The electricity will come from Cape Station, operated by Fervo Energy, which went public in May 2026. Google reserves the right to increase its withdrawal to nearly one gigawatt by June 2030.
The power purchase agreement signed by Google covers 396 megawatts from Cape Station, Fervo Energy's geothermal project, and is the largest agreement of its kind ever concluded. Google presents this electricity as a building block of a data center that it plans to build in Utah. The first capacities are due to be commissioned from 2028, and an option allows the group to increase its withdrawal to nearly one gigawatt by June 2030.
Fervo Energy only went public in May 2026, which makes the size of the commitment remarkable: it is a single buyer who, by signing off, is financing the industrial ramp-up of a young producer. The deep geothermal energy exploited by the company is based on horizontal drilling techniques borrowed from shale oil, applied to the heat of dry rock.
The choice of resource says the essence of the problem. Intermittent renewable electricity purchase contracts are not enough to cover permanent consumption, and an inference data center runs twenty-four hours a day. Hence the shift of large buyers to controllable sources — nuclear, geothermal, long-term storage — in which they now invest directly rather than buying guarantees of origin on a market.
Read the full article on the original source
Go to the source →