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

Geothermal companies are racing to tap heat beneath Western states to power data centers for Google and Meta, pitching it as steady, round-the-clock clean energy that solar and wind can't match. Google recently agreed to buy 396 megawatts from Fervo's Utah project, enough for roughly 430,000 households.

The catch is water: most next-generation geothermal techniques require injecting water underground to extract heat, and some, like Fervo's enhanced-geothermal method, lose up to 30% of it in the process. Closed-loop systems like XGS Energy's use far less water but produce less power per well, raising doubts about whether they can scale to data-center-sized demand.

In New Mexico, already in a decades-long drought, that leaves developers choosing between water-hungry methods that work at scale and water-light methods that may not, all while tech companies keep signing deals faster than the tradeoffs get resolved.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.