With the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI), the demand for data centers and the large energy loads required to support them is increasing rapidly. Geothermal energy has the potential to help add more reliable power to the grid and meet the needs of this increasingly digitized world.
How Geothermal Can Support Data Center Growth
Data centers require an enormous amount of power to sustain operations. Data centers’ share of total annual U.S. electricity consumption has already more than doubled from 1.9% in 2018 to 4.4% in 2023, and is projected to grow to between 6.7% and 12% by 2028 (2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report). Data centers’ energy-intensive operations also require a reliable power source that can operate continuously, as well as reliable cooling methods to prevent servers from overheating.
Geothermal technologies offer two solutions to the challenges of meeting and managing data center’s power and cooling demands.
Power Generation
Geothermal energy’s high capacity factor—generally about 90%—allows geothermal power plants to operate 24 hours a day, with steady output nearly all of the time. As a steady power generator, geothermal electricity is ideal for supporting the energy load generated by constant data center operations, such as that required by some AI data computing, as well as flexible computing loads like those of bitcoin mining, which can fluctuate between periods of high uptime (or regular operation) and reductions in response to market price sensitivities.
Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) and other next-generation technologies can also provide versatile support for data centers’ high energy demands by removing or reducing power plant location limitations. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) is researching ways to improve geothermal exploration, reduce drilling costs, and advance next-generation technologies like EGS, helping to open more opportunities for cost-effective geothermal electricity nationwide.
Direct Cooling
Geothermal energy has the potential to reduce data center peak cooling demand and energy costs with Cold Underground Thermal Energy Storage (Cold UTES). Cold UTES is basically cold water that is injected into the subsurface, stored underground, then drawn back to the surface to be dispatched as needed to offset peak cooling demands.
Data centers can have large, megawatt-scale cooling demands to keep their servers operational, especially in times of high usage. Reducing the power required to meet peak cooling demand can mean avoiding the need to build new power plant capacity. As a long duration energy storage solution, Cold UTES offers a way to reduce and shift data center peak cooling loads, reducing demands on the electricity grid, while also improving cooling efficiency compared with other cooling methods.
GTO is supporting work to understand the grid and system-wide value, costs, and impacts of large scale and widespread deployment of this emerging cooling solution.
GTO is also funding a project to investigate the use of abandoned mine water for data center cooling at a site in Southwest Virginia. Located on former and abandoned coal mine lands, the site has access to billions of gallons of cool underground water below these former mines. The project team will drill two entries to the underground mine workings and circulate water through them; cool water will be brought up from the subsurface to absorb heat from a facility and then reinjected back into the underground pool to be cooled by the surrounding pool and subsurface temperatures. The project will test the sustainability of this concept of creating a “cold energy reserve” underground for data center cooling.
Learn more about GTO’s Data, Modeling, and Analysis and GTO’s other initiatives, including a GTO project exploring another form of geothermal energy storage.