It's Thursday. A small power plant in South Texas spent the summer proving a negative: most of the water pumped into the rock came back out. That was the hard part.
In today's edition:
🔬 Big Story: Sage's enhanced geothermal pilot sells into the Texas grid
⚡ Quick Hits: a microreactor ships, Lansing starts LFP cells
💰 Capital: clean energy capex on a $180 billion pace
📋 Policy Watch: Pennsylvania trades permits for power
📊 Chart of the Day: EV batteries versus California's storage procurement
The Big Story
Sage's enhanced geothermal pilot sells power to the Texas grid
Sage Geosystems is producing power from its first next-generation geothermal plant near Christine, Texas, the Houston company told Canary Media on Wednesday. The 3 MW pilot has run since April and performed reliably and as predicted across more than 120 days of grid-connected operations, Sage said. It is only the third enhanced geothermal system to reach the US grid, after Ormat's 1.7 MW Desert Peak demonstration in 2013 and Fervo Energy's 3.5 MW Nevada plant with Google.
[The Texas pilot lets Sage] actually model and predict how the [reservoir] behavior is going to be going forward. And that sets us up very nicely for scaling and building commercial facilities with our approach.
Sage lost less than 10% of the water it cycled underground on multiple occasions. Taff said that bodes well for enhanced geothermal broadly, since water lost into surrounding rock makes a project less efficient.
Sage pumps water into a fracture network and lets mechanical pressure build, then releases it through a valve, unlike projects that flow water between two wells without pressure.
Taff said the results will "directly inform and de-risk" a Nevada collaboration, where Sage expects to drill its first well at an Ormat plant this year and sell hot water in rather than interconnect its own. Nevada precedes Sage's 150 MW deal with Meta.
Source: Canary Media
Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
A reactor on a truck, a cell line switching on, a protection scheme aging badly.
Radiant has begun shipping its Kaleidos microreactor to Idaho National Laboratory for fueled testing, the step that turns a factory-built design into licensing data. World Nuclear News
LG Energy Solution started production at its $2 billion Lansing, Michigan plant, building LFP cells for utility-scale storage alongside NMC cells for EVs. pv magazine USA
Bonneville Power Administration told a Western Market Seams workshop that the WECC-1 remedial action scheme "does not consider south-to-north flows," an assumption straining as western flows shift, Utility Dive reported. Utility Dive
China roughly doubled its energy storage deployments for a second consecutive year, with analysts flagging an emerging inflection point in system pricing, Energy-Storage.news reported. Energy-Storage.news
Cerebras unveiled CS-4, a rack-scale system rated at 750 petaflops, another step up in what one rack asks of a building. Data Center Dynamics
The Capital Stack
Clean energy capex is on a $180 billion pace for 2026
Crux's mid-year report puts US clean energy and manufacturing capex at $74 billion in the first half of 2026, a pace that would reach roughly $180 billion for the full year, according to pv magazine USA. Crux credits the momentum largely to data center load growth. The demand curve utilities struggle to serve also underwrites the build.
Source: pv magazine USA
Also in the capital stack:
Nebius is marketing $4.5 billion of senior notes to fund data center buildout, per Data Center Dynamics. Bond desks rather than venture equity increasingly finance AI power demand. Data Center Dynamics
Policy Watch
Pennsylvania's governor signed an executive order offering preferential state permitting to loads above 25 MW that meet new data center standards, a framework Utility Dive describes as rewarding projects that bring their own power and clear local approvals first. The state is trading permitting speed for disclosure and consent. Utility Dive
California lawmakers advanced two bills aimed at keeping data center costs off other ratepayers, over industry objections and with the session ending August 31, Canary Media reported. If either passes, cost allocation for large loads stops being a regulatory question in the largest state market. Canary Media
Chart of the Day
California's parked EV batteries dwarf the storage it plans to buy
California plans to procure 31 GW of utility-scale storage over ten years. Over the same period the report projects 9.7 million EVs on its distribution system, carrying far more battery capacity than that procurement, nearly all of it parked. GridLab, E3 and Kevala call the gap a program design problem.
Source: GridLab, E3 and Kevala · August 18, 2026
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