It's Friday. The cheapest way to cut the cost of a geothermal plant is to drill fewer holes. That means going deeper, into rock hot enough to cook the instruments sent down to measure it.
In today's edition:
🌋 Big Story: A $135 million bet on superhot rock
⚡ Quick Hits: a transformer plant, a wafer-sized power supply, buses that pay
💰 Capital: magnetics that run hot
📋 Policy Watch: who pays for big loads
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The Big Story
Mazama raises $135 million to drill for 400-degree rock
Mazama Energy, a Frisco, Texas company drilling beside Oregon's Newberry Volcano, closed $135 million to push superhot rock geothermal toward commercial scale. The oversubscribed Series B was led by billionaire John Arnold's Centaurus Capital and Doerr Capital, with ConocoPhillips and Shell Ventures joining existing investors Khosla Ventures and Gates Frontier. The money funds Project Ceres, a Department of Energy-supported effort to drill horizontally and demonstrate 15 megawatts per well. Mazama said drilling starts later this year, testing early next.
"Superhot rock is almost essential for geothermal to become cost-competitive with fossil fuels." Sriram Vasantharajan, CEO, Mazama Energy, to Canary Media
Mazama said it built the world's hottest enhanced geothermal system last October at Newberry, reaching 331 degrees Celsius at 10,350 feet.
It drilled a second well to that depth about 80% faster this year, which matters when rigs can run over $100,000 a day.
At 400 degrees Celsius, Mazama says a well could deliver up to 10 times the power of a conventional 200-degree well. That ratio is the whole argument for going deeper.
The raise lands in a busy year. Fervo went public, Sage began producing power in Texas, and Quaise, also drilling near Newberry, closed $180 million last month.
Source: Canary Media
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five from across the stack.
Hitachi Energy committed $528 million to a Mississippi transformer factory, reported as its largest single US grid-equipment investment, aimed at the lead times now setting the pace of interconnection. pv magazine USA
Onsemi unveiled an embedded power architecture that uses the silicon wafer itself as the package, pushing density in the rack power train AI buildouts keep running into. Data Center Dynamics
School districts and utilities are finding electric buses worth more as virtual power plants than as buses alone, with vehicle-to-grid payments now changing procurement math. Utility Dive
Blue Energy filed its first construction permit application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a shipyard-built reactor, where modular assembly meets licensing. World Nuclear News
Hephae ran a measurement-while-drilling tool through a geothermal well at 210 degrees Celsius circulating temperature, the hardware that decides whether hot-rock wells drill on budget. ThinkGeoEnergy
The Capital Stack
CorePower Magnetics raises $10.5 million for transformers that run hot
CorePower Magnetics, a Pittsburgh company, raised $10.5 million co-led by Engine Ventures and Material Impact for nanocrystalline-alloy inductors and transformers rated above 200 degrees Celsius, Heatmap reported. Magnetics are the quiet bottleneck in fast chargers, data center power trains, and grid interfaces, and a part that tolerates more heat is a part you can build smaller.
Source: Heatmap News
Also in the capital stack:
Rune raised a $40 million Series A for containerized compute sited at solar plants, trading the interconnection queue for whatever the sun is doing. Data Center Dynamics
ARENA opened a $30 million grant launchpad for early-stage Australian clean energy and grid startups, aimed at the gap between lab result and first pilot. RenewEconomy
Policy Watch
The US House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act 417 to 3 to keep data center costs off residential ratepayers. ClearView Energy Partners told Utility Dive it largely codifies a shift states are already making and is unlikely to pass the Senate before November's midterms, so large-load tariff design stays a state fight. Utility Dive
The Energy Efficiency Reform Act, heard by the Senate energy committee and still pending, would, as Inside Climate News described it, make new appliance standards essentially impossible to issue and open a path to repealing existing ones, weakening a cheap lever on winter peak. Inside Climate News
Analysts warned Australia's national electricity market could fragment into state-by-state reliability and market design regimes, RenewEconomy reported, raising the cost of anything built to one standard. RenewEconomy
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