Western governors push 200 GW geothermal target as DOE projects 90 GW by 2050
A bipartisan Mountain West coalition wants 200 GW of geothermal power, more than double the DOE's own forecast and fifty times current US capacity.
A bipartisan group of Mountain West governors unveiled an initiative on Wednesday (2026-05-20) to unlock an estimated 200 gigawatts of geothermal energy, a target that would dwarf every existing forecast for the technology in the United States.2
The scale divergence between the governors and federal analysts deserves scrutiny. The US Department of Energy projects enhanced geothermal projects could provide about 90 GW of carbon-free power by 2050, enough for at least 65 million homes.6 The governors' ambition exceeds that by more than double.2 Neither number emerges from thin air, but they imply very different assumptions about how fast permitting, drilling costs and demand can move.
The baseline makes both figures look ambitious. As of July 2026, the United States had roughly 4 GW of geothermal capacity spread across 99 plants, over half of them in California, and together they supplied about 0.4% of the nation's electricity generation.7 Globally, geothermal accounts for less than 1% of energy supply.1
Reaching even the DOE's 90 GW figure requires deploying more than 20 times the current installed base in under 25 years. The governors' 200 GW goal implies drilling and completing wells at a pace the sector has never approached. The IEA estimates cumulative global geothermal investment could reach $1 trillion by 2035, up from just $1 to $2 billion invested in 2024 — a trajectory that assumes the industry scales faster than it has across its first half-century of commercial operation.1
What has changed is the demand signal. The artificial intelligence boom is forcing data-center operators and utilities to hunt for firm, clean power that runs around the clock.5 Geothermal, unlike solar and wind, delivers without batteries at night. That property is drawing new capital into a sector long treated as a niche.
Private markets are moving accordingly. A privately held geothermal firm valued at roughly $1.4 billion will start producing electricity in 2027 in the first phase of a 500 MW deal with Shell's power division and a Californian utility.1 Princeton University researchers predict that by 2050, widely available geothermal could produce nearly triple the current output of America's nuclear plants, which supply around 20% of US electricity.1
The resource argument is striking on its own terms. Researchers estimate that tapping just 1% of the world's superhot rocks could meet global electricity demand eight times over.3 The geological endowment is not the constraint. Cost curves and project timelines are.
The international picture reinforces that point. Indonesia and the Philippines, both positioned along the Ring of Fire, hold the second and third largest installed geothermal capacity in the world after the United States, yet financial and community hurdles have slowed development in both countries for years.4 Those frictions are not confined to Southeast Asia and offer a practical warning about the gap between resource potential and delivered megawatts.
The governors' initiative raises a question the packet does not answer: whether the coalition is prepared to drive actual permitting reform, since the bottleneck in most geothermal development is less about geology than about multi-year processes for securing drill permits on public land. The Shell-backed 500 MW project set to begin producing electricity next year will be the first real commercial test of whether next-generation superhot-rock drilling techniques can deliver at scale.1 If that project slips, the DOE's 90 GW forecast begins to look as stretched as the governors' 200 GW promise.