America's New Power Plant Could Replace Coal Forever?

America's New Power Plant Could Replace Coal Forever A company in Utah has switched on a power plant that boils water without burning anything. The idea was born at Los Alamos in 1970 and shelved in 1995. Oil drillers just made it work. I look at enhanced geothermal, the technique of building a reservoir in hot, dry rock instead of finding one. I explain how a geothermal reservoir works and why nature builds so few of them. I examine the 25-year hot dry rock programme at Fenton Hill, New Mexico, and the failures at Basel in 2006 and Pohang in 2017. Then I look at how Fervo Energy borrowed horizontal drilling, multi-stage stimulation and fibre-optic sensing from the shale industry, and at Cape Station in Beaver County, Utah, which reached first power on 24 September 2026 and commercial operation on 1 October. I also look at what could go wrong: a first-phase build cost of about $7,000 per kilowatt against roughly $2,157 for the average gas plant, geothermal's 0.4% share of US electricity, and the fact that much of the performance data so far comes from the company itself. Sources are listed in the pinned comment. #geothermal #energy #supplychain