The enhanced geothermal company Fervo is raising another $462 million, bringing on new investors in its Series E equity round.
The lead investor is a new one to the company’s books: venture capital firm B Capital, started by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Fervo did not disclose a valuation, but Axios reported in March that it had been discussing an IPO in the next year or two at a $2 billion to $4 billion valuation.
Much of the capital will be devoted to further investments in its Cape Station facility in Utah, which is due to start generating 100 megawatts of grid power by the end of 2026. A smaller project in Nevada came online in 2023.
Fervo’s last equity round was early last year, when it raised $255 million led by oil and gas company Devon. It also raised another $206 million this past summer in debt and equity to finance the Cape Station project, specifically, and reported faster, deeper drilling numbers.
“I think putting pedal to the metal is a good way to put it. We are continuing to make progress at Cape station, which is our flagship project in Southwest Utah, and some of the funding will also be used for early stage development at other projects and locations to expand Fervo’s reach across the Western U.S.,” Sarah Jewett, Fervo’s senior vice president of strategy, told me
“Enhanced geothermal” refers to injecting fluid into hot, underground rocks using techniques borrowed from hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas. Along with the geothermal industry as a whole, Fervo has found itself in the sweet spot of energy politics. It can provide power for technology companies with sustainability mandates and states with decarbonization goals because it produces carbon-free electricity. And it can host Republican politicians at its facilities because the power is 24/7 and employs labor and equipment familiar to the oil and gas industry. While the Trump administration has been on a warpath against solar and (especially) wind, geothermal got a shoutout in the White House’s AI Action Report as an electricity source that should be nurtured.
“Being clean and operating around the clock is just a really strong value proposition to the market,” Jewett said. “Utilizing an oil and gas workforce is obviously a big part of that story; developing in rural America to serve grids across the West; producing clean, emissions-free energy. It's just a really nice, well-rounded value proposition that has managed to maintain really strong support across the aisle in Washington despite the administration shift.”
But bipartisan support on its own can’t lead to gigawatts of new, enhanced geothermal powering the American west. For that Fervo, like any venture-backed or startup energy developer, needs project finance, money raised for an individual energy project (like a solar farm or a power plant) that must be matched by predictable, steady cashflows. “That is, obviously the ultimate goal, is to bring the cost of capital down for these projects to what we call the ‘solar standard,’’’ Jewett said, referring to a minimum return to investors of below 10%, which solar projects can finance themselves at.
While solar power at this point is a mature technology using mass-manufactured, standardized parts having very good foreknowledge of where it will be most effective for generating electricity (it’s where the sun shines), enhanced geothermal is riskier, both in finding places to drill and in terms of drilling costs. Project finance investors tend to like what they can easily predict.
“We are well on our way to do it,” Jewett said of bringing down the perceived risk of enhanced geothermal. “This corporate equity helps us build the track record that we need to attract” project finance investors.
Whether enhanced geothermal is price competitive isn’t quite clear: Its levelized cost of energy is estimated to be around twice utility scale solar's, although that metric doesn’t give it credit for geothermal’s greater reliability and lack of dependence on the weather.
While Cape Station itself is currently covered in snow, Jewett said, construction is heating up. The facility has three power plants installed, a substation and transmission and distribution lines starting to be put up, putting the facility in line to start generating power next year, Jewett said.By the time it starts generating power for customers, Fervo hopes to have reduced costs even more.
“Cost reductions happen through learning by doing — doing it over and over and over again. We have now drilled over 30 wells at the Cape Station field and we’re learning over time what works best,” Jewett said.
