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A conversation with Manjula Martin about her new book The Last Fire Season.
When Manjula Martin was growing up in Northern California in the 1980s, wildfires weren’t something she thought about much. She knew about disaster — the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, which killed 63 people and injured thousands, hit when she was a teenager — but fire, she thought, was just something that happened up in the mountains in the summer.
Things are different now. In 2017, Martin left the high prices of San Francisco for the redwoods of Sonoma County. The night of their housewarming party, a firestorm swept through Santa Rosa and Sonoma and Napa counties. The next year — 5 years ago this week — the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive fire in the state’s history, destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.
In her new book, The Last Fire Season (out on January 16 next year), Martin writes about the fires that swept through California in 2020, weaving her personal story with that of fire in California writ large. It’s a beautiful book, and I called her up to talk about her relationship with fire and how we can learn to live with the changing world. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The book opens in 2020, which was a year of multiple fire complexes. Was that the first time fire made itself known in the immediate vicinity of your home?
No, it wasn’t. But it was the first time that I realized that it wasn’t an anomaly.
We had horrible fires near my area in 2017. In 2018, the Camp Fire happened in Northern California, which was like a four-hour drive away, but the smoke from that fire lingered in the Bay Area for weeks. And then in 2019, the Kincade fire was a huge fire up here in Sonoma, and the entire west of the county was evacuated in basically the course of a night, including ourselves.
Then in 2020, the Lightning Complex fires happened in late August, which is what the book starts with. And that was the moment where I personally was like, “oh, this is going to keep happening.”
Before that a natural disaster to me felt like a thing that happened once and then that’s it, right? It wasn’t connected to larger things for me. But the fact is that the new wildfires that we’re having are bigger and hotter and far more destructive than the previous wildfires we’ve had, and 2020, which is probably far too late, was the year that I personally put that all together under the name of climate change. It wasn’t the first year I knew about fire, but it was the moment I realized that I was going to be living with fire for the rest of my life.
I was struck by your description of the 2020 fires and the ways that COVID complicated your experience of them. It reminded me of the concept of cascading events; it was striking to read about how your go bag was filled with these N95 masks that were there for the sake of the fires, but also, of course, turned out to have utility for this other thing that you’re dealing with at the same time.
That was one of the reasons why I chose to center the book around 2020. I think that was a moment where it became clear for a lot of people that disasters don’t take their turn. When it was happening, I felt it was a historic moment.
You named your book The Last Fire Season. But, of course, it wasn’t the last.
Unfortunately not. The book began as an essay, and since I was writing it in 2021 I thought I was writing about the last fire season I had experienced. But then I realized that it was actually a really great title for a book. It’s pretty commonly acknowledged now that in the North American West, fire season isn’t really a thing anymore. Now fire authorities talk about having a fire year.
That is directly linked to the changing of the weather and the climate. But for me, the deeper meaning of it is this idea that fire being seasonal also sort of implies that it’s temporary, and that it’s going to go away. But really it’s not seasonal, it’s part of this land. And we’re going to be living with it forever.
There’s a point in your book where you write that the California ecosystem was fire-adapted, but also that fire is changing. What do you mean by that?
Since time immemorial, California’s ecosystems — from oak woodlands to redwood forests to grasslands and chaparral — evolved with fire as part of their natural cycle. Fire is actually something that helps the cycle of the landscape reset and continue.
And this was something that Indigenous people knew and really sort of harnessed and used in the way that they tended the lands. But the genocide of Indigenous people in California really sort of stopped that cycle, as is the case with colonialism in most places.
Right, you have a chapter about the Indigenous history of fire in California and the suppression of fire both through violence against Indigenous communities and also a long history of policies against fire.
Yeah, the colonial policies of managing the land in California had been what they call ”total fire exclusion,” which is basically the idea that all fire is bad and we need to extinguish fires right away. There was a policy in place called the 10 AM policy that actually said every new forest fire needs to be extinguished by 10 AM the next morning. And, you know, there are a lot of reasons why that happened, including profits and fear and prioritizing human habitat and recreation over the landscape. But the result is that the landscapes here are actually neglected at this point, 150 years after colonization.
You wrote at one point about going to prescribed burns and there was a section that really stood out to me:
Fire is exuberant. It’s joyous. It dances. I can see why people joke that all firefighters are secret pyros. It’s so much fun.
I fully relate to this feeling. Has going to prescribed burns changed your own relationship with fire?
Good fire and cultural fire, which is generally the term we use when we’re talking about Indigenous use of fire, have radically changed my feelings about fire. Humans have evolved with fire, and the more I engage with fire, the more I learn about it, the more I understand its role in both the land and the history of this place, the less afraid I feel.
You write about your own experience with getting a hysterectomy and how that affected your life afterwards, and I thought that was an interesting choice. You could have written a book that was just about fire, and we could have never learned about your hysterectomy. But you chose to include it. Can you tell me a little bit about how that came to happen?
I could have written a straight journalistic look at wildfire right now or at the 2020 fire season specifically. And that was something I toyed with. But I ultimately realized, in thinking about this idea of cascading disasters, that they’re all happening while people are living their lives. Climate change, wars, economic ruin are all happening on top of whatever else is going on in your life. So I thought this part of my life was worth including.
The hysterectomy, and many associated health crises, led me to having chronic pain. And one of the only things that helped me with that was gardening. For me, the physical act of literally touching the land, being in this dialogue with the environment and the ecosystem around me, was the thing that helped me recover from this health crisis. I wasn’t quite well. And more importantly, nature wasn’t quite well. And gardening in this environment is what really made it click for me that this environment is going through a crisis as well.
That garden was partly how you knew about the oncoming fires in 2020, right?
Yeah, when the Lightning Complex fires started, I was out in my garden watering the roses. I saw this little black object on the ground, and when I leaned down and picked it up I saw it was a leaf of a California bay laurel tree. And it was burned black, but it was still whole. It had been blown on the wind and landed in my garden. It was sort of like a messenger, telling me that a few miles away these trees were burning.
Bay trees are a natural part of the forest understory here, but they are highly flammable. They’re basically made of oil, and they serve as what’s called a ladder fuel; if fire gets in that tree, it will shoot up it and then can get into the crowns of taller trees like redwoods or oaks that would normally be more fire resistant. It’s literally a fire spreader. Anyone who lives in the area will tell you that when there’s a fire nearby it rains burnt leaves.
Parts of the book are unexpectedly written in the past tense. You write, for example, that “Northern California was a very large place,” but the depictions of events in the past or future are written in the present tense. Was that intentional? Did you mean to contract the idea of Northern California?
I absolutely did. The convention in nonfiction is to write events in the past tense, but to phrase facts, or things that are still true, in the present tense. I felt like it was important to acknowledge that the things we take as granted, these truths about the way the environment works, might not always remain that way. It was also partly a pragmatic decision, because I didn’t know what would happen before the book came out. What if my house burned down before that, or if I have to move? Things are just so chaotic right now.
The other time I break with convention is when I write about Indigenous nations and Indigenous management practices. I intentionally used the present tense there as a way to push back against the trope of a lot of non-Indigenous writers portraying Indigenous people and worldviews as extinct when in fact they’re very, very alive.
Throughout the book you’re constantly talking to your partner about whether to stay in your home or move away to a “safer” area. I think it can be really hard for people who don’t live in areas under threat to grasp just how hard the concept of migrating really is.
Right, that’s such a common binary: to stay or go. And the reality is actually a lot messier. I’m fortunate to even have the choice of whether to stay or go; I am a person who has a lot of different privileges. I have resources, I have friends, I’m educated, I’m white.
Most people don’t willingly leave their homes unless things are really bad. But it’s never really all bad: Sometimes there’s extreme weather and disasters, and then there isn’t. It’s up and down. There’s a lot of talk around what the perfect solution is, where the safe places are. And the truth is that nowhere is safe because of climate change.
For me, the point of living at this moment on this planet is that it’s messy. It’s full of grief, it’s full of joy and beauty, and it’s also dangerous. There may be a time when I leave this place, for a variety of reasons. But I think the idea that you can run away from climate change is false.
Something I’ve learned a lot from talking with people who are deeply connected to the land here and who work with fire is that you have a responsibility to the place where you live. If I love this place so much, what do I owe it? The idea of tending a place for its overall health, not just for my personal survival, is very powerful.
Right, at one point you write about you and your partner thinking about doing prescribed burns in the woods near you to help reduce the risk of more fires.
We have thought a lot about the idea of reintroducing good fire where we live. Our neighborhood has been getting together and doing work days where we clear fuels from the forest floor together. And it’s really proof of how much work is needed, because you can clear brush and cut dead limbs off trees for a day with a group of 15 people, and then you look at this tiny quarter acre that you’ve worked on, and it still needs so much more work.
Stewardship is a constant act.
Absolutely. And it might not be perfect, and honestly it might not make a difference. These woods might still burn. But if and when they do burn, they are going to be healthier afterwards because the fire is going to be healthier.
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On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant
Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and the rest only have so much political capital to spend.
When Donald Trump first became a serious Presidential candidate in 2015, many big tech leaders sounded the alarm. When the U.S. threatened to exit the Paris Agreement for the first time, companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook (now Meta) took out full page ads in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal urging Trump to stay in. He didn’t — and Elon Musk, in particular, was incensed.
But by the time specific climate legislation — namely the Inflation Reduction Act — was up for debate in 2022, these companies had largely clammed up. When Trump exited Paris once more, the response was markedly muted.
Now that the IRA’s tax credits face clear and present threats, this same story is playing out again. As the Senate makes its changes to the House’s proposed budget bill, tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are keeping quiet, at least publicly, about their lobbying efforts. Most did not respond to my request for an interview or a statement clarifying their position, except to say they had “nothing to share on this topic,” as Microsoft did.
That’s not to say they have no opinion about the fate of clean energy tax credits. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon have all voluntarily set ambitious net-zero emissions targets that they’re struggling to meet, largely due to booming data center electricity demand. They’re some of the biggest buyers of solar and wind energy, and are investing heavily in nuclear and geothermal. (On Wednesday morning, Pennsylvania’s Talen Energy announced an expanded power purchase agreement with Amazon, for nearly 2 gigawatts of power through 2042.) All of these energy sources are a whole lot more accessible with tax credits than without.
There’s little doubt the tech companies would prefer an abundant supply of cheap, clean energy. Exactly how much they’re willing to fight for it is the real question.
The answer may come down to priorities. “It’s hard to overstate how much this race for AI has just completely changed the business models and the way that these big tech companies are thinking about investment,” Jeff Navin, co-founder of the climate-focused government affairs firm Boundary Stone Partners, told me. “While they’re obviously going to be impacted by the price of energy, I think they’re even more interested and concerned about how quickly they can get energy built so that they can build these data centers.”
The tech industry has shown much more reluctance to stand up to Trump, period, this time around. As the president has moved from a political outsider to the central figure in the Republican party, hyperscalers have increasingly curried his favor as they advocate against actions that could pose an existential risk to their business — think tighter regulations on the tech sector or AI, or tariffs on key supplies made in Asia.
As Navin put it to me, “When you have a president who has very strong opinions on wind turbines and randomly throws companies’ names in tweets in the middle of the night, do you really want to stick your neck out and take on something that the president views as unpopular if you’ve got other business in front of him that could be more impactful for your bottom line?”
It is undeniably true that the AI-driven data center boom is pushing these companies to look for new sources of clean power. Last week Meta signed a major nuclear deal with Constellation Energy. Microsoft is also partnering with Constellation to reopen Three Mile Island, while Google and Amazon have both announced investments in companies developing small modular reactors. Meta, Google, and Microsoft are also investing in next-generation geothermal energy startups.
But while the companies are eager to tout these partnerships, Navin suspects most of their energy lobbying is now being directed towards efforts such as permitting reform and building out transmission infrastructure. Publicly available lobbying records confirm that these are indeed focus areas, as they’re critical to bringing data centers online quickly, regardless of how they’re powered and whether that power is subsidized. “They’re not going to stop construction on an energy project that has access to electricity just because that electricity is marginally more expensive,” Navin told me. “There’s just too much at stake.”
Tech companies have lobbied on numerous budget, tax, sustainability, and clean energy issues thus far this year. Amazon’s lobbying report is the only one to specifically call out efforts on “renewable energy tax credits,” while Meta cites “renewable energy policy” and Microsoft name-drops the IRA. But there’s no hard and fast standard for how companies describe the issues they’re lobbying on or what they’re looking to achieve. And perhaps most importantly, the reports don’t disclose how much money they allot to each issue, which would illuminate their priorities.
Lobbying can also happen indirectly, via industry groups such as the Clean Energy Buyers Association and the Data Center Coalition. Both have been vocal advocates for preserving the tax credits. The Wall Street Journal recently detailed a lobbying push by the latter — which counts Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google among its most prominent members — that involved meetings with about 30 Republican senators and a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
DCC didn’t respond to my request for an interview. But CEBA CEO Rich Powell told me, “If we take away these incentives right now, just as we’re getting the rust off the gears and getting back into growth mode for the electricity economy, we’re really concerned about price spikes.”
The leader of another industry group, Advanced Energy United, shared Powell’s concern that passing the bill would mean higher electricity prices. Taking away clean energy incentives would ”fundamentally undercut the financing structure for — let’s be frank — the vast majority of projects in the interconnection queue today,” Harry Godfrey, the managing director of AEU, told me.
Being part of an industry association is by no means a guarantee of political alignment on every issue. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are also members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — by far the largest lobbying group in the U.S. — which has a long history of opposing climate action and the IRA itself. Apple even left the Chamber in 2009 due to its climate policy stances.
But Powell and Godfrey implied that the tech giants' views are — or at least ought to be — in alignment with theirs. “Many of our members are lobbying independently. Many of them are lobbying alongside us. And then many of them are supporting CEBA to go and lobby on this,” Powell told me, though he wouldn’t reveal what actions any specific hyperscalers were taking.
Godfrey said that AEU’s positions are “certainly reflective of what large energy consumers, notably tech companies, have been working to pursue across a variety of technologies and with applicability to a couple of different types of credits.”
And yet hyperscalers may have already spent a good deal of their political capital fighting for a niche provision in the House’s version of the budget bill, which bans state-level AI regulation for a decade. That would make the AI boom infinitely easier for tech companies, who don’t want to deal with a patchwork of varying regulations, or really most regulations at all.
On top of everything else, big tech in particular is dealing with government-led anti-trust lawsuits, both at home and abroad. Google recently lost two major cases to the Department of Justice, related to its search and advertising business. A final decision is pending regarding the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta, regarding the company’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. Not to be outdone, Amazon will also be fighting an antitrust case brought by the FTC next year.
As these companies work to convince the public, politicians, and the courts that they’re not monopolistic rule-breakers, and that AI is a benevolent technology that the U.S. must develop before China, they certainly seem to be relinquishing the clean energy mantle they once sought to carry, at least rhetorically. We’ll know more once all these data centers come online. But if the present is any indication, speed, not green electrons, is the North Star.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect Amazon’s power purchase agreement with Talen Energy.
The new funding comes as tax credits for geothermal hang in the balance.
The good news is pouring in for the next-generation geothermal developer Fervo Energy. On Tuesday the company reported that it was able to drill its deepest and hottest geothermal well to date in a mere 16 days. Now on Wednesday, the company is announcing an additional $206 million in financing for its Cape Station project in Utah.
With this latest tranche of funding, the firm’s 500-megawatt development in rural Beaver County is on track to deliver 24/7 clean power to the grid beginning in 2026, reaching full operation in 2028. The development is shaping up to be an all-too-rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.
The bulk of this latest financing comes from the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program, which provided $100 million in project-level equity funding. The energy and commodity trading company Mercuria provided $60 million in corporate loans, increasing its existing fixed-term loan from $40 million to $100 million. An additional $45.6 million in short-term debt financing came from XRL-ALC, an affiliate of X-Caliber Rural Capital, which provides loans to infrastructure projects in rural areas. That comes on top of a previous $100 million loan from the firm.
The plan is for Cape Station to deliver 100 megawatts of grid power in 2026, with the additional 400 megawatts by 2028. The facility has the necessary permitting to expand production to two gigawatts — twice the size of a standard nuclear reactor. And on Monday, the company announced that an independent report from the consulting firm DeGolyer & MacNaughton confirms that the project could expand further still — eventually supporting over 5 gigawatts of clean power at depths of up to 13,000 feet. The company’s latest drilling results, which reached 15,765 feet at 520 degrees Fahrenheit, could push the project’s potential power output even higher.
Traditional geothermal wells normally max out at around 10,000 feet, and must be built in locations where a lucky confluence of geological features come together: high temperatures, porous rock, and naturally occurring water or steam. But because Fervo can drill thousands of feet deeper, it’s able to access hot rocks in locations that weren’t previously suitable for geothermal development, pumping high-pressure water down into the wells to fracture rocks and thus create its own geothermal reservoirs.
The primary customer for Fervo’s Cape Station project is Southern California Edison, which signed a 320-megawatt power purchase agreement with the company last year, advertised as the largest geothermal PPA ever. Shell was also announced as a customer this year. Fervo is already providing 3.5 megawatts of power to Google via a pilot project in Nevada, which it’s seeking to expand, entering into a 115 megawatt PPA with NV Energy and the tech giant to further build out production at this location.
Fervo’s latest funding comes on top of last February’s $244 million Series D round led by Devon Energy, as well as an additional $255 million in corporate equity and debt financing that it announced last December. On top of investments from well known climate tech venture firms such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Galvanize Climate Solutions, the company has secured institutional investment from Liberty Mutual as well as public pension funds such as the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Fervo, like all clean energy startups, also stands to benefit greatly from the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, which are now in jeopardy as President Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill works its way through the Senate. While Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has traditionally been a booster of geothermal energy and is advocating to keep tax incentives for the technology in place through 2031, the bill as it stands would essentially erase incentives for all geothermal projects that start construction more than 60 days after the bill’s passage.
Fervo broke ground on Cape Station in 2023, so that project will make the cut. For future Fervo developments, it’s much less clear. But for now, the company seems to be flush with cash and potential in a climate tech world awash in ill omens.