As electricity demand from data centers soars, Meta and Google are looking at a novel solution: harnessing clean heat far below Earth’s surface.
Big tech companies across the United States are struggling to find enough clean energy to power all the data centers they plan to build.
Now, some firms are betting on a novel solution: harvesting the heat deep beneath the Earth’s surface to create emissions-free electricity, using drilling techniques from the oil and gas fracking boom.
On Monday, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, announced an agreement with a start-up called Sage Geosystems to develop up to 150 megawatts of an advanced type of geothermal energy that would help power the tech giant’s expanding array of data centers. That is roughly enough electricity to power 70,000 homes.
Sage will use fracking techniques similar to those that have helped extract vast amounts of oil and gas from shale rock. But rather than drill for fossil fuels, Sage plans to create fractures thousands of feet beneath the surface and pump water into them. The heat and pressure underground should heat the water to the point where it can be used to generate electricity in a turbine, all without the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming.
“It’s basically the same fracking technology,” said Cindy Taff, an oil industry veteran who worked at Shell for 36 years before becoming Sage’s chief executive. “The difference is that we’re going after clean heat instead of hydrocarbons” such as oil and gas.
Sage has already drilled a test well in South Texas to demonstrate its approach. The startup now aims to build its first large-scale power plant at a yet-to-be-determined location east of the Rocky Mountains, with the first phase coming online by 2027.