Is Google that confident in Geothermal? Or that desperate for power?
Probably both.
What strikes me is the fast timeline – generating for the grid in ’26-’27 time frame.
I’ve been saying for years that Geothermal is the dark horse, and it might be breaking from the pack right now.
- Enhanced geothermal company Fervo Energy announced Tuesday that it has made a 396-MW power purchase agreement with Google, the largest-ever geothermal PPA, with Google planning to use that power as a “foundational building block” for a potential data center in Utah.
- “As part of the PPA, Fervo will offer Google an option to expand its offtake by approximately 600 MW, for a total of nearly 1 GW, by June 2030,” Fervo said. “Final data center plans remain subject to a variety of factors including engineering feasibility, state and local approvals, and commercial conditions.”
- In a Tuesday research note, financial services company William Blair said the PPA deal “increases contracted revenue across Fervo’s portfolio by about 65% and strengthens our belief that Fervo’s enhanced geothermal systems provide a critical solution to address our ‘baseload imperative’ thesis by delivering firm, dispatchable power to fuel AI data centers.”
Wall Street Journal:
The agreement for nearly 400 megawatts of electricity is enough to power a midsize city and would be Fervo’s largest-ever power deal. Fervo plans to begin selling power to Google in 2028 from its Cape Station project in southwestern Utah.
Google intends to buy the power for a data center in Utah—though it has yet to determine the location. The company still needs to work with local communities and go through state and local regulatory approvals before it can move forward with the plans.
“Even though right now we don’t have clarity yet on how this will serve a data center…we know that it will be a foundational building block of power generation for a data center presence in Utah,” said Lucia Tian, Google’s director of advanced energy technologies.
Google has an option to expand the agreement by about 600 megawatts by June 2030.
The tech company has been working with Fervo for about five years, starting with a small 3-megawatt pilot project that began operating in 2023 in Nevada. Later, Fervo, Google and utility NV Energy joined together on a 115-megawatt deal in Nevada.
Fervo now has about 1,000 megawatts contracted; other customers include Shell and utility Southern California Edison.
When it went public in May, Fervo raised more than $2 billion, and last year Fervo privately raised $462 million from a group of investors including Google and Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
“This is us taking that $2.2 billion of proceeds from the IPO and turning it into rapid commercial growth, which is the whole point,” said Tim Latimer, Fervo’s chief executive and co-founder.
The Fervo-Google deal shows how tech companies are trying to lock down electricity supplies even as they work out the details of projects.
The need to build artificial-intelligence data centers has created a huge surge in electricity demand in the U.S. Meeting it is easier said than done because of equipment backlogs for transmission infrastructure and the complex engineering studies needed to understand grid impacts. Waits to connect to the grid can extend well into the 2030s.
