Is Geothermal The Next Evolution In Energy Storage? - Sage Geosystems

If you dig deep enough anywhere on Earth, it gets hot.

Not volcanic hot, just steadily, reliably hot.

For decades, geothermal power has relied on finding rare places where the heat rises close to the surface, like Iceland or parts of California. If you didn't have the perfect geology, you didn't have geothermal. My guest is Cindy Taff, CEO of Sage Geosystems. She spent thirty five years at Shell, building and drilling thousands of oil and gas wells.

Her last job was driving down costs at scale, and now she's applying those same skills to geothermal. Instead of searching for water and natural flow paths, Sage drills for heat and then engineers the reservoir itself.

And then there is the twist. Along the way, Sage realized the same underground systems could act like a battery, storing energy under pressure and then releasing it on demand. A bit like pumped hydro, but underground. No mountains required.

Where they can scale is still up for debate. But this conversation is all about taking a century of subsurface expertise and repurposing it for an energy system that needs reliable carbon free power around the clock. But before we start, I have something to ask you. We want to give transmission a bit of a glow up, and we want you to tell us what's working and what isn't.

So we will put the link to our survey in the show notes.

If you could take three minutes to fill it out, we would be very thankful. Thank you. I'm Alejandro Adiego, and welcome back to transmission.

Hello, Cindy. Thank you very much for joining us today. It's great to have you here. Could we start by hearing from you about yourself, what your role in the energy industry is, and what Sage Geosystems is?

Yeah. Alex, thank you for having me. I always appreciate, being able to talk about what we're doing at Sage. So, yeah, a little bit of background on me.

I spent thirty five years in the oil and gas industry at at Shell. My last role at Shell was VP over their unconventional wells operations, meaning that we did all of the well construction for onshore unconventional, wells. So my career really focused on large scale well construction, deployment of new technologies, and really driving down cost at scale. So then a few years ago, four and a half years ago, almost exactly, my cofounders reached out.

My cofounders being Lovevery and Lance Cook.

And they said, should join us in geothermal because what we're trying to do is really leverage the experience that we have from the oil and gas industry to get into the energy expansion. So if you think about where those skills will apply, not so much to wind and solar, but to geothermal definitely.

And so geothermal really builds on not only the technical skills in the oil and gas industry, but also the project management skills or leadership skills that the oil and gas industry has really shown over the last hundred years in innovation and driving cost down. So my background was, again, building wells, constructing wells, driving cost down at scale. And then my partner's background was actually a lot different.

They spent their careers basically taking technology, very complex technology, from idea to commercialization. So between their innovation and being the scientist and then my background in in in building and driving down cost scale. And then all of us really know the subsurface. We wanted to get into geothermal to, basically make that impact on the energy expansion.

Yes. To clarify, within Shell, did you work also on geothermal projects?

We never did, drill any geothermal wells. It was my team, however, that would provide cost estimates for different geothermal projects. They were coated projects, meaning that they were projects that we were looking at potentially to drill and to to build. But what what I noticed that Shell never really pulled the trigger on drilling those projects, but it was my team that was looking at how, you know, how to drill the wells, what the cost of those wells would be. But we never did drill any next generation geothermal wells while it was at Shell.

Great. Thank you. So if I understood correctly, you saw an opportunity with your other two cofounders, and then you got together to get into the geothermal industry.

What big problem did you see in the energy industry that geothermal would solve?

I I guess let me talk about what excites me about next generation geothermal. It it, you know, it's really kind of where wind and solar were fifteen years ago. So, currently, all of the production around the world is from conventional geothermal. So when you think about conventional geothermal, you think about Iceland or the geysers in California.

And what you're drilling for is a very unicorn or unique geology. You're looking for water. You're looking for heat, of course, and then you're looking for flow paths or permeability for that water to flow.

But because it's so unique, it only represents about two percent of the geothermal potential around the world.

And so next generation geothermal, which is really looking for mainly heat and not water and permeability, opens up that geothermal potential to, you know, probably fifty to sixty percent of the geothermal potential around the world.

And and so when I think about back to your question, the oil and gas industry drills just in the US, twenty five to thirty thousand wells per year, while the conventional geothermal industry may drill I mean, usually less than a hundred years. And it's interesting because those industries never crossed paths before. Whereas now with next generation geothermal, you're seeing a lot of that influence from the oil and gas industry coming into this hot dry rock or, next generation geothermal resource for for, for for geothermal. And and so going back to, you know, why did I go into geothermal?

The the skills, the equipment, the know how, all of that is a really almost an exact overlay from oil and gas in into geothermal. And the other exciting thing is because the oil and gas industry is is, you know, still operating, you know, it's really poised to help us scale next generation geothermal right now. You don't have to build a skill set. You don't have to wait on all that because it's ready to go right now.

Okay. I see. There's a lot of interesting questions that just popped. First one being, if you would look at the total electricity generation in the US right now, how much would, right now, come from conventional geothermal?

It's less than one percent, definitely. It's it's, I think it's seventeen gigawatts around the world right now. And and to your point, all of the power generation is from conventional geothermal.

Okay. Why is the percentage so low so far?

It I think it goes back again to, over the last hundred years, what has been developed is this conventional geothermal.

And you're looking for that very unicorn geology, which can only be found near volcanoes or the ring of fire. So there's been there's companies out there that are doing a great job of tapping into that resource, but it's just very limited. So it represents, again, less than two percent of the geothermal resources around the world. So then that's why a lot of companies are in the market today, including Sage, tapping into that hot dry rock geothermal because it's a lower exploration risk. You're looking for heat. You don't need that large body of water, and you don't need the permeability, that you find near these volcanoes. So it just opens up that resource to a lot more areas.

Okay. And if we take one step back so that we everyone in the audience follows us, how does exactly geothermal work in the most basic form?

Yeah. No. Great question. So the the Earth's core is is is unbelievably high temperature, and that that heat radiates out toward the, you know, basically, the exterior of the of the Earth.

And what we're tapping into for geothermal is that heat. So you're drilling a well just like you do in oil and gas. But for oil and gas, of course, you're looking for a specific layer of rock that contains either, you know, the oil or the gas. What we're doing is drilling deep into the earth, getting closer to that core where that heat is. And so as we go deeper, of course, it gets it's gets hotter.

And and what you're doing with next generation geothermal or this hot dry rock geothermal is you're drilling into the earth toward that heat, and then you're also creating a or engineering a reservoir, an artificial reservoir to simulate what mother nature is doing in conventional geothermal. So, again, Iceland and geysers at California, that's mother nature's geothermal. We're engineering that geothermal by creating this artificial reservoir. We do it through fractures. We create a a fracture in the earth, and that gives you surface area to basically harvest the heat. And then what you're doing is pumping water from the surface, harvesting that heat, and then using that water to carry the heat to the surface to generate electricity, or you could use that heat for direct heating as well. And so in the simplest forms, geothermal is using the earth's heat as an energy source, and it's a huge resource, by the way.

And the power of geothermal in today's power grids is that it complements very well solar and wind generation. Is that correct? What is the piece that it provides to the power grid?

Yeah. No. That's a great question. So, yeah, solar and wind have done a great job greening the grid, but they're intermittent. They're they don't they they you know, wind produces power when the wind's blowing, solar produces power when the sun is shining.

And so what geothermal gives you is a reliable dispatchable power twenty four seven, and it's carbon free. I I you know, I can I'll mention it's carbon free, but it's what what's exciting is just a huge untapped energy source. So it's deployable in a lot of locations around the world. You just have to look at the heat maps to see where you can drill to the heat. So if if I think about today's utility grid, you know, the system, it really relies on fossil fuels for reliability. So what we wanna do is use geothermal for that reliability.

I see. You just mentioned that there are some parts let's focus just on the US as an example, where heat concentrates in the outer layers of the earth. What would be those regions here in the US?

Yeah. I would love to show you a map, but I know this is a podcast. So I'll explain it, you know, kind of paint a picture for the for the listener. So what we're looking for, Alex, is being able to drill to a heat, certain heat source.

We're targeting two hundred degrees Celsius, and we're wanting to drill to that heat source at a depth of twenty thousand feet or shallower. And the reason why is because that is a common depth that the oil and gas equipment can drill to, and you don't you don't need a specialized rig. So it's very off the shelf drilling. And so if if I then start thinking about what that map looks like in the US, there's a lot of heat in the western US, so west of the Rockies.

If you start coming east of the Rockies, then you'll see that heat in Colorado. You'll see it in New Mexico. You'll see it in Texas, Louisiana.

And so and and Texas, it's it's the and Louisiana is definitely along the Gulf Coast. In the in the eastern US, eastern US is a older rock, and so the heat is there. But, unfortunately, it's at much deeper depth. So, like, thirty thousand feet, twenty eight thousand feet. And so it's not that the heat's not there, but to drill to those depths, you would need specialized rigs, and it would just mean that it wouldn't be economic.

Because right now, with the techno we have gone through the technological obstacles. Apparently, they are already solved, as you just mentioned. On the commercial side, for those sources of heat, the regions that offer good heat sources, Is are these products already economical, and can they compete with other technologies?

I I I would say that, that is what the industry and I'll I'll go back to, again, the next generation geothermal industry is is striving for right now. There are several companies, including ours, in the field. We're, you know, drilling wells, building power plants. And I would say in the next two to three years, you're gonna start seeing electricity production from those power plants. But to your point, you know, when we start I'll I'll I'll talk about Sage. When we look at, our models as in what can these resources produce as far as electricity and what are the cost, I would say that, prescale, so under, say, a hundred and fifty megawatts, you're looking at a cost of ten to twelve cents a kilowatt hour.

If we can drive that scale up to a hundred and fifty megawatts or greater, then we can get those costs below ten cents a a kilowatt hour. So it depends on, you know, what you're comparing to. And, of course, this is twenty four seven power. It's not intermittent power.

And so I think it's it's it's the the the, industry is coming in to bringing those costs down so they are affordable, and they are cost competitive with other sources of energy.

And, also, you need to take into account that these technologies that generate green energy usually, have a cost premium. Because so far, it's quite difficult technically to get this twenty four seven green energy onto the grid. So that will be embedded into the cost, I guess.

We have talked about the geothermal energy generation site.

I've also read that you have another product which is on the storage site. Could you tell us a little bit more about that business line?

Yeah. No. Absolutely. So, to to your point, Alex, when we went in the field in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, we reentered a oil and gas well, which was it is not really our business model, but there was an exploration well that had larger casing.

We you really need a larger casing sizes for geothermal. So we reenter this well. We created a fracture, which is our artificial reservoir, our engineered reservoir. And we started operating that fracture to, basically identify how best to get the heat out of the earth without putting a lot of energy into the system because that's one of the things that next generation geothermal has to overcome is the amount of energy you're putting into the system, which you have to subtract from the amount of energy that you're making.

And so we created a fracture, and we were testing that fracture. And we were circulating through it, and we we noticed that we were having higher water losses than expected as well as, friction losses or or, you know, additional pressure that we had to overcome.

So we started operating that that fracture instead of circulating through it. We started operating it more like a balloon, or you can use your lungs as an analogy. We would put water into that fracture, hold the fracture open with the water pressure, just like your lungs are held open with the air pressure.

And then we would basically open a valve at surface, let that fracture close because mother nature's wanting to put that fracture back into the closed state. And when we did, we would get basically water to the surface under a great deal of of pressure. And so it we we recognize not only was this a way to reduce the amount of energy we're putting into a geothermal system, which is a parasitic load.

But if we drilled a well shallower and we weren't even looking for heat, we could turn that that well into a, energy storage system or a battery. And so if you think about pump storage hydropower where you're pumping a lake up a mountain and then you're letting that lake basically rush down the mountain, go through a Pelton turbine, which is just a big wheel with buckets on it and the the water pressure makes that wheel spin.

We're doing the same thing except we're doing it upside down. So one of our one of our reservoirs is deep in the earth. And so the advantage being that you don't need a mountain, we actually have a higher energy density than most pump storage hydropower because we're deeper than than the tallest pumped storage hydropower. So our our battery is deep in the earth, and it's using the water pressure and the and the earth's elasticity to to store that water under pressure.

That's incredible. The technical miracle that must happen to make that work. Just to give a sense of scale to the audience, how big are these reservoirs that you create underground?

Yeah. So what we're doing, so for a single well, so say a well that has a nine and five eighths or ten inch casing, we can get about a three megawatt capacity in the system.

And so what we're doing is we're we're cycling about, thirty thousand barrels of water in order to achieve the longer duration production. So one thing I do wanna emphasize is that we are targeting discharge durations of greater than six hours because we are not trying to compete with lithium ion batteries. They're they're doing a great job at the two to four hour discharge durations. But for that six plus hours, we're needing about thirty thousand barrels of water to to cycle from that fracture.

And in that sense, you just mentioned batteries. What lithium ion batteries. One thing they're very good at, it is is at fast response Whenever you need some frequency control, voltage control, batteries are there to step in. In that sense, what are the characteristics of these geothermal plants? Are they really easy to ramp up? Do they take some time? Do they behave more like a coal plant?

What is their characteristics?

Yeah. No. That's that's actually a great question. If you came to our location, what we've built our first commercial energy storage facility actually at a coal plant. You mentioned coal plants.

We've built it at the San Miguel Electric Cooperative. But if you went to our facility, what you would see in the surface equipment is when we pump the water into the well to store it under pressure, we close a valve, not at the wellhead, but we close a valve very close to this Pelton turbine. And so if you can imagine, the pressure is about four feet away from the Pelton turbine. So when we're ready to basically open that valve, which again will allow that fracture to close, the water has to go about four feet in the piping to hit the Pelton turbine, go through a nozzle, hit the Pelton turbine.

So what we've tested, we've we've actually built and commissioned the facility. We're actually waiting on the grid interconnection to operate it. But what what we've tested during the commissioning, which is the pressure testing, the function testing, the equipment, is that we can get that Pelton turbine spinning in less than sixty seconds. And, again, it's because our water pressure is less than four feet from that Pelton turbine.

So that very dispatchable, we can turn it on, turn it off.

One thing that's an advantage with our technology that the lithium ion batteries don't have is when we cycle it, we don't degrade it. Whereas when you're cycling lithium lithium ion batteries, the way I've heard it kind of phrase is you you're kind of beating up that battery. So we're not having degradation because of cycling. We can cycle it as many times as we want. But to your question, dispatchability is pretty fast.

So the lifetime of one of these plants would be similar to the lifetime of a hydropower plant?

Absolutely. Yeah. We're looking at you know, we're we're we're we're modeling twenty five to thirty years.

Great. And just to clarify for our audience, what exactly is a Pelton turbine? What does it make special?

A Pelton turbine so so this is what's also exciting. You know, pumped storage hydropower, even though it doesn't get a lot of airplay compared to lithium ion batteries, it's actually like ninety percent of the storage around the world. And pumped storage hydropower uses Pelton turbines in their operations. Pelton turbines are are they've been around for over a hundred year.

They're hundred years. They're very low maintenance, not very complex pieces of equipment. So what you're looking at is a big wheel, and they call it the runner. And the wheel has buckets on the end of the wheel so that when you're putting that water pressure through a nozzle, it's basically spraying that water out like a a a hose, and it's directing that spray onto the buckets.

And when it hits the first bucket, it'll start spinning the wheel. And then the second bucket will, basically spin up and get get, hit by the the water pressure. And so what you're doing is using that water pressure going through the nozzle to hit those buckets, spin the runner, and then, of course, that runner is spinning a generator, and that's how you turn that mechanical it it's it's pressure that's turned into mechanical energy, which then turns the the generator to produce electricity.

Great. Thank you for clarifying that.

So conventional geothermal has existed for decades.

Why does this next gen geothermal pressure geothermal and the Earth Store technology that you're working on become viable now? What are all the pieces that are coming up together to make it viable today?

Yeah. So I I would say that it is really tapping into a lot of the learnings from the oil and gas industry and in particular, the unconventional shale revolution.

So during the unconventional shale development, directional drilling drilling long laterals at a long at a low cost were really perfected as well as using hydraulic fracturing, which you can use in next generation geothermal to create a very controlled engineered reservoir that I that I mentioned earlier. And so that is what's actually enabled next generation geothermal to to start making advances. I would say that coupled with just the massive demand that you're seeing for reliable, firm, carbon free power has has kind of made it the perfect storm and a very huge momentum for the oil and gas industry. The the other thing I would mention is geothermal has actually and and and always has enjoyed bipartisan support. And so I think that also helps to accelerate the development and the and where we are in the industry with next generation geothermal.

And jumping to the business side, if I'm a utility CFO right now, let's put this as an example, what's the simplest this makes money story for AirStore? And later, we will look at the geothermal generation as well.

What's get what gets paid for, by whom, and under what kind of contract?

Yeah. Okay. So the contract is usually gonna be a tolling agreement where the energy storage asset would earn revenue through kind of guaranteed fixed payments, you know, to to the asset owner. The utility would make money by charging and discharging for arbitrage.

They can also use storage for capacity or for ancillary services such as frequency or having reserves for for, for power.

If we what what what what what we usually like to do, Sage, is look at gas peak peaker plants. So gas peaker plants provides these services in a lot of cases.

And what we've analyzed is when gas prices are five to six dollars per Mcf, our energy storage will be cheaper than running a gas peaker plant. And, of course, with with geothermal, you don't have the same fuel supply risk or the the price changes of of natural gas.

And so to me, I think that price stability would also be very valuable for utilities.

And right now, what type of customers are you working with? Are these utilities?

I've also read, the army in some cases. What is the spectrum of customers that you have?

Yeah. No. So customers for let me let me talk about for energy storage first. So energy storage is very much attracting wind and solar producers for obvious reasons, especially now that, the tax incentives are are being basically ended. So they're wanting to optimize their assets, and the way to optimize those assets is through storage. Utilities are very interested in, storage. And I would say some of the big tech companies, not all of them, but a lot of the big tech companies are interested in storage because they they do hourly matching to achieve their carbon free goals.

On the geothermal power generation side, I think the two biggest, well, I would say more than two, but the the two main, customers or or interest comes from A department of defense and definitely big tech companies, you know, obviously, for the data centers and the and with the AI demand increasing.

It's all around with all technologies. It's a massive crunch of energy. If you would look at the biggest obstacles that you are facing right now for development of these plants, which ones would it be? Grid interconnection, like any other technology in any other power market in the US, getting someone to sign the offtake, the technical side on drilling the well, what would it be and why?

Oh, definitely the grid interconnection. So I'll I'll go back to our first commercial facility that we've actually we were able to build it, Alex, in about thirteen months. And that's from funding to dirt work, to drilling the well, to building the entire facility. We're still waiting on the grid interconnection. So definitely the grid interconnection.

When you mentioned drilling, drilling is very well understood by the oil and gas industry. They do it every day. They know how to drive down cost. I did it for my career. We were driving down cost by fifty percent over five years while the scope of the wells, so the lateral length and the number of fractures was increasing. So drilling is very, very well understood.

And then the the the other one that you mentioned is getting an offtake agreement.

I think you know as well as I do is if you can provide power that is reliable and and affordable, the demand is is very, very high. So I don't think that would ever be an issue.

Exactly. I agree with that. What about the permitting sites? I can imagine that whenever you're drilling underground in these depths, you must get some studies done and some permits approved. How does that work for your technology?

Yeah. So permitting will depend on where you are. So for example, when the reason why we've done a lot of development in Texas is because the permitting is regulated by the Texas Railroad Commission, believe it or not, Railroad Commission. They don't they don't regulate railroads, but they are able to provide permits in a very timely manner, one to three months.

If you go to other states that have oil and gas development, they are also able to provide permits in a very timely manner because geothermal, as we talked about earlier, is very much like oil and gas. Where the permits start to slow down is when you actually get on federal land. So the the BLM permits are rather than months, can take years. But I do understand that the the government is working on streamlining that permitting process.

And so once that permitting process gets streamlined, you know, it it needs to be less than a year. Mean, the the word I I I would say the most challenging state to get permitting is California. You can still get a permit in California in about a year or a year and a half. So I think the the permitting bottleneck is really in the federal, on the federal land side. And I think once that is streamlined, I know, the last administration has started to streamline that process, and the current administration has has continued that process. So once that gets streamlined, I think we're gonna be in a lot better position for for permits in a timely manner.

Jumping back to the client side, your customers, I've read that Meta agreed to up to one hundred and fifty megawatts of your generation starting in twenty twenty seven. That's very soon. What did they need to believe in, let's say, technically and and commercially right now before they would bet data center reliability on you?

Yeah. No. That's a great question. So so, maybe just to clarify. So you're you're exactly right.

So the metaterm sheet is for a hundred and fifty megawatts of geothermal power for its data centers with an option for an additional two hundred, and they're already meeting more power than that. But metaphase one is four to eight megawatts by twenty twenty seven. And so because our geothermal our pressure geothermal system has, a ninety percent capacity factor, that was one of the things that they needed to believe is, you know, you need very reliable power twenty four hours a day. They also needed to know that it was gonna be scalable.

They also needed to understand what the cost is or the economics, and they also needed to understand that we could execute. So I would say those were part of the due diligence that that Meta did on our technology and on Sage while we were negotiating the term sheet.

And why do you think they went for your solution rather than going for gas generation per with a battery or solar and wind plus a battery?

I I would say that our, solution is in addition to those things. I think they they they're still, you know, using solar. They're still using wind. They're still using natural gas. But it's it's going back to that energy expansion rather than an energy transition. It's just we, you know, we as a society need all of the above energy, and I I think that's the way they were looking at it. It was another energy resource for them to tap into.

Okay. And looking into the future, your vision for geothermal, first part, what do you think could be the scale that this technology could reach in generation here in the US?

Yeah. You know, I Alex, I get quest I get asked this question a lot. And, you know, I always I probably always overestimate just because I'm so excited about where we are in the learning curve. I did mention that, you know, we are where wind and solar were fifteen years ago.

And I do believe that now that the oil and gas industry is fully involved in next generation geothermal, it and it's my bias because I spent spent my career in the oil and gas industry. But if I look at what the oil and gas industry did for the last hundred years going from land drilling to offshore drilling to deepwater drilling. I I just think that solving problems is what the industry can do. So to your question, if you let's just talk about the lower forty eight US.

The DOE did a study, and they compared the resource, for conventional geothermal, which was about forty gigawatts, to the resource for next generation geothermal, which is about five point five terawatts.

So, you know, it's hard to put a number on it. But once the companies that are in the industry right now, Sage, start to produce electricity from their, you know, commercial developments that they're currently building, I think the ability to scale very quickly, again, leveraging the oil and gas industry is there. If I had to it's it's hard to actually guess what that number could be, but with a five point five terawatt resource that you can tap into, I think it could be very, very big.

And just to give, again, a scale to the audience that is listening to this, how much is five point five terawatts?

Okay. Well, in the US okay. Five point five terawatts is fifty five hundred gigawatts, which is, five point five million megawatts. And so I had to get to a megawatt because one megawatt in the US will power about, six hundred or seven hundred houses.

So five point five million megawatts at each megawatt powering about six hundred or seven hundred houses. It's a lot of power.

We would have more than enough for the houses at least. And what how could this impact the whole grid design and operations on a daily basis if this goes big, if this technology goes big, how would it change the grids?

Yeah. So if I think about energy storage, first, and we talked about, you know, the ability to get cheaper than gas peaker plants. So that would be exciting. You wouldn't be relying on gas peaker plants for the stability of the grid.

We we talk about needing more transmission lines, and I think the US does need more transmit transmission lines, but those can take years to permit and years to build. Whereas if you have storage that you can place strategically along the transmission where you have problems like congestion or, you know, peak demands that you're not being able to meet, then I think energy storage can help with with all of that without having to build those, transmission lines. If I think about geothermal as a base load, it would it would be able to provide the grid stability that would that would complement what wind and solar has done, but be able to provide that grid stability with a reliable, resilient power, clean power, or carbon emissions free power.

And now before jumping to the final part, what on the personal side, what keeps you excited about working on the fields?

Oh, everything that we're doing. I mean, it it really does go back to where we are as industry on on the learning curve. So, again, think about that five point five terawatts of geothermal power that is in a in a lot of places under our feet that has not been tapped into and being part of that journey to tap into that power, to make that power, affordable, to to to make it reliable, and then to be able to bring that anywhere around the world. So when I think about energy, and I guess this is what inspired me to go into the oil and gas industry in the first place, energy is the great equalizer. Everybody needs energy, and, you know, everybody should have energy at a at a cost they can afford. And so just being part of that journey is what excites me.

That's great to hear. And I'm very happy to see other people as excited about the energy industry as me. So, actually, one more thing before jumping to the final part. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that I should have asked you?

No. You asked a lot of great great questions. I'm not sure, I would pose any yeah. We did talk about, you know, the fact that we can do, storage and electricity or power generation.

Maybe one other thing to mention, Alex, is that from geothermal, and and even from the shallower, depths that we get energy storage, we can also do direct heating. And so we don't think about that a lot, at least in the US, because there's not a lot of district heating set up in the US like there is in Europe. But a lot of electricity gets spent, quote, unquote, on generating heat. And so if we can replace that heat with geothermal heat, then that's another way to bay basically deliver clean, you know, heat to to people without using electricity, and then you can use electricity for things like data centers.

Are you in in the price that you're working on right now already using that heat?

We are working with, a partner in Europe that where there is district heating. We're currently in one of the countries. They're they're, burning, trash to create that heat. So they call, you know, call it bio biomass, but it creates a soot when they burn the the trash, and so they're really wanting to replace that with, geothermal heat. So we're we are working with a partner in Europe to deliver a district heating project.

That's great to hear as well. Now jumping to the final part of the conversation, is there anything you would like to plug or promote to our audience?

Yeah. I think the thing to plug would be, you know, we at Sage, we're moving from building pilots to actually building at scale. So, of course, we've got our first commercial project at the Smecke coal plant. We're gonna be deploying our first commercial project with Meta.

We're working with Ormat. Ormat's one of the biggest conventional geothermal companies in the world to deploy our next generation geothermal with them. Then, of course, we're working with the Department of Defense. So we're actually moving to scaling, and, I think that's important for people to know that this isn't years and years out.

It's actually coming as sooner than they think.

And talking about scale out in the future, what do what milestones do you envision for twenty twenty seven, twenty thirty, and twenty thirty five in terms of capacity built by your company?

Twenty twenty six. Twenty twenty seven is gonna be four to eight megawatts. That's just for geothermal. We're we'll have also storage at ten to fifteen megawatts.

Twenty thirty, we're gonna be probably in the fifty to a hundred megawatt range. And what was the last year?

Twenty thirty five.

Twenty thirty five.

Far away, I know.

But if you have Yeah.

Twenty thirty five will definitely be, above a hundred and fifty or two hundred megawatts.

That's great to hear. Jumping to the final question. What is your contrarian view on the energy industry that not a lot of people would share with you?

You know, I think I mentioned it earlier. I I I met a very smart lady at South by Southwest a couple of years ago, and we were talking about the energy, you know, transition. And she she said, have you ever heard of the term energy expansion?

And I hadn't, but it made all the sense in the world. I mean, we need, you know, energy. Our our our lives are being electrified.

AI, data centers need need power. So I you know, I I think it's this belief that we really need all of the above and and more of an energy expansion than energy, transition. And then just to mention that, once again, I think next generation geothermal is gonna play a huge part of that energy transition and that the oil and gas industry is really poised right now to scale that that, that resource and tap into that resource. And so, you know, whether that's contrary or just, you know, I don't I don't think geothermal is on a lot of people's radar. So maybe it's just a little not not as known, as other energy sources, but that that's that's my contrary, contrarian view.

Cindy, it was a pleasure to have you today in the podcast with me, and I hope that I see you soon again.

Yeah. Alex, thank you so much for your time, and I appreciate, the opportunity to talk about geothermal and energy storage with you.