New Analyses Spotlight Massive Potential for Geothermal Powered Data Centers in the US
The Potential for Geothermal Energy to Meet Growing Data Center Electricity Demand
Next-generation geothermal energy has a number of advantages in meeting growing electricity demand from data centers. We estimate how much of this demand could potentially be served by geothermal over the next decade.
According to a new report from the independent research provider Rhodium Group (Ben King, Wilson Ricks, Nathan Pastorek and John Larsen), growing electricity demand from new data centers, particularly driven by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI), has quickly become an important topic in energy and technology circles. Though there is uncertainty as to just how big this boom in demand could be, what’s clear is that electric power utilities and policymakers are taking the possibility of this growth seriously and are contemplating a range of solutions to meet this growing need. Continuing American leadership in AI—a major priority of the federal government across administrations—relies in part on ensuring there is sufficient electricity to meet load growth from new data centers. Major technology companies have ambitious greenhouse gas and clean electricity targets that mean this new load growth should come from clean sources.
Next-generation geothermal has a number of advantages in meeting this new load growth, including high capacity factor output, wide geographic dispersion, and the sheer amount of subsurface energy available to harness. In this note, we estimate how much electric demand at data centers could potentially be served by geothermal over the next decade. There are multiple promising next-generation geothermal technologies; Rhodium Group focused on the use of behind-the-meter enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) because of its broad geographic availability as well as the public availability of modeling data. They found that if the growth patterns of data centers follow historical clustering trends, geothermal could economically meet up to 64% of expected demand growth by the early 2030s under our baseline assumptions. If data centers are located in areas with the best geothermal resource, geothermal has the potential to meet all projected data center demand growth at prices 31-45% lower than in a clustered approach. Policymakers, technology companies, and geothermal developers need to act quickly to achieve the speed and scale required to meet this opportunity, and Rhodium Group outlines policy changes like improvements to permitting processes that would be necessary to do so. Geothermal could be a key solution to meeting the growing electricity needs of data centers.
