How The Heat Beneath Our Feet Could Cut U.S. Electric Bills

BY BEN TRACY, SENIOR CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT ON ASSIGNMENT FOR CLIMATE CENTRAL

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As electric bills spike across the country, utilities are racing to meet record-high power demand—fueled in part by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and the energy-hungry data centers behind it. Now, an often-overlooked power source is getting a second look: geothermal energy.

From High Bills to Deep Savings: A Neighborhood Powered by the Earth

For Carol Canova of Framingham, Massachusetts, the shift has already paid off—literally.

“I got a geothermal system for free,” she says, still sounding astonished.

“People dream about winning the lottery with lottery tickets. This is my lottery.”

Her neighborhood—including a fire station and high school—is now connected to a first-of-its-kind geothermal network developed by the local utility Eversource. The project taps the earth’s steady underground heat to warm and cool buildings, and in some cases, feed energy back into the grid.

“How low can my bill go?” Carol remembers thinking. Switching from gas cut her monthly electric bill from around $200 to about $130. “That’s like nothing to me for heat to keep my house at 70 degrees!”

Turning Underground Heat Into Everyday Power

Inside a small pump house, Nikki Bruno of Eversource calls the system “the brains of the operation.” So far, she says, it’s serving “roughly about 140 customers in 36 buildings.”

Despite geothermal being a form of reliable, clean energy, it accounts for less than one percent of U.S. electricity generation. It’s long been considered too costly outside volcanic hot spots like Iceland, where heat lies closer to the surface.

“And most people go ‘okay well I don’t live in Iceland what else do you got for me?’” says Drew Nelson of Project Innerspace, a nonprofit pushing to scale the technology. But he says the economics are changing fast as AI drives electricity demand higher and drilling innovations make geothermal more accessible.

“It’s hot everywhere underground. We’re actually now able to tap into that heat in a way that we haven’t before.”

The Race to Scale Geothermal

New technology is accelerating that push. Near Austin, Texas, a startup called Quaise is using microwaves to vaporize rock—drilling deeper and faster than conventional rigs. Lead engineer Henry Phang shows off their progress. “So this is a hole that we made with the rig,” he says. Their goal: reach temperatures above 600 degrees about six miles underground.

“That’s crazy hot,” Phang replies with a grin.

Other companies are racing ahead too. Mazama is building a geothermal plant on an active volcano in Oregon, and Fervo is adapting oil and gas drilling techniques to construct one in the Utah desert. Federal officials now estimate geothermal could supply up to 12 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2050—enough to replace coal.

For early adopters like Carol Canova, that future can’t come fast enough.

“It'd be great for everybody in the United States to have geothermal.”