It's Thursday. The best site for the next power plant might be a few miles straight down, in rock hot enough to melt steel. A Houston company just raised $134 million to go drill for it.
In today's edition:
⛏️ Big Story: A superhot geothermal startup raises $134M to drill for baseload
⚡ Quick Hits: Massachusetts' storage haul, Meta's Alberta gas plant, a 40-hour battery, and US wind orders
💰 Capital Stack: America's first sodium-ion battery factory, plus a run of grid-software raises
🏛️ Policy Watch: Georgia halts a data center's pop-up power plant, and what is left of the IRA
The Big Story
Quaise raises $134M to build the first commercial superhot geothermal plant
Quaise Energy announced the first close of a Series B on July 7, raising $134 million to fund Project Obsidian, which it bills as the world's first commercial superhot geothermal power plant. The company uses a millimeter wave drilling system developed at MIT to bore into rock hot enough to rival the power density of fossil and nuclear plants, and it says the drill is now approaching one kilometer of depth at its Central Texas test site. The round was led by Prelude Ventures, with strategic checks from JERA and Idemitsu, two of Japan's largest energy companies.
"Our ambition is to power civilization with Earth's most compelling energy source. This round takes us from field-proven technology to first commercial revenues."
The $134 million first close brings Quaise's total raised to $230 million; project-level equity and debt are being raised separately, with commercial off-take partners still undisclosed.
The millimeter wave drill ablates rock at 300 to 500°C at depths conventional drilling cannot reach economically; reaching one kilometer would be the deepest hole ever bored by a non-contact drilling technology.
Project Obsidian sits on federal geothermal leases in Oregon's Deschutes National Forest, has gigawatt-scale potential, and is targeted to deliver first power to the Pacific Northwest grid by 2030.
Quaise proved the drill in the field in 2025, penetrating more than 100 meters of granite at full scale, the milestone the Series B is meant to carry toward commercial deployment.
Source: Quaise Energy, BusinessWire
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
Massachusetts utilities Eversource, National Grid, and Unitil filed contracts for about 4.5 GWh (1,118 MW) of energy storage with state regulators, a major step toward the state's 5,000 MW-by-2030 storage mandate. Utility Dive
Meta confirmed a roughly $13 billion AI data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta, its first in Canada and largest outside the US, paired with a dedicated 932 MW gas plant, Pembina's Greenlight Electricity Centre, under a long-term tolling deal targeting late 2030. CNBC
Southwestern Public Service will use a $113 million Texas reliability grant to run drone inspections across more than 273,000 poles and install pole-mounted sensors that flag line hazards in real time across the Panhandle and South Plains. Office of the Texas Governor
Elestor and Windpark Zeewolde will deploy a hydrogen-iron flow battery at Europe's largest onshore wind farm, scaling toward 800 MWh and 10 to 40 hours of duration to push congested wind output past its grid bottleneck. Energy-Storage.news
Nordex booked 3,054 MW of onshore wind turbine orders in the second quarter, up from 2,310 MW a year earlier, with about 800 MW from the US, a sign demand there is holding up despite federal policy headwinds. Reuters
The Capital Stack
Peak Energy picks Sacramento for America's first sodium-ion battery factory
Peak Energy will build the first US factory dedicated to grid-scale sodium-ion battery systems, a 183,000-square-foot plant in Sacramento representing up to $71 million in investment and capable of turning out up to 4 GWh of storage a year. Backed by a fresh Series B, the plant deepens a domestic, lithium-free supply chain for grid storage and will use cells co-developed with GM, sidestepping the lithium supply chain that runs through China.
Source: Peak Energy
Also in the capital stack:
Axle Energy closed a Series A of roughly £20 million (€21 million) led by US investor Energize Capital to scale a platform that turns EV chargers, home batteries, and heat pumps into grid-balancing capacity, and plans to expand into the US. UKTN
Bohr Energie raised €10 million in a Series A led by Suma Capital to scale an AI-driven platform that aggregates and optimizes distributed renewables, batteries, and hybrid assets, with expansion planned into Spain and Italy. EU-Startups
Piq Energy raised an oversubscribed $5 million seed led by Active Impact Investments for an AI platform that automates interconnection studies, taking aim at the 2,300-plus GW of projects stuck in North American grid queues. GlobeNewswire
Policy Watch
Georgia regulators ordered VoltaGrid to halt construction of an unpermitted 90 MW off-grid gas plant built to power a Serverfarm data center, and the PSC is weighing whether the arrangement violates a 1973 territorial-service law, a warning shot for the off-grid model hyperscalers are using to skip interconnection queues. Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A new MIT CEEPR report finds the US power sector will keep roughly two-thirds of the emissions cuts and about three-quarters of the clean capacity expected under the IRA even after its rollback, arguing the real brake on clean energy now is permitting, siting, and interconnection rather than lost subsidies. Heatmap
US solar developers face a tightening squeeze as a threatened Section 232 tariff on polysilicon and the scheduled phaseout of the residential tax credit press on both supply and demand, a combination that could slow rooftop and utility-scale build rates into 2027. pv magazine
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