Dear Subscriber First Name,

Welcome to the Mountain West Geothermal Consortium’s September newsletter. Here, we keep members, advisors, and subscribers up to date on our big-picture happenings as well as trends we’re tracking in the geothermal landscape.

Upcoming events: If you’ll be in Houston Sept. 22 or New York Sept. 23rd, we’d love to see you at one of our events!

MWGC happy hour at Geothermal Rising:

📍 8th Wonder Brewery, 2202 Dallas St, Houston, TX 77003

📅 Tuesday, September 22

🕔 5:00-7:30 PM

Register for the Houston event here.

MWGC happy hour at New York Climate Week:

📍 Haven Rooftop, Sanctuary Hotel - New York, New York

📅 Wednesday, September 23

🕔 5:00-7:00 PM

Register for the New York event here. 

Geothermal in the news:

• Mazama is demonstrating incredible improvements in drilling speed, yet again underscoring that when a developer has access to capital, they can deliver in hugely exciting ways. Technology is no longer the barrier to scaling this industry; intelligent financing will unlock huge amounts of clean, firm power.

  
  

• Fervo announced a 400MW power purchase agreement (PPA) with Google, the largest EGS PPA in history. So exciting to see! While extremely important, this development does not expand the map for next-gen geothermal to new sites; rather it continues investment at Fervo's Cape Station, where investors have years of detailed subsurface data to affirm ROI. This further supports the Consortium's hypothesis that capital follows certainty, in a big way. 

• The National Petroleum Council, alongside leaders from state government, Tribal organizations, industry, scientists, and academia, is advocating for a robust nationwide assessment of subsurface resources. We strongly support this effort, which is aligned with the Consortium’s data modernization efforts beginning soon in member states (more below).

Hello, all!

It’s been a busy summer for the Consortium, and we want to bring you up to speed on our latest activities.

Earlier this year, we published The Firm Frontier, which demonstrated that commercial-scale EGS projects of 100-500 MW can achieve commercial operation dates in less than three years under the right conditions, making next-gen geothermal one of the fastest paths to clean, firm power—if offtakers are lucky enough to have the option to buy it. So why is it still so scarce? 

Case in point, Fervo brought in billions in capital through project finance investments and an earth-shattering IPO in May of this year. But to get to that point, it first took Fervo six years to raise the $100 million needed for the appraisal drilling required to unlock traditional capital. The Consortium is working on policy solutions to shorten this timeline for future projects.

To that end, Consortium staff released a new research paper in July, Misunderstood and Manageable, which presents evidence that next-generation geothermal technologies have fundamentally changed the risk profile for geothermal investment, and capital markets have not caught up. The mismatch between how investors currently price geothermal risk and current technological capabilities is creating a bottleneck to scaling the geothermal industry. The paper proposes a structure to help investors and policymakers understand and shift their risk frameworks and also provides examples of targeted, revenue-neutral public/private drilling insurance programs that can help accelerate that shift. 

The Consortium has spent much of the summer working on two intervention points simultaneously. One is data modernization–improving access to data about the subsurface on the front end of projects so that developers can spend time and money on exploratory drilling where it is most likely to be successful. A major challenge across geothermal and other industries is that much data about the subsurface exists in paper files dating back decades or in some cases more than a century at state geologic surveys, environmental management agencies, universities, and beyond. The Consortium is in the process of hiring a data modernization lead and will have a budget for grants available to support institutions in digitizing data about the subsurface that can and should be publicly available. MWGC has also stood up a working group to inform project execution.

At the same time, based on our research, we are working with advisors to design potential policy interventions that would help support responsible geothermal developers’ access to capital at the crucial appraisal stage, where financial risk to a developer actually increases slightly from the beginning of a project, because appraisal drilling is expensive and traditional capital is hesitant to finance it. One concept being explored is an Appraisal Drilling Revolving Fund (ADRF), which states could create to better manage risk and support the creation of a pipeline of next-gen geothermal projects. Our ADRF working group has now completed 4 of 5 planned meetings with advisors to collect input on the development of a potential program. 

In the future, we also plan to address ways to improve certainty in offtake; these activities will follow from the workstreams above.

Thank you for your interest in the Consortium, and we look forward to a busy fall. We hope to see you at an event soon!

Best,
Mike O’Connor
Director, Mountain West Geothermal Consortium

Upcoming events

MWGC happy hour at Geothermal Rising:
📍 8th Wonder Brewery, 2202 Dallas St, Houston, TX 77003
📅 Tuesday, September 22
🕔 5:00-7:30 PM
Register for the Houston event here.

MWGC happy hour at New York Climate Week:

📍 Haven Rooftop, Sanctuary Hotel - New York, New York

📅 Wednesday, September 23

🕔 5:00-7:00 PM

Register for the New York event here. 

Third Quarter 2026 webinar: This webinar series outlines the progress we’ve made in our intervention areas and provides you with the opportunity to engage with Consortium Staff and State Officials. Our next webinar is scheduled for Wednesday October 28 at 2 PM MST. Register for the Zoom here.

TBA: December 1-3: MWGC happy hour at Colorado’s Geothermal Solutions Summit 

Look for more details in the coming weeks.

Please reach out if you have questions about events or other Consortium activities by replying to this email or sending a note to info@mountainwestgeo.org.

Thanks for reading! Please send this on to a friend or colleague - and if you were forwarded this email, you can sign up for future Consortium updates on our website.