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Money is pouring into small modular and microreactor startups. But there can only be so many winners.
Can she appease AI skeptics, economic development advocates, and renewables boosters?
The July 4 heat wave showed just how far the metropolis has to go to reach its decarbonization goals.
A just-released MIT paper argues that the energy transition is still largely following the trajectory laid out in the Inflation Reduction Act.
On Thea Energy’s $100 million Series B, plus more of the week’s big money moves.
The enhanced geothermal darling is spending big on capex, but its shares will be structured more like a software company’s.
Fervo, the enhanced geothermal company that uses hydraulic fracturing techniques to drill thousands of feet into the Earth to find pockets of heat to tap for geothermal power, is going public.
The Houston-based company was founded in 2017 and has been a longtime favorite of investors, government officials, and the media (not to mention Heatmap’s hand-selected group of climate tech insiders) for its promise of producing 24/7 clean power using tools, techniques, and personnel borrowed from the oil and gas industry.
After much speculation as to when it would go public, Fervo filed the registration document for its initial public offering on Friday evening. Here’s what we were able to glean about the company, its business, and the geothermal industry from the filing.
The main theme of the document, known as an S-1, is the immense potential enhanced geothermal — and, thus, Fervo — has.
The company says that its Cape Station site in Utah, where it’s currently developing its flagship power plants, had “4.3 gigawatts of capacity potential” alone. That’s more than the 3.8 gigawatts of conventional geothermal capacity currently on the grid. Enhanced geothermal technology, otherwise known as EGS, “has the potential to make geothermal generation as ubiquitous as solar generation is in the U.S. today,” the company projects. (There’s about 280 gigawatts of installed solar capacity currently in the U.S., according to the Solar Energy Industries Association) “A broader subset of our reviewed leases represents over 40 gigawatts” of capacity, the document goes on.
Like all investor pitches, the S-1 features some eye-popping “total addressable market” figures. Citing analysis by the consulting firm Rystad, the document says that if there’s a sufficient shortfall in capacity due to retiring power plants (98 gigawatts by 2035), the annual market for enhanced geothermal would be approximately $70 billion by 2035, and that this would represent some $2.1 trillion in revenue potential over 30 years.
The company is already producing 3 megawatts at its Nevada Project Red site for the Nevada grid as part of a deal with Google. It also expects to begin generating power from the Cape Station site “by late 2026,” according to the filing, and get up to 100 megawatts “by early 2027.” In total, Fervo has “658 megawatts of binding power purchase agreements,” which it says represents ”approximately $7.2 billion in potential revenue backlog.”
Beyond that, Fervo says it has 2.6 gigawatts “in advanced development,” and “over 38 gigawatts” in “early-stage development,” where it’s still doing feasibility studies to “validate and confirm the path toward commercial development.”
Fervo says that the energy produced from its Cape Station facility will come in at around $7,000 per kilowatt. That’s already cheaper than “traditional and small modular nuclear power,” which the Department of Energy has estimated costs $6,000 to $10,000 per kilowatt, the filing says. Fervo is aiming to get the total project costs down to $3,000 per kilowatt, at which point it says it would outcompete natural gas without any of the price volatility due to fuel costs going up and down.
But Fervo’s upfront spending is still immense. Fervo says that it expects some $1.2 billion in capital expenditure this year, of which only $125 million is going toward the first phase of its Cape Station project, which it has said would deliver 100 megawatts of power. (Meanwhile, the $940 million it expects to spend on the second phase, which is due to be 400 megawatts, is mostly unfunded.) The company says the public offering will fund “project-level capital expenditures,” as well as land holdings and general corporate expenditures.
Google comes up some 36 times in the document, most times in reference to the “Geothermal Framework Agreement” Fervo signed with the hyperscaler this past March. The S-1 describes the deal as a “3-gigawatt framework agreement … to advance and structure potential power offtake opportunities for current and planned data centers in both grid-connected and alternative energy solutions.” This deal, the company says, “establishes a structured process for the development of geothermal projects across specified regions of the United States,” and could involve the offtake by Google of up to 3 gigawatts of Fervo-generated electricity by the end of 2033.
What the framework is not is a power purchase agreement. One of the risk factors Fervo lists in the IPO document says, “The GFA is a non-binding agreement, and does not obligate Google to purchase power from us.” Instead, it is “a binding framework under which we may propose geothermal development projects to Google, but it does not obligate Google to accept any project, execute any power purchase agreement or provide us with any project financing.”
The agreement also places limits on Fervo, including from whom it can accept investment or financing. (The deal outlines a “broad category of entities defined as competitors,” which are all no-nos.) Overall, the company says, the arrangement gives Google “significant priority over our near-term development pipeline and may limit our flexibility to pursue alternative commercial, strategic, or financing arrangements that would otherwise be available to us.”
Upon going public, the company will have two shares of stock: Class A shares available to the public, and Class B shares owned by its founders, chief executive officer Tim Latimer, and chief technology officer Jack Norbeck. These Class B shares will have 40 times the voting rights of the class A shares and will allow Latimer and Norbeck to “collectively continue to control a significant percentage of the combined voting power of our common stock and therefore are able to control all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval.”
These arrangements are familiar with venture-backed, founder-led software companies. Alphabet and Meta are the most prominent examples of large, publicly traded companies that are under the effective control of their founders thanks to dual class share structures. Tesla, rather famously, does not have a dual class share structure, which is why CEO Elon Musk convinced his board to award him more shares so that he would maintain a high degree of influence over the company.
While other technology companies such as Stripe pile up billions in revenue without any near term prospects of going public, Fervo largely has spending to report on its income statement.
In 2025, the company reported just $138,000 in revenues with a $58 million net loss; that’s compared to a $41 million net loss in 2024. The revenues were “ancillary fees associated with rights to geothermal production at Project Red,” the company said. “This type of revenue is not expected to be significant to our long-term revenue generation, as we have not yet commenced large-scale commercial operations.”
And there’s more spending to come.
Fervo expects that the second phase of its Cape Station project will “require approximately $2.2 billion in capital expenditures through 2028,” which it hopes to pay for with project-level financing.
Fervo said it is “continuing to evaluate the effect of the OBBB” — that is, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which slashed or curtailed tax credits for clean energy companies — and that it wasn’t able to “reasonably” estimate the effect on its financial statements by the end of last year. The company does say, however, that it “may benefit from ITCs and PTCs (including the energy community and domestic content bonuses available under the ITC and PTC, in certain circumstances) with respect to qualifying renewable energy projects,” referring to the investment and production tax credits, which acquired a strict set of eligibility rules under OBBBA. It cautioned that the current guidance regarding tax credit eligibility is “subject to a number of uncertainties,” and that “there can be no assurance that the IRS will agree with our approach to determining eligibility for ITCs and PTCs in the event of an audit.”
The company also disclosed that earlier this month, it reached a deal with Liberty Mutual, the insurance company “to sell and transfer tax credits generated at Cape Station Phase I,” taking advantage of a provision of the law that allows credits to be sold to other entities with tax liability, and not just harvested by investors in the project.
How China emerged the victor of the war with Iran.
The Strait of Hormuz appears to maybe be opening up eventually — and the price of oil is collapsing.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday morning that the waterway was “completely open,” shortly before President Trump declared on Truth Social that the strait was “COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS AND FULL PASSAGE,” though the president also clarified that “THE NAVAL BLOCKADE WILL REMAIN IN FULL FORCE AND EFFECT AS IT PERTAINS TO IRAN.”
Eurasia Group analyst Greg Brew cautioned me that, as was the case when Trump announced a ceasefire last week, the actual status of the Strait of Hormuz has remained unchanged. Iran’s position is that traffic from non-hostile countries can go through the strait as long as ships coordinate with its government and follow a route that hugs its coastline; the U.S. has insisted for over a week that the strait is open, and has been blockading traffic from Iran.
That’s not to say today’s announcement was meaningless. “There has been movement from both the U.S. and Iran on the issues that matter — namely, Iran’s nuclear program,” Brew told me. Meanwhile, “there’s a lot of ambiguity, and there’s a lack of clarification on the status of the strait. The upshot of that is shippers don’t feel secure in using the strait.”
As for the mutual statements, Brew said they were a sign that “both sides have acknowledged a mutual interest in having the strait reopen.” The market, meanwhile “is responding to the positive vibes that the president and, to some extent, the Iranians are putting out regarding the status of Hormuz moving forward.” Oil prices fell substantially Friday, with the West Texas Intermediate benchmark price down 10.5% to around $85 per barrel.
While the final disposition of the conflict between the U.S. and Iran — and thus the flow of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — remains unclear, the global energy system may be at the beginning of the end of the crisis that started at the end of February.
This doesn’t mean an immediate return to the status quo from the beginning of the year, however, which saw a glut of fossil fuels depressing global prices. Several hundred million barrels of oil that would otherwise have been pumped in the Persian Gulf remain in the ground after producers shut in production, temporarily suspending operations to protect their infrastructure and minimize their exposure to the conflict. This has created what Morgan Stanley oil analyst Martijn Rats called an “air pocket” in the market — and anyone who’s watched a hospital drama knows how dangerous an air pocket can be.
As happened with Russia’s war against Ukraine, the consequences of the Hormuz closure cannot simply be undone. That leaves countries — especially poorer countries dependent on fossil fuel imports — with a stark choice about how to fuel their future economic growth. The crisis may have tipped the balance towards renewable and storage technology from China over oil and natural gas from the Persian Gulf, Russia, or the United States.
“There is a huge shift in total supply available in the fossil system,” Jeremy Wallace, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “I think the fossil system has been demonstrated to be vastly less reliable, riskier than it was seen to be in February.”
For gas specifically, recovering from Iranian attacks on Qatar could take years, not just the weeks and months necessary to clear the backlog in the Persian Gulf.
That will serve to reinforce China’s dominant position as a producer and exporter of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. “It’s hard for me to not see this as a huge win for Chinese firms that produce these products, upstream and downstream in those supply chains — as well, arguably, for the Chinese government itself,” Wallace said.
There’s already been some institutional movement away from fossil fuel investments and towards clean energy as well. A Vietnamese conglomerate, for instance, has proposed scrapping a planned liquified natural gas terminal for a solar and renewables project, while the county has also signed a deal with Russia to build the region’s first operational nuclear plant. And even as electric vehicle sales in China have slowed down, the share price of the battery giant CATL has surged since the war began despite rising costs of metals due to disruptions of chemicals necessary for refining from the closure of the strait.
Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Chinese technology and economic policy, summed up the situation by calling the energy shock of the war “the best marketing program you could possibly imagine for China’s clean tech sector.”
It’s not just China’s technology that is likely to be more attractive in light of this latest energy crisis, but also its energy model, which fuses energy security and decreasing dependence on imported fossil fuel (thanks, in part, to domestic coal supplies and hydropower) with a vast buildout of renewables and nuclear energy.
“The way that China has weathered the Iran war energy shock so far has really validated its strategy of investing heavily in alternative energy,” Chan said.
Going forward, Asian countries will have to decide on future investments in energy infrastructure, especially the extent they want to build out infrastructure for importing and processing oil and especially liquefied natural gas.
While the United States, especially under Trump, is more than happy to sell LNG to any taker, the fact that oil and LNG are global markets could make countries leery of depending on it at all if it’s risky to supply and price shocks, even if U.S. exports are dramatically less likely to get bottled up in the Gulf of Mexico.
“It seems like once in 100-year storms happen every year. Now it feels like that in the fossil energy system,” Wallace told me. “We’ve been talking about the crises of the 1970s for 50 years afterwards. We don’t need to be talking about those now.”
The 1970s saw major investments in non-oil energy generation, especially nuclear power, in Japan and France and large scale investments in energy efficiency. Today, Wallace said, “the alternatives are much more attractive.”
“In the months to come, I think we will see a lot of bottom up industrialists and probably wealthy consumers in Southeast Asia and South Asia who are going to vote for energy security of their own as best they can,” he told me, pointing to the mass adoption of solar in Pakistan since 2022.
But Asian countries embracing renewables and storage will not have entirely freed themselves from geopolitics. While batteries, solar panels, and electric vehicles do not require a flow of fuel from abroad the same way oil and gas infrastructure does, China has shown itself to be perfectly willing to use economic leverage to achieve political ends.
Relations between China and Japan, the second largest Asian economy and a close American ally, quickly devolved into crisis following the ascent of Sanae Takaichi to Prime Minister of Japan in October, after the new leader suggested that if China were to blockade Taiwan, it would constitute “an existential threat.” China responded with an array of economic punishments, including discouraging Chinese tourism in Japan and restricting shipments of rare earths elements and magnets.
China’s economic coercion, Chan told me, “reminds everyone that while you can buy all this really affordable, highly scaled-up clean energy equipment, China has been able to and has been willing to leverage that supply chain dominance in certain ways. There’s a degree of trust that you can’t really make up for.”
Countries embracing Chinese energy technology will “always have to have a Chinese-hedging discount in the back of their minds,” he said.
