It's Tuesday. The most talked-about technology in clean energy right now has been turning heat into power for decades. The twist is where the heat comes from, and one of the industry's oldest names just decided to go find it the hard way.
In today's edition:
🌋 Big Story: Ormat, the geothermal old guard, jumps into enhanced geothermal
⚡ Quick Hits: a record year in Australia, a MISO queue fight, a UK charging flagship, and a Himalayan comeback
💰 Capital Stack: Voltus lines up a pre-IPO round of up to $100M
📋 Policy Watch: 19 states sue over the wind freeze, and New Mexico vetoes a data-center pipeline
📊 Chart of the Day: clean energy now draws nearly double the capital of fossil fuels
But first…
📅 Event Announcement: Energy Tech GTM Forum
Grid Innovation Hub, presented with INNOVIT
Wednesday, July 22, 5:00 to 8:00 PM · INNOVIT, 710 Sansome St, San Francisco
Selling technology into US energy is where good products go to wait: the average deal takes 12 to 24 months, and most of that time is spent in the buying process. On July 22, host Adam Shaw is bringing together 50 founders and go-to-market, product, and security leaders from energy-tech companies, alongside operators who have built and sold to utilities, IPPs, and co-ops. The program covers how to find buyers who are ready to buy, how to move a pilot into production, who really controls the budget, and how the best vendors shorten the sales cycle, followed by a fireside chat, a GTM tactics panel, and an energy-tech happy hour.
This is an invite-only gathering, and registration is approval-based, so space is limited, but Grid Innovation Hub subscribers are encouraged to register.
The Big Story
Ormat, a geothermal veteran, bets on enhanced geothermal.
Ormat Technologies, which already runs more than a gigawatt of conventional geothermal capacity across the western United States, is pushing into enhanced geothermal, the approach that engineers an underground reservoir where nature never built one. Canary Media reported that Ormat is developing an enhanced pilot at its Desert Peak field in Nevada with oilfield-services giant SLB, and separately with the Houston startup Sage Geosystems, in which it invested $25 million during a January funding round. The work is early: the company is still gathering geophysical data to decide where to drill, and executives could not say when the projects will be finished.
"Right now, we have what the world needs: renewable, local, baseload energy. After 20 years in geothermal, I've never seen such a big opportunity."
Enhanced geothermal extends the resource beyond the natural hydrothermal sites near tectonic boundaries that anchor Ormat's existing fleet, in principle opening far more of the country to baseload geothermal power.
The Desert Peak pilot pairs Ormat with SLB, part of a broader crossover in which oilfield drilling expertise is being aimed at geothermal heat rather than hydrocarbons.
The second pilot deploys Sage Geosystems' next-generation technology at an existing Ormat site in Nevada or Utah; Ormat's $25 million stake came inside Sage's $97 million Series B in January.
The move lands amid a geothermal capital surge, from Fervo's 500 MW Cape Station and IPO to a first-of-a-kind 3.5 MW enhanced system another developer recently switched on in Nevada to help power Google.
Source: Canary Media
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
Four milestones from four corners of the grid: a record year Down Under, a Midwest queue fight, a UK charging flagship, and a Himalayan comeback.
AEMO reported a record 9.1 GW and 12.9 GWh across 34 projects reaching full output in Australia's 2025/26 financial year, more than double the prior year, with batteries now 52% of the National Electricity Market's connection pipeline. pv magazine
MISO said it will press ahead with zero-injection generation agreements, the mechanism that lets co-located load such as data centers pair with on-site generation without exporting to the grid, holding its plan despite stakeholder pushback and a one-month filing delay. RTO Insider
Gridserve opened its largest UK Electric Forecourt yet at Markham Vale, 39 bays of 400 kW chargers under a solar canopy, one of Europe's most powerful public charging sites. electrive
NHPC returned the last unit of its 510 MW Teesta-V plant in Sikkim to commercial operation, completing the rebuild of a hydro station knocked offline by a 2023 Himalayan glacial-lake flood, a pointed reminder of climate risk to grid assets. Power Peak Digest
The Capital Stack
Voltus lines up a pre-IPO round of up to $100M.
Voltus, a US virtual-power-plant operator, is raising between $50 million and $100 million in what it intends to be its final private round before going public, Axios Pro reported. The company aggregates commercial and industrial demand flexibility into capacity it can bid into wholesale markets, and a raise of this size, if it closes, would tee up one of the first pure-play VPP operators to test the public markets, a real signal for a sector that has scaled on demand-response contracts but still has few public comparables for investors to price against.
Source: Axios Pro Deals
Policy Watch
Nineteen states moved to join litigation against the federal wind-permitting freeze reported last week, arguing in court filings that the pause threatens their energy portfolios, jobs, tax revenue, and decarbonization targets; the outcome will shape how much new wind can realistically enter interconnection queues over the next few years. RTO Insider
New Mexico regulators rejected a natural-gas pipeline that would have fed on-site fuel cells at Oracle's proposed 2.5 GW Project Jupiter data center, a pointed check on the behind-the-meter gas model that hyperscalers have leaned on to add power without waiting for the grid. Data Center Dynamics
Chart of the Day:
Clean energy now draws nearly double the capital of fossil fuels.
Global energy investment is on track to reach about $3.4 trillion in 2026, and roughly $2.2 trillion of it flows to clean energy, including grids, storage, renewables, nuclear, efficiency, electrification, and low-emissions fuels, against about $1.2 trillion for oil, gas, and coal.
Source: IEA, World Energy Investment 2026 · June 2026
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