Ormat, a geothermal company founded six decades ago, has signed a power purchase agreement with Google for up to 150MW in Nevada and is running enhanced geothermal pilots with Sage Geosystems and SLB. Europe has the same demand problem and is meeting it with restraint rather than contracts.
A company that has been drilling for heat since the 1960s is now an artificial intelligence story. Ormat has agreed to supply Google with up to 150 megawatts of new geothermal capacity in Nevada, through the state utility and a tariff that lets the buyer pay a premium for emerging technology.
Until this year it had never sold directly to large power users at all. Its first data centre agreement, signed in January with Switch, covers about 13 megawatts over 20 years at a plant in western Nevada.
The Google contract is more than ten times that. The projects behind it are expected to come online between 2028 and 2030, with Nevada regulators due to approve the arrangement in the second half of this year.
What data centres are buying is continuity. Geothermal runs day and night regardless of weather, which is the quality that makes it worth more to a computing site than cheaper intermittent power.
