the world record for HN comments by the world’s first brudgers.

The internet expanded as the result of semi-conductor break throughs made by thousands of engineers with access to semi-conductor break throughs. There was a ‘virtuous’ cycle.

That is not the same thing as a press release. ‘World’s first,’ ‘New Record,’ and ‘Scientists’ correlate with press releases. Press releases make for easy news content and news sites are attracted to them.

It is a heuristic regarding the scaling of a business idea based on conventional industrial processes presented as a technological breakthrough.

It is premised on a belief that a significant number of smart motivated professionals have been trying to solve the same problem with substantially the same budgets and technologies for many years and that experience has led them to an informed belief that more practical solutions exist.

You might say it is a stronger belief in engineering practice and economic efficiency than in press releases.

[note: I agree it would not be “everywhere” because the practicality of drilling into bedrock varies significantly between locations. But that is not a point in favor of scaling the proposed technique]

It is not an uncommon problem with geothermal.

Would the deep-drilling approach enabled by Quaise alleviate this issue ?? I was super-interested when Quiase was first announced, but not sure if they are moving towards viability. Insights appreciated. Thx, NSC

Not really, it is more the limiting physics of extracting heat through conductive transfer in the rock. The rate of heat extraction through fluid convection has to be less than the rate of conductive replenishment though the basement rock to not get thermal drawdown and these rates are often not economical.

Fervo engineers for thermal drawdown up front, it is well known that for EGS to maintain constant power output you need to periodically re-stimulate the field after a period of some number of years. What matters for the economics is the rate of eventual drawdown. The nameplate 100MW is also a bit misleading as it represents gross power output without taking into account the parasitic load of pumping which for an EGS plant is quite high. There was a ~60% parasitic load for their test facility and IIRC Fervo is eventually targeting 30-40% for the commercial power plant.

If the coffin needed any more nails, this puts the final kibosh on that cancelled SMR project out there that centered on Utah and Idaho, the one involving NuScale. Geothermal makes much more sense for them now.

There's a geothermal project at the Newberry Volcano in Oregon that also looks interesting (different people doing that).

Yes! It's near where I live, very excited to see this come online.

Does this support improved availability and economics of district heating?

I don't think district heating had anything to do with the CFPP.

I was referring to enhanced geothermal in general for district heating, as I believe you are potentially a subject matter expert and qualified to opine.

District heating doesn't make much sense in the US west. The distances are too large.

And summers tend to be hot in many of the places people live.

DISTRICT HEATING?

WHERE?

In theory it could. The advantage of enhanced geothermal is it allows for a much wider variety of sites to be used compared to conventional geothermal. So, it may be possible to create one near an existing district heating system and use the excess heat for it.

I don't see why necessarily, they are in the same ballpark LCOE cost wise. The advantage of enhanced geothermal is that you can potentially build it relatively quickly but that is more a policy choice.

One should be careful to not equate LCOE from demonstrated construction costs, vs. LCOE from projected construction costs in sales presentations.

I don't think when all is said and done SMRs will be anywhere close to the cost of energy from this kind of geothermal.

The other advantage is political feasibility. Rational or not, people freak out the moment they hear the word "nuclear". Whether people should be this way is irrelevant if your goal is to have a project that succeeds. What's relevant is that they are.

Does "enhanced geothermal" have a definition beyond "drilling deeper", or "whatever anyone does that's different than what what was done before"?

Enhanced geothermal are engineered geothermal systems in naturally hot dry rock where natural fluid convection and permeability are not found. The term comes from the fact that conventional geothermal power plants are often tapping into natural near surface convective systems with high water permeability. Bringing that heat to the near surface also heats the surrounding rock over hundreds of thousands of years so one way to "enhance" the output of traditional geothermal power plants was to theoretically engineer permeability into these surrounding rock formations. Fervo's facility is built next to an existing conventional geothermal power plant.

It is a nice field they have.

It happens to be right next to the DOE sponsored Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE [1]) site that established the temperature and ability to create permeability at depth using EGS.

[1] https://utahforge.com/

Wiki page for that project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Observatory_for_Resea...

I admit I don't know enough, but does it negatively affect the underground water a negative way? I read a while back that geothermal plants (can) use fracking like technique to heat up the water but it has negative effects on the local geology and underground water. But not sure if that's true hencey question here.

Huh, my first reaction was to say that Enhanced Geothermal is actually just a polite way of saying fracked geothermal but it turns out that's not quite accurate. Hydro-shearing (which EGS uses) doesn't intentionally create new cracks in the rock, which fracking does, but will cause existing cracks to grow. Potentially still negative local effects for sure but not as violently, hopefully.

Every project has risks, of course. EGS projects are basically two wells making a circulation loop: inject cold water down one well under pressure, circulate it through hot rocks using the fracked channels, and pull out hot water up the other well.

Theoretically, a leak into groundwater aquifers would make keeping the system pressurized harder or would dillute the amount of heat they're extracting, so seems like a stronger commercial incentive not to f up the groundwater.

In oil fracking they're just trying to pull the oily goo up from underground. And in theory you could do heat extraction using just water instead of shale goo solvents so any contamination would be less impactful?

I dunno, I'm just internet armchair quarterbacking this until a real geologist chimes in, but I can see how this is a somewhat different beast that shale fracking wells.

Certainly a welcome development. Let's hope this pilot can be repeated and scaled.

Extremely happy more geothermal power plants are being created!In my opinion it is the best and most reliable renewable energy resource in geothermal active places.

This is pretty cool! I wonder if datacenters can get permits to colocate geothermal power + heat transfer. That might make permitting the actual datacenter significantly easier if there isn't a huge additional grid tie in.

As a small time Fervo investor, yay!

Do they have a conventional drill or does this involve some new technology? They aren’t using the microwave thing are they?

They’re using tech invented for fracking, so very conventional. The application for geothermal is what’s new.

The new thing is using new-ish fracking drilling techniques to create a geothermal resource. Conventional geothermal relies on finding very specific geology which is why its so rare. Enhanced geothermal can (in theory) work in many more places since it can create the geology needed to produce electricity.

Fervo was previously discussed on hn a couple months ago when they were hyping up this project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903945

Some good info about what's different in there.

Every time I am "forced" to read TechCrunch, I feel like I am reading an LLM summary of a company PR release. Anyone else? This article is so short on facts.

Title of the article: "World’s first enhanced geothermal power plant completed..."

A quick Wiki search shows a page for "Enhanced geothermal system"[1]. There is a list of projects. There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here?

    > The power plant synchronized with the grid about a week ago, bringing online the first third of what will soon become a 100-megawatt power plant.

They brought 33MW online. Yay. Instead, you hide it behind "first third of 100MW".

What about cost? Nothing from TechCrunch. I found better analysis here[2]. Look at this savage quote:

    > At $7,000 per kW for Phase 1 against the $2,157 per kW Canary Media gives for a 2025 gas plant

Initial build cost is 7K USD per kW. Solar plus battery and a touch of wind wins by a long shot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_geothermal_system

[2] https://mgrid.org/2026/09/27/fervo-first-power-cape-station-...

Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else by such a wide margin it boggles my mind we’re even still talking about, or contemplating anything else.

By the time you finish reading this, solar panels got cheaper

> Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else

Except that they don't.

Why do you think new datacenters are using natgas turbines and not wind+solar?

Honestly a lot of different reasons. One they can put natgas on a private disconnected grid direct on the same property.

The other big ones is states ignoring the environmental rules of all the negative side effects of said generation.

DC's better be careful or any government change and their choices now will bite them in the ass.

Physical footprint fits in limited available space, well understood turnkey commercial off the shelf solution, and lack of grid scale flexibility/redundancy to best exploit available capacity at different times of day/year.

Because they don’t want to wait for a grid connection that can take years and they need backup generation capacity anyways.

You’ll see them all connecting to the grid in the following years simply because it’s cheaper

Indeed. And the problem with grid connections is that the grid can't carry arbitrary streams of energy. So you can't just connect a bunch of remote panels to the grid and YOLO it on the scale of the large datacenters.

This problem does not go away, though. It's still an issue for renewable generation, especially for northern areas.

Because behind-the-meter generation bypasses many municipal permitting processes and now also skips NEPA review. As diesel keeps climbing it'll get more expensive to truck fuel in and you'll start to see operators begging for the grid connections they scoffed at before.

But the volume of solar panels you'd need and especially the volume of batteries you'd need don't exist, nor is the supply there for anything but a gradual build-out.

Only in some regions that’s enough. A lot of regions have winters where solar output is greatly diminished and wind can stop for days. Batteries are too expensive to store electricity for days to weeks. On top of that you have higher demand if you have electrified space heating.

Humanity actually has millennia of experience with solar energy, we just call it agriculture. Plants literally are natural solar panels. And you know what all this experience tells us? It varies from place to place, like, a lot. In some places it works nice and in some places it just doesn't.

This article also provides good analysis: https://powerstack.currence.ai/p/powerstack-post-ipo-fervo-c....

The tldr

> If we look at our Fastest MW analysis, the fastest way to get power to the grid right now is solar+BESS with existing interconnection agreements in ERCOT. This setup gives a 27-month or less time-to-COD, and can come in at $40/MWh PPAs, a price and speed Fervo can't catch. So, per the above, the right way to think about it is that Fervo competes for a different customer than the ones looking at solar+BESS. Are they required to procure geo? Are they in the West? Do they need fully baseload power? For sure, that’s a smaller niche. But if Fervo's anticipated 38GW resource base materializes even a little, the niche is huge.

A lot of geothermal energy investment happened after the California Public utilities commission issued procurement mandates for clean firm power after SB 100 passed.

Does the build cost matter? After you've built the gas plant you still need to buy gas in perpetuity.

The marginal cost of the energy from the geothermal plant must be very much less.

And yet, when the same argument is made about nuclear, all hell breaks lose

> There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here?

First commercial operation with a grid connection. You'll notice that those 50+ are listed under the "research and development" section.

Could this cause earthquakes or canos? How come folks can’t conserve energy?

No.

> How come folks can’t conserve energy?

The whole economy runs on energy, and we have a lot of fossil fuels to replace.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com