On August 26, 2024, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced that the six projects selected from the Biden-Harris administration’s Investing in America agenda, will receive $31 million to advance geothermal energy nationwide. [1] The projects will improve the construction of enhanced geothermal systems and demonstrate how reservoir thermal energy can mitigate the energy needs for industry. This supports the DOE’s Enhanced Geothermal Shot goal to reduce the costs of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) by 90% by 2035. It also supports the DOE’s Industrial Heat Shot goal to develop cost-competitive industrial heat decarbonization technologies with at least 85% of lower emissions by 2035. Currently, geothermal resources generate approximately 4 gigawatts of electricity in the US, but a recent DOE analysis illustrates that advancing EGS could provide at least 90 gigawatts of firm, flexible power to the national grid by 2050. This is enough energy to power more than 65 million US households. Many locations lack enough water or conditions that facilitate fluid flow needed to recover underground heat, in which case EGS can be harnessed to create a humanmade underground reservoir to access that heat for energy. This would require drilling into the subsurface and using wells to draw hot water to the surface, a method that can be costly to construct. However, improving those methods can mitigate costs for EGS, making geothermal an optimal choice for clean, cost-effective electricity.
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