The Interior Department gave the green light to Fervo Energy’s Cape Geothermal Power Project in Beaver County, Utah, the White House confirmed to The Washington Post.
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So they’re trying to put 2GW of dispatchable (can be dialed up and down on demand), carbon-free electricity by 2028. If you include the last year and a half of the exploratory drilling work they’ve done on site, that’s about 5 and a half years.
They’re also saying that each well is about $5 million, have about 30 wells planned for the 400MW project. Not sure how much going up to 2 GW would increase the cost, but that’s $0.33 per watt for the 400 MW plan.
In comparison, Vogtle added 2 nuclear reactors for 2 GW of capacity in Georgia, and it cost $35 billion and took 16 years. That’s $17.50 per watt.
Solar is somewhere between $1 to $1.20 per watt, but isn’t dispatchable.
Ongoing operational costs might be different between all of the different types of generation, but the up front costs are important enough to where they should be a significant part of the discussion.
So if they can pull this off in a few places, this will go a long way towards actually going to zero carbon on the grid.
It’s similar to hydroelectric – if it works and it’s cost effective, people will use it and consider it a privilege… Some green energy works really really well.