How Texas unleashed a geothermal boom [Video]

With its nation-leading renewables fleet and oil and gas industry, Texas is poised to dominate what boosters hope will be America’s next great energy boom: a push to tap the heat of the subterranean earth for electricity and industry.

That technology, known as geothermal energy, has demonstrated the rare ability to unite the state’s warring political camps — and is fueling a boom in startups that seek to take it national. 

While other forms of renewable energy lost ground during Texas’s 2021 and 2023 legislative sessions before a legislature that combined a hard-right political bent with a focus on building more “dispatchable” power, the geothermal industry advanced. State lawmakers passed four key bills in 2023  that helped lay the foundation for a new generation of drilling — with just one vote against. 

In the 2023 session, “we didn’t get put into the renewable bucket, we didn’t really get put into …