Pathways to national-scale adoption of enhanced geothermal power through experience-driven cost reductions

This is a manuscript accepted for publication in Joule. The published version is available at https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(25)00152-7. All code and input/results data relevant to the analysis are available for download from a separate repository.

Enhanced geothermal power, an emerging technology with the potential to deliver round-the-clock carbon-free electricity across a wide range of geographies, is receiving increased public attention following several years of rapid advances and successful field demonstrations. However, due to both the technology’s nascency and its reliance on geothermal resources that vary in quality across the country, its near- and long-term potential to compete with established sources of power and contribute to the decarbonization of electricity systems across the US is poorly understood. In this paper we first leverage recent field data to produce the first empirically grounded near-term cost projections for enhanced geothermal in the United States. We then use these geographically-granular cost data as inputs to an electricity system planning model to assess where and under what conditions enhanced geothermal power could see near-term commercial deployment. We finally utilize an experience curves framework – which assumes that enhanced geothermal costs will fall with increasing deployment – to explore how the cost and adoption of enhanced geothermal could evolve over time following any initial deployments. These deployment pathways are sensitive to variations in assumed near-term technology costs, learning rates, resource availability, and policy, but we find under baseline assumptions that EGS could plausibly contribute up to a fifth of total US electricity generation by 2050 and drastically reduce the cost electricity decarbonization even in lower-quality resource areas east of the Mississippi – a much larger role for the technology than has been previously assumed. Such a substantial role is contingent on significant reductions in the cost of enhanced geothermal wellfields, which in turn must come as a result of advances in reservoir design. These findings suggest that efforts to facilitate early deployment and better understand uncertainties in enhanced geothermal’s cost and learning potential should be key near-term policy and development priorities.