CEO @fervoenergy, revolutionizing the electric grid with next-gen geothermal 🌋 ⚡️ Texan.
Houston, TX
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Oh, hey everyone.
Drill, Baby, Drill. For clean energy.
ift.tt/6jo5TIH
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Gas powered leaf blowers are now banned in DC. They have 124X the pollution of a car and the gas powered variety produces noise that impacts 15X the households than the electric variety. The health and quality of life impacts of this policy are enormous. theatlantic.com/magazine/arc…
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1/Today I am thrilled to announce, after years of work, our team @fervoenergy has developed a major advancement in geothermal, proven it at the field scale, and is set to deliver commercial next-gen geothermal decades ahead of schedule. THREAD. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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1/We @fervoenergy are excited to announce our new geothermal drilling results. We have achieved a 70% YoY reduction in drilling times, dramatically outpacing predictions, and are poised to unleash a new wave of geothermal decades ahead of schedule. THREAD. fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy…
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Two completely wild facts in this one chart.
The US once accounted for 50% of global emissions!
The US is on a path to be <10% soon.
🤯
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With net-zero pledges with no Scope 3 emissions, 100% Renewable Energy plans that are unbundled and/or not time matched, and carbon offsets of dubious quality, we may be headed for a world where every company is "carbon neutral" and yet underlying emissions haven't changed much.
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The most undertold story in all of energy continues to be how Kenya is decarbonizing while greatly expanding the grid through rapid development of geothermal energy.
Kenya’s electricity demand hits new record peak of 2,051MW in May up from 2,036MW recorded in November 2021.
This growth was driven mainly by renewable energy with geothermal energy making the greatest contribution.
Source: @EPRA_Ke and @KenGenKenya
🔗 bit.ly/3wTnc8w
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Seven years in to running a hardtech startup and I think the biggest surprise for me is…how many companies there are out there that could be debunked in an afternoon using the most basic physics but somehow. Still. Keep. Raising. Money.
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1/We are excited about a partnership between Google and Fervo, announced today by CEO Sundar Pichai, to develop next-generation geothermal, delivering 24/7 clean power by 2022 and setting the stage for a long term technology partnership. A THREAD: cloud.google.com/blog/produc…
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Big geothermal news. Gov. @jaredpolis of Colorado announces a new Western Governor's Association initiative, "The Heat Beneath Our Feet" a bipartisan, multi-state effort to rapidly scale up geothermal power in the western United States. westgov.org/initiatives/over…
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1/Last year, we announced the world’s first commercially successful next-gen geothermal project, and we told y’all it was just the beginning. Today we are excited to unveil the next phase of our partnership with Google, a massive scaleup to deliver 115 MW.
Google has partnered with a Nevada utility and a geothermal energy startup to run data centers on electricity derived from the earth’s own heat trib.al/egdSRV5
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I’m losing patience with climate doomerism. I understand how overwhelming it all can be sometimes, but this is the most invigorating time to be working in climate. If you aren’t energized by the progress, policy, tech, talent that is building momentum, I’m not sure what to say.
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My news feed this morning is full of “Green” party members cheering the closure of nuclear power in Germany, which prolongs a reliance on coal, and Burning Man cheering their successful blocking of a renewable energy project.
Depressing all around.
apnews.com/article/burning-m…
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Big Oil: “we can’t invest in renewables because of the low returns”
Also Big Oil:
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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1/Alright this is an experiment, probably my most obscure thread to date, but I want to talk about one of the step-change tech breakthroughs being applied to geothermal that is transforming the sector: the polycrystalline diamond cutter (PDC) drill bit. THREAD:
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Some exciting @fervoenergy news.
We’ve raised a new $244m funding round from leading investors to accelerate development of next-generation geothermal. Demand for 24/7 carbon free energy has never been more urgent, and we’re ready to meet the challenge.
fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy…
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What a find. “Take 25% of the profits and invest it in solar first, then geothermal, and yes, maybe then wind.”
The fictional 1980s Ewing Oil has a better transition strategy than most real oil companies today. 😆
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A good answer to one of the more persistent (and annoying) questions I get: “Is geothermal *really* renewable?”
The author estimates we have 17 billion years of potential energy from geothermal, outlasting the sun. If solar is renewable, geo is too. wired.com/story/how-long-wil…
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Burning Man going to extraordinary lengths to try to block an important renewable energy project.
The nonprofit behind the Burning Man -- which builds a temporary city of 80,000 people in the Nevada desert every year -- is suing the federal government over its approval of a geothermal energy project, citing the potential environmental harm: nevadacurrent.com/2023/01/10…
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Enhanced geothermal is a real, functioning, cost-effective technology today, can provide clean firm power, and has practically unlimited upside.
Wild that it doesn’t get more attention. Literally checks all the boxes.
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Wow. 43% of oil and gas workers plan to leave the industry within five years, and 56% want to leave to work on renewables.
If this is you, please come help @fervoenergy revolutionize geothermal. We have open positions now with a lot more to come.
reuters.com/markets/commodit…
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Excited to announce this new 320 MW contract with Southern California Edison. With this new contract, @FervoEnergy Project Cape Phase I and II are now fully contracted, enabling us to continue rapid deployment of our next-generation geothermal technology. latimes.com/environment/news…
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This is a really big deal, perhaps the most ambitious clean energy target by any government to date. And more good news for geothermal—every 2035 scenario in the LA100 study with NREL called for significant increases in geothermal in the grid mix. utilitydive.com/news/la-appr…
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Good overview here of what I think continues to be the most overlooked story in all of energy and climate: Kenya’s rapid ascent as a geothermal powerhouse. reasonstobecheerful.world/ke…
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This is correct and will revolutionize a lot more than O&G. People outside the industry don’t realize how good we’ve gotten at drilling, it’s sci-fi level breakthroughs compared to pre-shale days, and that’s going to revolutionize geothermal, energy storage, CCS, mining and more.
the shale revolution is still the most underrated even of the 21st century, we barely understand the effects it had on the US economy, let alone climate, geopolitics, etc
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Regular reminder that pretty much everything defining the modern energy sector--wind, solar, shale O&G, li-ion batteries, EVs--has its roots in a brief period in the 70s when we actually spent $$$ on R&D. We can and should do it again. Chart from @ITIFdc.
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11/This is mostly because of a self-fulfilling prophecy that enhanced geothermal can’t work. Well, that changes today. @FervoEnergy is pleased to announce the production test results of our commercial pilot. fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy…
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A common response, when I press modelers on why geothermal isn’t in their decarbonization study:
“We tried to include geothermal, but it built a ton and radically changed the results.”
If it has that much impact, we should figure out how to build it, not toss it out.
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I’m exceptionally proud of our team for all the milestones that led to this fundraise, and I’m excited to get to work deploying geothermal power with a set of world-class investors. The geothermal decade continues.
Fervo is thrilled to announce $138 million in new funding, led by @DCVC, to accelerate our next-generation geothermal deployments. There is unprecedented demand for 24/7 carbon-free energy in today’s market and these funds will help us meet that challenge.
businesswire.com/news/home/2…
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One of the under appreciated benefits of geothermal is that, due to the skills overlap with the oil and gas workforce, there is an established deep pool of trained workers to build geothermal projects. Geothermal won’t face the same skills gap slowing down other technologies.
A wakeup call for builders of US gigafactories and critical minerals processing plants: A shortage of skilled workers is forcing TSMC to push back the launch of its Arizona chip plant by a year, till 2025. The battery industry has the same skills gap.
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17/There will be a lot of opportunities to learn more. We are hosting Fervo Tech Day in Houston, TX tomorrow to release more detailed results. For the academics out there, here is a preprint on EarthArXiv. And stay tuned for a @drvolts pod on Friday!
eartharxiv.org/repository/vi…
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12/We’ve successfully completed and tested the world’s first next-gen geothermal system. To do this, there were dozens of technology challenges that we were able to overcome years ahead of schedule by leveraging advanced technology from the oil and gas industry.
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1/Today @fervoenergy hosted our Second Annual Tech Day, where we unveiled several advancements:
-Record breaking flow test at our Project Cape achieving 10MW/production well
-A $100m construction loan from X-RC
-10+ months of stable Production from Project Red
An update THREAD.
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We @fervoenergy are going to be making a big announcement on Wednesday and I’m already so excited about it. It’s going to be gamechanging for geothermal.
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4/With dramatically lower drilling costs, it would now be possible to drill down to depth and then drill horizontally for enhanced geothermal, significantly increasing the productivity of the resource, and enabling development anywhere.
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5/Unfortunately, I found almost no one who agreed. There were, however, a few folks in Stanford’s geothermal program working on that idea. So I headed there for grad school, and co-authored this paper on drilling innovation’s impact on geothermal.
pangea.stanford.edu/ERE/db/I…
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2/The Fervo journey began 10 years ago when I was still working in the oil and gas industry as a drilling engineer. I loved the work, but I was passionate about climate change. I saw all the tech advancement around me and realized that it could be used for geothermal energy.
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That is quite literally an aerial view of one of the lowest per capita environmental impact areas of the country.
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Two facts about geothermal. While Iceland is a major player in geothermal, it is not the world leader like many assume.
As a % of electricity: Kenya with well over 50% of the grid from geothermal
Total capacity: the US, with over 5X the geothermal capacity of Iceland
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This may be one of the important products in decarbonization. The F-150 has been the best selling vehicle in America for 39 years. Electrification here is a big deal.
America’s number one truck has been electrified for the future — and we can’t wait to show it off on May 19. #F150Lightning
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Really BIG news in the world of geothermal. Test results from the world's first commercial horizontal geothermal well have come back and they are fantastic.
Horizontal drilling will be gamechanging. Congrats to @kirstenmarcia and the DEEP team.
linkedin.com/pulse/deep-achi…
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I really don't want to reopen the projections/forecast/scenarios debate, but do want to point out, since so many utilities and stakeholders rely on these numbers, that natural gas is currently more expensive than any point in any EIA scenario for the next 30 years.
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I really don’t understand how copper supply isn’t a more commonly discussed part of the energy transition. Copper is key to so much electrification and the market response to charts like this seems to be to yawn.
"world’s largest copper producers have warned that there is a lack of mines under development to deliver enough to keep pace with the energy transition... warning comes as miners struggle with falling metal prices because of weakness of the global economy and cost inflation, which makes executives, investors and banks cautious over financing new projects" ft.com/content/b3ad2631-f8b9…
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1/The DOE just dropped a fantastic, years in the making, 218-page update on geothermal energy in the US. The GeoVision study outlines a roadmap to generate over 16% of US electricity and heat 45 million homes from geothermal by 2050.
energy.gov/eere/geothermal/g…
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The thing that gives me the most optimism about climate is the caliber of people working on it.
Often recently I’ve heard from university administrators and faculty that it’s what all their brightest students want to work on. That flood of talent is what will solve this.
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This is both a remarkable achievement, and also a clear visualization of the future of decarbonization. Continuing to make progress now relies on making more carbon free power at night, which will take a completely different set of tools going forward.
California, April 30 2022, and a mid-afternoon interval of renewable electricity exceeding electricity demand
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Me when the press release says a company is going “100% renewable energy” but it’s just unbundled RECs.
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1/Nearly everything we take for granted in the modern world is the result of government funded research and public-private partnerships. @apoorv_bh89 recently laid down this challenge. Challenge accepted.
How the McRib came from gov research, a THREAD:
If you do some obscure / weird tweet thread about how McRib is actually the product of decades of @DARPA investment in super pigs or something like that @TimMLatimer , I’m going to get really mad
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8/We’ve been fortunate to get support along the way, from customers to philanthropists to VCs to the DOE, who’ve believed in our vision and worked tirelessly to help us make it a reality with over $200m in investment, most recently from Devon Energy. axios.com/pro/climate-deals/…
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The longer I spend working in hardtech innovation the more I realize this is true:
Scientists and engineers can do literally anything. It’s policy and funding choices that define the art of the possible. Innovation is always downstream of policy choices.
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Gasoline demand peak in the US is behind us, a fascinating trend, which gives me an excuse to highlight a chronically underdiscussed topic: demand for different products within the barrel is going to change dramatically throughout the energy transition.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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3/The US had gotten dramatically better at drilling since the shale revolution began, and I knew that drilling costs were the major barrier to geothermal deployment. Innovations like the PDC drilling bit, like I wrote about here, had changed the game.
1/Alright this is an experiment, probably my most obscure thread to date, but I want to talk about one of the step-change tech breakthroughs being applied to geothermal that is transforming the sector: the polycrystalline diamond cutter (PDC) drill bit. THREAD:
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More big news in the geothermal world today (I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot lately).
GM announces deal to source lithium for their electric vehicle program from Controlled Thermal Resources geothermal project in Salton Sea, CA.
media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/…
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1/I get asked a lot why geothermal seems to suddenly be getting a lot of attention. There’s a market/policy reason and a tech reason. A short THREAD.
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I’m glad the discussion around transmission lines has finally taken center stage.
It took 18 years to permit the TransWest line.
Let me be clear: if we accept that as ok, we have no hope of addressing climate change in a relevant timeline. nytimes.com/2023/05/04/opini…
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The diagonal pattern predated the street grid. That area was Hyde Park, est. 1893 and annexed a decade later and on the outskirts of Houston. But you can see in the 1890 map the landowners already had that pattern before roads in early Houston. Not sure how that started though.
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Texas current electricity issues show a lesson for decarbonization. Texas is hot, and has an abundance of winter peaking wind power, and still is having major issues in the winter.
Meeting cold winter demand with clean energy is a much more difficult problem than summer demand.
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6/This paper is the basis of Fervo’s work: geothermal has long been held back by drilling costs. We just got a lot better at drilling. Let’s make this work together. Dr. @JackNorbeck from Stanford’s Geothermal Program agreed, and we launched Fervo in 2017.
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It’s amazing how much ambient noise in cities is just cars and leaf blowers and I don’t know if people really appreciate yet how much that is going to change with electrification.
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Both Chevron and Oxy have made big geothermal announcements this week. It’s safe to say the industry has captured the attention of oil and gas now. And momentum is picking up fast.
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7/The last six years have been quite a journey. I never expected how much skepticism and pushback we would receive for what we thought was an obvious idea. So we set out to systematically prove this was a truly revolutionary, and viable, way of doing geothermal.
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1/Excited to share some BIG news on a new effort at @fervoenergy to optimize direct air capture (DAC) of carbon by addressing the energy needs of DAC systems, funded by @ChanZuckerberg: hybrid geothermal + DAC facilities. A THREAD.
washingtonpost.com/climate-s…
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We are at a strange point in the technology cycle where it’s become in vogue to claim carbon dioxide removal technologies will never work at exactly the same time that many early solutions are proving to be viable and scalable.
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Collectively, these companies spend about 4X more on R&D than the US spends on climate and clean energy R&D.
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16/We’ve now shown we can develop highly productive enhanced geothermal wells, slash development costs, and deliver incredible performance drilling granite at more than 430F. Hotter, deeper, faster, cheaper. The Geothermal Decade continues. END.
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It's a great time to be a clean energy entrepreneur. 10 years ago, we didn't have:
Cyclotron Road
Greentown Labs
ARPA-E
TomKat
PRIME
BEV
Elemental Excelerator
Congruent
CELI
Powerhouse
EIP
Chain Reaction
Innovation Crossroads
IN2
Generate
Energy Innovation
OGCI
CREO
+many more
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In just one week, the Western Governors Association announced a bipartisan initiative to accelerate geothermal, the IRA could finally provide tax credit certainty, and the DOE launches a new $165m geothermal initiative.
The geothermal decade is finally all coming together y’all.
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1/Alright, now that everyone is paying attention to geothermal, time to discuss one of the more exciting developments that is driving geothermal growth to become a mainstream resource: the emergence of modern, emission free, low temperature binary cycle geothermal plants. THREAD
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Wow. Hydropower down 44% in 2020 in California. A lot of models are very reliant on this hydropower to provide firm power on a future grid…an assumption that needs a lot more scrutiny in a world of rapidly changing climate.
We finally got full-year electricity data for 2020, and.....hydropower was way down in California due to drought, unsurprisingly. Natural gas generation was up, at nearly half of in-state power supply. And CA just barely met its 33% renewables mandate. sandiegouniontribune.com/bus…
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16/We could not be more thrilled to announce these results. We are already at work on our next projects, orders of magnitude larger than our pilot. More to come on that soon. Cost-effective, clean, firm, reliable geothermal is at our fingertips, and we’re ready to rock and roll.
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There was a lot of talk at CERAWeek about the energy transition struggling, with one prominent oil CEO even calling it a fantasy and saying it was failing.
That’s just not what the data shows. This transition is flourishing.
US investment in clean energy
2020: $85 billion
2021: $114 billion
2022: $141 billion
2023: $303 billion
Source: @BloombergNEF
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Here is a great overview of the when and how learning curves apply, based on customization. What's interesting is you can also expand this to think about sub-components of energy tech systems--some are standardized, some can not be. cell.com/joule/fulltext/S254…
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My biggest pet peeve in the climate community: pitting unrelated solutions against each other as a choice when the correct answer is both/and.
Sometimes we have scarce resources to allocate, but more often solutions have completely unrelated costs and can be pursued in parallel.
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Excited to announce @fervoenergy is among the awardees in the Direct Air Capture hubs. This $3.5m project will allow us to accelerate our work on coloration of DAC with geothermal. Powering DAC with carbon free electricity and heat is vital to success. energy.gov/fecm/project-sele…
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1. The world desperately needs an abundant source of 24/7 carbon free energy.
2. Geothermal is emerging as the best candidate to fill that role quickly.
But.
3. Financial support, both government and private, for geothermal is a rounding error compared to other resources.
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This is just the beginning.
As @Google works toward 24/7 carbon-free energy, it partnered with @fervoenergy to bring an advanced geothermal project online in Nevada. @michael_terrell- “We’re really hoping that this could be a springboard to much, much more advanced geothermal power." apnews.com/article/geotherma…
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LCOE has always been a somewhat useful, but deeply flawed, metric. But it gets less useful with each passing year, and there isn’t much recognition of that fact from a lot of market observers.
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1/I'm very excited to share some big Fervo news as we launch our next phase of growth: a new PPA with @PoweredbyEBCE to supply 40 MW of 24/7 carbon-free electricity (24/7 CFE) from one of our next-generation geothermal projects in Nevada.
Fervo Energy is pleased to announce a 40 MW power purchase agreement to provide 24/7 clean geothermal power to @PoweredbyEBCE, one of the nation's top-ranking clean energy providers. prnewswire.com/news-releases…
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Always wild to think that one of the sunniest and windiest places in the world also happens to be right on top of the Permian Basin where currently there is 6 million barrels/day of oil production. Texas is ridiculously blessed energy state.
Half the world’s energy use is for industry.
Let’s put the most energy intensive industries where energy is most abundant - Texas.
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13/@Energy and @SecGranholm recently launched the “Enhanced Geothermal Earthshot” which details steps for a dramatic increase in geothermal deployment in the United States. nrel.gov/news/features/2023/…
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Geothermal has gotten far cheaper, far faster, than any industry or public benchmark has contemplated, and that has important implications for scaling to new geographies. New data from @fervoenergy coming on this soon, as well as publications from @Princeton Zero Lab.
Stay tuned for more from @wilson_ricks and I on this soon. Safe to say: we've been mistaken to think of enhanced geothermal as "a Western resource" only (as I had initially)...
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The other duck curve. This is what CO2 emissions look like in April in California now.
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15/And the world desperately needs it. Study after study show the need for clean firm power. Climate change is rapidly worsening. We need a reliable, affordable, grid. Geothermal is that missing piece of the puzzle.
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China is starting to take such a leadership position in automotive exports that they will define what the future of the global automotive industry looks like. All the recent handwringing over EVs in the US is a sideshow and distraction that risks us falling even further behind.
⚡️🚘BREAKING: For the first time ever, more than half of cars sold in China last month were electric
New-energy vehicles, including EVs and PHEVs, reached a record-high 51.1% of retail sales in July, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association
EVs are already noticably trimming China's oil demand: Just the increase in EVs on the road since last year shaved ~4% off transport fuel demand:
carbonbrief.org/analysis-chi…
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9/But by and large geothermal has been left out of the conversation. It’s often not included in grid modeling forecasts, when it is, it’s viewed as too early stage or too far away, and receives the least government support of any energy resource.
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It may be just an artifact of this platform, but it’s weird that the tweets I send that get the most vitriol are the ones where I profess any sense of optimism about the future. It’s very frustrating. It’s ok to find some things to have hope in y’all.
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So many conversations I’m having with other developers right now are about multi-year (or decade) interconnection and transmission delays. Many are pivoting to behind the meter strategies. That’s not gonna get the job done for grid decarbonization. We have to fix this.
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One of my long term goals is to get a National Lab in Texas. Nearly 1 in 10 Americans live in Texas but we account for 0 of the country’s 17 National Labs.
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1/I recently read American Prometheus, about Robert Oppenheimer, to get some insight into rapid, large scale science innovation. Oppenheimer famously led the Manhattan Project that led to the atomic bomb. A lot of interesting lessons, so, a THREAD.
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Great to see more corporate procurement of geothermal. The world is demanding 24/7 carbon free power, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that geothermal is the best positioned technology to meet that demand. datacenterdynamics.com/en/ne…
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Electricity demand growth is going to outpace expectations so rapidly that it’s going to make all these silly tribal arguments a moot point. We need electricity, and lots of it, and fast, and clean.
Replies when I post positive things about nuclear energy:
"Why do you hate renewables, you nuclear grifter?"
Replies when I post positive things about renewables:
"If you cared about the climate you'd be talking about nuclear energy"
A never-ending loop.
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Advocating for smart energy policy is hard. Pre-crisis, it’s “too expensive” and not a priority. During a crisis, it’s “too slow” and not a priority. We need to learn better from history and not keep repeating the same mistakes, especially now when we have more tools than ever.
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New Lazard LCOE analysis shows the gap on clean firm power continuing to close. Geothermal range now $56-93/MWh while Natural Gas CC is $53-93/MWh with a modest carbon price.
Buyers can go carbon free at virtually no cost and have no fuel price volatility. This is a no brainer.
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This isn’t really an accurate depiction of any of the facts, as @danprimack summarizes well here.
Except that there are tons of U.S. govt investigations.
Some of SBF's investors are the same as the ones who co-invested on Elon's takeover in Twitter.
Another FTX exec gave around $20 million to Republicans.
In short, this is factually wrong and intellectually dishonest.
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