Earlier this week, tech giant Meta the parent company of Facebook and Instagram unveiled plans to buy a lot of electricity from an innovative power plant to be built by geothermal energy start-up Sage Geosystems. The location of the new-fangled facility remains sketchy. Somewhere east of the Rockies was all the companies said.
But there's another, even more important, location worth noting: Sage Geosystems is based in northern Houston, not far from Greenspoint Mall. Hop on Interstate 45 and head about fifteen miles south, to the downtown skyscrapers, and you'll find the headquarters of Fervo Energy, another geothermal start-up, which recently announced an even larger power deal with Southern California's largest utility.
Arguably the two most promising companies in what is arguably the most promising new source of energy are rooted in Houston. That's great news for the future of Texas and it makes all the sense in the world. Today's geothermal is the precocious younger sibling of fracking deploying the same technology that turbocharged aging oil-and-gas fields and turned the United States into a fossil fuel powerhouse. And nowhere in the country sits a greater concentration of the skilled labor and technological tools behind fracking than in Texas.
