- Meta has reached an agreement to power data centres using geothermal energy storage at scale for the first time east of the Rockies by 2027.
- Meta’s partner Sage sees this form of energy storage as a key step toward the next generation of geothermal energy, which relies on oil and gas fracking to harness the earth’s buried heat for industrial or electric power.
OUR TAKE
For tech companies like Meta, which require a large supply of electricity in order to meet their ambitions in training new AI models, the development of cleaner sources of energy is critical to meeting their climate commitments. It’s not just Meta, as the economy and technology levels grow, the US has seen an unprecedented increase in demand for energy, and the development and utilisation of new energy sources will have a direct impact on the environment and long-term trends.
— Iydia Ding, BTW reporter
What happened
Under a power purchase agreement announced Monday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, struck a deal to power data centres using geothermal energy storage on a large scale east of the Rockies for the first time by 2027. Meta’s partner in the deal, Sage Geosystems, a company run by three former Shell executives, is a company that has been in the business for years. Sage sees this form of energy storage as a key step toward the next generation of geothermal energy, which relies on oil and gas fracking to generate heat for industrial or electric power.
In early August, Sage announced a deal with San Miguel Electric Cooperative, a South Texas coal mine and power company. The company agreed to host a 3 megawatts pilot project in exchange for a portion of the royalties, with a view to building its own geothermal power plant in the coming years.However, the deal is much smaller than the one Sage just signed with Meta, which will commit the energy company to eventually deliver 150 megawatts of power over three years, or 50 times the amount it hopes to generate in San Miguel.
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Why it’s important
New geothermal power generation aims to create this geology through drilling and fracking, and the Department of Energy (DOE) believes it could soon begin to serve as a more stable power generation technology than wind and solar. A DOE study in March found that next-generation geothermal energy could power the equivalent of 4 million homes by 2030, largely by adapting existing off-the-shelf technologies. By mid-century, that equates to between 8 and 260 million homes being built. As demand rises to bring more clean energy to the grid, Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk called geothermal methods “a game changer in our efforts to increase the supply of clean power.
For tech companies like Meta, which require large supplies of electricity to meet their ambitions in training new AI models, the development of cleaner sources of energy is crucial to meeting their climate commitments. Not only Meta, as the economy and technology level grows, the demand for energy in the U.S. has seen an unprecedented increase, and the promotion of the use of new energy sources has been a major trend, the development of which will have a direct impact on the environment and long-term development trends.
