New Mexico is looking for aoesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. Many of the state’s politicians see promise in geothermal energy, which taps into Earth’s natural underground heat to spin turbines and generate electrons
New Mexico is one of seven states with an active geothermal plant — the Lightning Dock plant in Hidalgo County. And geothermal developer XGS Energy is partnering with Meta to develop a 150-megawatt plant to support its Los Lunas data center.
“It’s always there when you need it,” Logan Stephens, vice president for development of Houston-based XGS, told lawmakers at a Monday meeting of the Economic and Rural Development and Policy Committee. “It operates around the clock.”
But building a geothermal power plant can be costly. Lucas Mejia hopes his company, HeatFlow, has a solution to bring down those costs.
The startup is designing turbine-cycle technology that can pull more electricity from geothermal brine than today’s power plants. The technology would allow geothermal generators to operate with heat as low as 176 degrees. Traditional plants need higher temperatures.
“If we do that, we can also use very cheap materials,” Mejia said in an interview. “We can make our turbines, for example, out of plastic. That really brings the costs down.”
HeatFlow hopes to cut in half capital costs associated with developing geothermal power. He pitched the technology to investors at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s annual New Mexico Demo Day in Santa Fe late last month.
“One phrase that is used a lot in the geothermal industry is that you are using capital expenses at the scale of oil and gas but with the returns of renewable energy — which are way lower,” Mejia said.
In July, the state Economic Development Department announced it gave HeatFlow $650,000 through its Advanced Energy Award, money doled out in two phases. Currently, the company is in the first phase of development and will be paid half of that if it achieves certain milestones.
HeatFlow is also supported by venture capital funding from Roadrunner Venture Studios. New Mexico’s State Investment Council is an investor in Roadrunner.
Such technology would provide the state’s utilities, which are waiting for geothermal power to take off, a solution to the intermittency problem of renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
Depending on the day, up to 80% of the power generated by Public Service Company of New Mexico comes from renewable energy sources. But it still relies on fossil fuels when its intermittent wind and solar plants are not generating electricity.
