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) Office of Geothermal 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 through geothermal storage technologies, particularly 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 while building more resilient infrastructure that creates a stable source of cooling 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.
Current Direct Cooling Projects
NLR (Sub: LBNL) – Reducing Data Center Peak Cooling Demand and Energy Costs with Underground Thermal Energy Storage (UTES)
The Office of Geothermal funds a project led by the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) exploring Cold UTES use to support data centers. By using off-peak power to create a cold energy reserve underground, Cold UTES can be incorporated into existing data center cooling technologies and used during grid peak load hours. This charge/discharge cycling allows the technology to be optimized based on time-of-use and other key grid parameters, similar to a conventional battery charge/discharge cycling, thereby reducing the overall operating cost of the grid. The key difference between Cold UTES and conventional grid batteries is that Cold UTES can not only do the same diurnal storage, but can also achieve long-duration energy storage at seasonal time scales.
Learn more about this work to understand the grid and system-wide value, costs, and impacts of large-scale and widespread deployment of Cold UTES.
Learn more about the Office of Geothermal’s data, modeling, and analysis efforts, other Office of Geothermal initiatives, and geothermal storage technologies.