The US Energy Department puts $99 million into 21 geothermal projects
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readThe U.S. Department of Energy announced, on 21 September 2026, more than $99 million for 21 projects to advance geothermal energy. The projects are to test next-generation geothermal technologies and explore promising resources, framed by the department as support for "affordable, reliable, secure American energy".
⚠ This is a departmental funding announcement, and the framing is the government's own. What it funds is concrete — 21 selected projects, a stated total — but the significance is a bet, not a result.
What it means
Geothermal's appeal is what it is not: intermittent. Unlike solar and wind, geothermal is firm, dispatchable heat available around the clock, which is why it keeps attracting funding even when it is a rounding error in the generation mix. The technology question is whether "next-generation" approaches — enhanced and closed-loop systems — can reach heat where conventional geothermal cannot, which is most places.
$99 million across 21 projects is a research portfolio, not a build-out. Roughly $5 million a project funds pilots and exploration, not power plants. The right way to read it is as the government spreading bets across approaches that mostly will not scale, hoping one or two do.
Watch which projects are enhanced or closed-loop. Conventional geothermal is limited to where hot water already sits near the surface. The entire reason geothermal might become a national resource rather than a regional one is the engineered approaches — so the interesting line in the 21 is how many of them are trying to make heat available where geology did not put it.