Geothermal Isn't Expensive: The Reservoir Always Has the Final Say Somewhere beneath a volcanic ridge, a drill bit is turning through rock that has not moved in two million years. It costs money every second it turns. And nobody on the surface — not the engineer, not the financier, not the minister who announced the megawatts — knows yet whether that well will produce steam or silence. That single moment explains almost everything people get wrong about geothermal energy. Geothermal is routinely described as expensive, slow, capital-hungry and haunted by drilling risk. Investors are reminded that tens of millions can disappear underground before a single megawatt reaches a grid. All of that is true. But it is not the whole truth. The uncomfortable question the industry keeps avoiding is this: is geothermal expensive, or is the way we develop geothermal making it expensive? Those are two completely different problems. One is geology. The other is us. Why Geothermal Refuses to Be...
“Mazama Energy Unveils the World’s Hottest Geothermal System — A Blueprint for Terawatt-Scale Clean Energy”
Mazama Energy Ignites a New Era: The World’s Hottest Geothermal System Powers Toward a Carbon-Free Future By Robert Buluma , October 2025 In a quiet corner of Oregon’s Cascade Range, deep beneath the rugged volcanic landscape of Newberry, a new energy revolution is taking shape. Mazama Energy — a startup incubated by Khosla Ventures and backed by Gates Frontier — has just achieved a technological milestone that could change the way we power the planet. At a staggering 629 °F (331 °C), Mazama’s newly completed Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) is now the hottest ever recorded on Earth. And this is just the beginning. By 2026, the company expects to push those temperatures to 750 °F (400 °C) — unlocking enough energy to power gigawatts of clean electricity from this single site. 🔥 Cracking the Code of the Earth’s Heat For decades, geothermal energy has been the “quiet cousin” of renewables — clean, reliable, but limited to places where hot water naturally flows near the sur...