DOE's next-generation geothermal funding round closes with a useful asymmetry on the table. The official language talks about field tests and exploration drilling, but the live thesis is simpler and more brutal. Geothermal only becomes a real grid technology when it stops asking geology for permission.

EIA has Fervo's Cape Generating Station scheduled for June as the first large-scale commercial EGS generator in the U.S., while the new Pennsylvania demo tries to convert Utica Shale oil and gas infrastructure into an eastern EGS testbed. That is the interesting migration. The shale stack drilled, fractured, mapped, financed, serviced, and iterated its way through rock at industrial tempo. If that competence crosses into heat, baseload starts borrowing the nervous system of oil.