A clean energy source is buried under the desert, but it takes water to use it

Geothermal energy is booming across the West, driven largely by tech companies wanting round-the-clock clean power for data centers. Google recently agreed to buy 396 megawatts from Fervo's upcoming Cape Station plant in Utah, enough to power about 430,000 households, and Meta has backed geothermal projects in New Mexico. Geothermal taps heat from underground rock, but most methods need water to work, and these projects sit in some of the driest parts of the country.

Traditional geothermal draws on naturally occurring hot water underground, which limits where it can be built. Newer "enhanced geothermal" methods use oil-and-gas-style fracking to circulate water through hot rock, but this loses water underground in the process. At one Nevada site, 30 percent of injected water was lost. A company called XGS Energy has developed a closed-loop system that recycles the same water repeatedly, using almost none, but experts say this approach may produce less power per well and could struggle to scale up to the size data centers need. Fervo's Utah project uses salty groundwater rather than drinking water, but water scarcity remains a real constraint on how far geothermal can expand.

This story mostly plays out at the scale of power plants and state energy policy, not individual homes. But it matters for anyone in a state pursuing clean-energy goals, since geothermal is increasingly seen as a steady complement to solar and wind on the grid. California, for example, is requiring utilities to secure more "clean firm" power like geothermal as it works toward a fully clean electricity system by 2045.