Why the ‘redheaded stepchild’ of renewable energy is poised to rise under Trump

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AUSTIN, Texas — Even as President Trump slashes support for wind and solar energy, another renewable energy source is finding unexpected favor under his second administration.

In early February, newly confirmed Secretary of Energy Chris Wright named geothermal energy, which uses underground heat to generate clean heat and electricity, as one of the prime areas for department research and development.

And geothermal advocates see Trump’s own pledges to “drill, baby, drill” — even if primarily intended to benefit the oil and gas industry — as offering both rhetorical and practical support for the nascent enhanced geothermal industry, which uses technologies like fracking to extract the heat from the earth.

The sector is still “10 to 15 years” behind where wind and solar are, and raising capital is tough, Cindy Taff, chief executive of geothermal company Sage Geosystems, told The Hill.

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Geothermal proponents interviewed by The Hill argue it could soon offer heating, cooling and electric power in a form that combines the cheap, pollution-free aspects of wind and solar power combined with the on-demand security of fossil fuels.

Those advantages, they argue, make the industry particularly well placed to help meet the demand of the new data centers, which require massive quantities of electricity to run and cool off their servers: A November McKinsey study found that data center electricity demand would more than quadruple by the end of the decade — requiring additional electricity about equal to all the power the state of Texas used in 2024.

For one thing, they noted, geothermal energy is nearly as plentiful as solar. Last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) found that there is enough accessible heat within the Earth to increase global electricity demand by a factor of 140.

It can also be produced on a more consistent basis. Geothermal plants on average ran 75 percent of the time in 2023, according to the IEA — far more than solar.

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Many were tentatively excited about Trump’s pick of Wright, pointing to his deep experience — as head of oilfield services company Liberty Energy — with oil and gas drilling, which has significant overlap with geothermal technology. While generally focused on oil and gas, Wright’s company, Liberty Energy, invested $10 million in Houston-based geothermal startup Fervo Energy.

Wright “wants to unleash base load power, and we think geothermal really fits the bill,” Charlotte “Coco” Wallace, who leads policy and business development for geothermal startup Quaise, told The Hill.

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“For geothermal, that is potentially HUGE,” Beard wrote to The Hill. Most of the hottest, most accessible rock in the country is in the West, nearly half of which is federally owned. In those regions, “red tape” has made geothermal projects a “slog,” she said.

Much of the energy in geothermal is currently based in Houston, Texas, site of the nation’s biggest oil and gas industry workforce and home to billions in energy capital. Many oil giants now have geothermal divisions, and Texas leads in startups.

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