It was nearly a year ago that Google and the Nevada utility NV Energy unveiled the clean transition tariff, a novel rate structure that would allow large customers to pay a premium for power from emerging energy technologies. The third member of the cohort was enhanced geothermal company Fervo Energy, the developer whose project would be the subject of the first-of-a-kind funding model.
The CTT, the three companies explained at the time, would enable Fervo and NV Energy to work directly with Google to provide its data centers with 115 megawatts of geothermal energy. And rather than pass on the costs of commercializing enhanced geothermal to utility ratepayers, the CTT would instead allow for a long-term agreement for Google to fund Fervo’s project, and eventually access credits against the value of the resulting power.
This week, the Nevada Public Utilities Commission approved the CTT. That means not only that the three companies are assured that their plan has legs — but also that the model has a better chance of being replicated in other electricity markets. As Google said in a press release, “we are already seeing conversations emerge in several other states.”
As for Fervo, the work with Google more generally and the company’s Corsac Station project more specifically have prompted outreach from “dozens” of other hyperscalers and artificial intelligence companies interested in clean firm power. And according to Dawn Owens, Fervo’s VP of development and commercial markets, the company is working overtime to meet it.
“We always knew that…this resource that’s already available to be deployed could be scalable to meet sort of a clean, firm demand,” Owens told Latitude Media. “What we didn’t anticipate was how quickly that demand would come.”
Planning for scale
Owens said that the regulatory process to approve the CTT has been key to proving the model to other potential customers. The Nevada PUC consideration, she said, has demonstrated that “deals like this really do allow customers to choose their resource without having an additional rate burden on other customers.”
In the immediate term, there is interest in following in Google’s footsteps and securing power from Corsac, so much so that Fervo is planning to expand the project size. Owens confirmed to Latitude Media that the company is talking about “doubling or tripling” the size of the project, if not much more.
“Every single one of Fervo’s project sites is designed to be a gigawatt-plus resource,” Owens said. “We’re actively working on ‘how do we deploy a gigawatt-plus at this site, and many others across our portfolio?’”
Customers are also reacting to the increase in information about enhanced geothermal as a source of clean firm power, and especially about its cost-effectiveness. Owens pointed to a March study from Rhodium Group, which found that “geothermal could economically meet up to 64% of expected demand growth [from data centers] by the early 2030s.” Especially for hyperscalers looking to build more data centers to power the artificial intelligence boom, the promise of clean and firm power increasingly appeals.
“Their primary objective is speed,” Owens said. “It’s not like the CTT is what’s bringing them there; it’s more like ‘Okay, we need this and we need it as soon as possible, and what is the contracting vehicle?’ It’s almost like the CTT is the how, not the why.”
These interested potential customers include some of the country’s biggest companies; of the dozen major corporations that Fervo is in talks with, “at least five of them are very serious commercial conversations for helping them reach their either internal mandates or their own just cost-effective desire to have 24/7 carbon-free power.”
As interconnection timelines rise, Fervo is also seeing more interest in behind-the-meter geothermal, with an eye toward speed. “The feeling that we have from our customers is that they are ‘all hands on deck, trying to get power to their centers and their sites as quickly as possible,’” Owens said.
And Fervo isn’t only seeing this interest in domestic projects. “We are continually fielding — and almost having to sort of put off — global data center demand as well,” Owens added. So far, the Mountain West states have been at the center of the market’s growing interest in enhanced geothermal, but states like California are also beginning to warm to the resource as well.
Where Fervo goes from here
Alongside the CTT regulatory process, which NV Energy has managed, Fervo has been continuing early development activities in Nevada: things like permitting, early resource characterization, base load scheduling, and stakeholder management.
But from the regulatory to-do list is to submit the energy supply agreement for approval, as well as to finalize the power purchase agreement between Fervo and NV Energy.
“The way it actually works is that we are supplying power to Google, but NV Energy is actually delivering that power, and so they act as the intermediary,” Owens explained. “And because they are a public agency, there needs to be public oversight on that contract.”
On the project front, Fervo is already working on the expansion of Corsac Station’s capacity. The primary bottleneck, though, is interconnection. As the project moves through the process of securing investments and being contracted — which will happen over the next two to five years — interconnection looms increasingly large, Owens said.
“Interconnection is the new PPA,” Owens said, referring to conversations she’s had recently with the project finance community. “It used to be if you had a PPA with a credit-worthy offtaker, then the investment community [of equity and] project finance was very interested and [consider it] a bankable project. Now, it’s interconnection.”
For that reason, Fervo is making sure the interconnection details “are really buttoned up,” so they can move through that queue as quickly as possible.
But the Corsac project is just one piece of the company’s much larger pipeline, of over 16 gigawatts of geothermal leases under Fervo’s direct control, Owens said, which could become active projects once the potential customer interest is converted into true contracts. “We’re very busy,” said Owens. “I’m not sleeping very much.”
Dawn Owens will be speaking at Transition-AI 2025, on June 12 in Boston. She’ll be discussing clean firm technologies for meeting data center demand with RJ Johnson of Form Energy and Mike Kramer of Constellation Energy, as well as Latitude staff reporter Maeve Allsup. Get your tickets today.
