Fervo Cape Station's first 100 MW phase loads to the grid this fall in Beaver County, Utah. 320 MW already locked under a 15-year PPA to Southern California Edison. 500 MW online by 2028. Reservoir temperatures past 428 Fahrenheit, drilling times cut 75 percent and per-foot costs 70 percent in three years. The IPO filing prices installed capacity at $7,000 per kilowatt with a stated path to $3,000, a number that puts enhanced geothermal under combined-cycle gas on a curve no thermal generator is going to defend.

The case that ran through every quarterly report on geothermal from 1980 to 2022 sat on one assumption. Hot dry rock at depth was a research problem, the wells closed early, the reservoirs depleted, and the cost curve never moved because the unit volumes never moved. The category stayed locked at 0.4 percent of US generation. The capital that learns by doing was somewhere else.

It arrived the moment hyperscaler load growth ran past what intermittent PPAs can underwrite. Crews trained on shale unconventional moved sideways into closed-loop and EGS, and the techniques that broke the Permian curve compressed the EGS cost curve faster between 2022 and 2026 than any IEA model penciled for any decade this century.

The first commercial-scale enhanced geothermal megawatts hit a real grid out of Beaver County in October. The field's valley of death closed the moment allocation finally moved through it.