Sage Geosystems brings its first next-gen geothermal plant online

A company called Sage Geosystems has started producing power from a new kind of geothermal plant near San Antonio, Texas. It's only the third project of its type to connect to the U.S. power grid. Unlike traditional geothermal, which only works in rare spots where hot water and permeable rock happen to line up naturally, this "enhanced" approach drills into hot rock almost anywhere, fractures it to create underground pockets, then uses pumped water to capture the heat for electricity. The Texas pilot, running since April, produces 3 megawatts and has performed well over more than 120 days connected to the grid.

One notable result: the system lost less than 10 percent of the water it cycled through, a sign the technology can run efficiently at larger scale. The company says this data will guide an upcoming project with geothermal firm Ormat in Nevada, expected to start producing power in 2027 and reach full scale in 2028. That project, in turn, is meant to set up a bigger deal: 150 megawatts of geothermal power for Meta, to be built somewhere east of the Rockies. Sage says it has about a gigawatt of projects in the pipeline overall.

For homeowners, this isn't a technology you'd install at home — it's aimed at supplying power to the electric grid, not individual houses. But it points to more clean, round-the-clock electricity potentially feeding into the grids that power homes, as demand for electricity keeps climbing.