An independent research body says that geothermal energy could almost single-handedly solve the AI energy demand boom. A new report from the Rhodium Group says that “geothermal could economically meet up to 64% of expected demand growth by the early 2030s” as long as their baseline assumptions hold true.
Advanced geothermal technology is still in its most nascent stages of development, but could be a gamechanger for baseload clean energy production if it can become commercially viable at scale. “To grow as a national solution, geothermal must overcome significant technical and non-technical barriers in order to reduce cost and risk,” says the introduction to a 2019 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report — GeoVision: Harnessing the Heat Beneath Our Feet. “The subsurface exploration required for geothermal energy is foremost among these barriers, given the expense, complexity, and risk of such activities.”
These barriers and prohibitive up-front costs have deterred investments over the years. “Analysts estimate just over $700 million in financing has been contributed to overall geothermal projects since 2020,” the report added. At present, geothermal accounts for just 0.5% of renewable energy on a global scale.
But continued breakthroughs are being made to bring geothermal development closer to reality. Technologies borrowed from other energy sectors, from nuclear fusion to fracking, have unlocked key solutions for drilling down to access the heat from the Earth’s core from nearly anywhere on Earth. While geothermal is already viable in places like Iceland, where the Earth’s heat naturally escapes the the surface through geysers and other natural phenomena, it's much less accessible in places without these geographical and geologic anomalies.
As geothermal technologies improve, Big Tech is starting to throw its weight behind the technology, helping to relieve the historic investment bottleneck. Meta and Alphabet (the companies behind Facebook and Google) are among the major tech firms partnering with geothermal startups. New and innovative geothermal companies are now popping up around the country and particularly in Texas, “due to an abundance of identified geothermal resources, 1-stop shopping permitting process and our regulatory certainty” according to Matt Welch of the Texas Geothermal Energy Alliance (TxGEA).
Big Tech’s growing interest in geothermal and other next-gen clean energies comes in response to the sector’s runaway energy demand growth rate. Google’s 2024 Environmental Report divulged that the company’s greenhouse gas emissions have grown nearly 50% since 2019. As a result, the company now publicly acknowledges that its emissions targets are growing increasingly difficult – if not impossible – to reach.
This surging energy demand is being driven by the proliferation of energy-hungry artificial intelligence, the energy use of data centers is rising sharply and will continue to balloon in the coming years. According to The Register, “the amount of electricity consumed by data centers in the US has increased from around 2 percent in 2020 to around 4.5 percent in 2024.” Already, AI demand growth has placed a major strain on energy grids around the world and caused serious concern for energy security and climate goals on an international scale.
But geothermal, if applied at a commercial scale, could provide something close to a silver-bullet solution to this runaway problem. And thanks to increased support from the public and private sectors, this could become a reality in the not-too-distant future. The Rhodium Group calculates that geothermal energy would potentially be able to fulfill all of the anticipated demand growth from data centers in 13 of the 15 largest U.S. markets and at least 15% of demand in 20 out of 28 national markets.
"Much of the opportunity we find is in the West, but geothermal can provide power for some or all growth, even in growth markets in the central and eastern US including the Washington, DC/Northern Virginia cluster, Chicago, Columbus, OH, and Memphis," the report states.
The report says that while this future is possible, a lot of assumptions will have to hold true to support these findings. Data center operators will have to be willing to spend a “green premium” on geothermal energy, tax credits will have to remain in place, and supportive policy mechanisms will be needed at all levels.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
More Top Reads From Oilprice.com
- Centrica CEO Pay Reduced by Half
- Military Spending Fuels Tension Between Azerbaijan and Armenia
- Outokumpu Adjusts Stainless Steel Pricing Strategy
