One of the most promising new forms of clean electricity just got a significant boost.
Earlier today at a U.S. Department of Energy workshop, next-generation geothermal energy startup Sage Geosystems announced that it had agreed to supply Meta, the owner of Facebook, with 150 megawatts of geothermal power.
The goal is for the first phase of the project to start generating carbon-free electricity for Meta's massive data centers in 2027, per the company press release. Sage will build the geothermal installation in a state "east of the Rocky Mountains," but hasn't yet decided on a specific location. The company declined to share project financials.
"As energy demand continues to grow, the need for reliable, resilient, and sustainable power is paramount and our partnership with Meta underscores the critical need for innovative and sustainable energy solutions like ours," CEO Cindy Taff, who joined Sage Geosystems as CEO in 2020 after more than three decades at oil and gas supermajor Shell, said in a press release.
The agreement with Meta is the company's first major push into electricity generation.
Earlier this month Sage Geosystems launched another major project involving a related but distinct task: storing excess clean energy in the ground for later use.
On August 13, Sage Geosystems unveiled plans to build what it called the world's first geopressured geothermal energy storage facility, located in Christine, Texas, on the site of a coal plant owned by the San Miguel Electric Cooperative. The installation will pump water underground, building up pressure that can be released later, when power demand spikes, in order to spin a turbine and send electricity to the grid. The company successfully tested the technology, which it has referred to as an "earthen battery," at an abandoned gas well in San Isidro, Texas, in 2023.
The facility will use grid power to begin with, but Sage is looking into the possibility of installing its own solar in the near term, Taff told Canary Media. Once online later this year, the installation will be able to discharge 3 megawatts of electricity to the Texas grid for between six and ten hours at a time.
"We are starting at 3 megawatts, but we can scale at this location up to 50 megawatts on a single what we call pad, or facility area," Taff said. But the first step is getting the initial commercial installation up and running, which will help Sage attract the project funding required to build bigger facilities.
Sage's two new announcements are the latest evidence of the ongoing renaissance in geothermal energy production.
The energy source is not entirely new. The largest geothermal power plant complex in the world, built on a field of hot springs in Northern California, has operated continuously since 1960. But historically geothermal energy has only been viable in certain geological regions, like swaths of the American West or Iceland, where heat simmers just beneath the earth's surface.
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