Sage Geosystems and Meta sign 150MW geothermal power agreement

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 10 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 been viable only in certain geological regions, like swaths of the American West or Iceland, where heat simmers just beneath the earth’s surface.

Those constraints have capped the potential of traditional geothermal energy, and today it accounts for just 0.4 percent of U.S. electricity generation.

Thanks to recent technological advances, many ported over from the oil and gas industry, geothermal energy could soon be unshackled from its geographic limitations. There’s some amount of heat, and therefore energy, underground everywhere — the challenge is accessing it. That’s what Sage Geosystems and other next-generation geothermal startups are trying to figure out how to do in a cost-effective and consistent way.

If they succeed, it would be a breakthrough for the bid to decarbonize the electricity system. While solar, wind, and battery storage are a powerful combination, experts are still searching for affordable sources of ​“clean firm energy”: carbon-free power that can be dispatched at any time, any day, to help smooth out the ups and downs of weather-dependent renewables. Several technologies could, in theory, fill this role, including long-duration energy storage systems and small nuclear reactors — plus advanced geothermal.

In recent years, startups have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in private and public investment to try to prove out and scale up geothermal energy. In February, Sage raised a $17 million funding round led by fracking pioneer Chesapeake Energy. That same month, Fervo Energy, another leader in the advanced geothermal space, raised $244 million from private funders and won a $60 million grant from the Department of Energy.

Earlier this year, Fervo connected its first power plant to the grid — a 3.5 MW project in Nevada sending electricity to Las Vegas utility NV Energy. The startup, also based in Houston and founded by oil and gas veterans, is currently building a 400 MW geothermal power plant in Utah. That facility is set to start generating grid power in 2026 and reach full-scale production in 2028.

For its first generation project, Sage will pump water underground, harvesting both pressure and heat to produce electricity around the clock for Meta’s data centers. In contrast, its storage projects just use pressure — not heat — and aim to absorb excess power and discharge only during the hours when renewable generation wanes and electricity demand rises.

The project is notable for the involvement of a major tech company. Big Tech firms are hungry for always-on sources of carbon-free power as their participation in an AI arms race threatens to undermine their climate goals. Fervo’s Nevada plant is likewise backed by a major tech company — Google. The tech firm is currently working with NV Energy and Fervo Energy to seek regulatory approval for a so-called ​“Clean Transition Tariff,” which would let Google and other large energy users pay a premium to help bring new clean-firm resources, like geothermal power plants, online faster.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of a fresh round of funding for geothermal projects from the Department of Energy. Also on Monday, the DOE awarded up to $31 million to six enhanced geothermal projects, ranging from efforts to develop tools for evaluating boreholes and wells to a pilot of a system that aims to produce usable steam heat from geothermal reservoirs.

“Expanding the use of new and innovative geothermal technologies will allow the United States to continue pushing forward into the frontier of the clean energy revolution by using the heat beneath our feet,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a press release.

Maria Gallucci contributed reporting to this article.