Google contracts 396 megawatts of Fervo geothermal for delivery starting in 2028

An operator sizing power for a building that opens in 2026 cannot buy any of this. Fervo's target for first operations at Cape Station is 2028, and the final plans are still pending feasibility studies and regulatory approvals ^[2][4]. In the meantime, many data center operators are installing on-site natural gas turbines to meet round-the-clock demand while bypassing the grid ^[7]. Solar and wind do not answer that requirement, because they are intermittent ^[8].

What the contract funds is drilling. Enhanced geothermal developers go deep, inject water to reopen pre-existing fractures and create new ones, then circulate water through hot rock and pump it up to generate electricity ^[11]. Fervo does this with directional drilling and multi-stage fracturing ^[12]. Conventional geothermal needs a rarer setting. "They've got to have the right combination of heat, water, and permeability," Roland Horne, director of the Geothermal Program at Stanford University, told Gizmodo ^[9]. "What EGS is all about is making permeability where there was previously none, or very little, and that allows for geothermal developments in many more places," Horne said ^[10].

Google contracted 396 megawatts and holds an option to take nearly a gigawatt by June 2030 ^[1][3]. The option is about 2.5 times the contracted volume ^[19], and its deadline falls roughly two years after the 2028 operations target ^[20]. Google buys the first tranche now and decides on the rest once the wells have a production history.

No price has been published, which is the gap between this agreement and a benchmark another buyer could use. Geothermal supplies 0.4 percent of US utility-scale generation, and cost is the biggest remaining hurdle, according to Horne ^[13][14]. On the Nevada pilot he was blunt: "My guess is that Google probably paid beyond market dollar for that as a way of stimulating the EGS industry," Horne said ^[16].

Whether a data center can buy enhanced geothermal power at all was answered in 2023, when Project Red came online and began delivering to the local grid and to Google's data centers in Nevada, part of a Fervo-Google partnership now five years old ^[15]. The new fact is 396 megawatts under a single contract ^[1].

For a team doing its own power procurement, what decides the usefulness of this is when the load turns on. Before 2028, the practical menu is a grid interconnection or on-site gas ^[7]. It also depends on whether the building can go where the resource is. Google bought a 300-acre parcel near Eagle Mountain in 2021, about 130 miles from Cape Station ^[5]. Gizmodo does not say how power from the wells would reach that parcel, and Google did not respond to its requests for comment ^[6].