New research from Stanford suggests heat from deep underground could help power a fully renewable energy system, slashing land use, storage needs and pollution while supporting the growth of energy-hungry data centers.
Heat locked miles beneath our feet could become a powerful ally in the race to replace fossil fuels, according to new Stanford University research.
The study, published in Cell Reports Sustainability, finds that enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, could sharply reduce the amount of wind, solar and battery infrastructure needed to run the world on clean energy — all while keeping costs comparable to renewable-only plans.
EGS taps super high temperature rock 3-8 kilometers (nearly 2-5 miles), underground by drilling deep wells, injecting fluid to crack the rock, and then pumping the heated fluid back up to generate electricity. Unlike conventional geothermal plants, which are limited to volcanic regions and tectonic plate boundaries, EGS can in principle be built in many more places.
That flexibility could make EGS a key piece of the global clean energy transition and an attractive power source for new data centers, which need steady electricity but often face land and grid constraints.
Lead author Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and Stanford School of Engineering, noted the technology fits naturally alongside other renewables.
“EGS is a promising clean, renewable technology that works together with wind, solar, hydro, and batteries to help power the world for all purposes, thereby providing energy security while eliminating energy-related air pollution and global warming at low cost,” Jacobson, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. said in a news release.
Jacobson’s team has spent years modeling how most of the world’s countries could move to 100% wind, water and solar energy. In the new work, the researchers compared scenarios with and without EGS across 150 countries and asked a key question: If you add deep geothermal to the mix, what changes?
The answer, they found, is not so much in the price tag as in the physical footprint and mix of technologies.
When EGS supplied just 10% of electricity, the model showed that onshore wind capacity needs dropped by 15%, solar capacity fell by 12% and battery storage requirements decreased by 28%. Because fewer turbines, panels and batteries were needed, total land requirements for energy infrastructure shrank from 0.57% to 0.48% of the countries’ combined land area.
That difference may sound small, but it could be crucial for small or densely populated places, such as Singapore, Gibraltar, Taiwan and South Korea, where land is at a premium and public resistance to large wind or solar farms can be strong.
The study also suggests that EGS can take over the role that coal and nuclear plants currently play in many power systems: providing a constant level of electricity, known as baseload power, day and night. Because EGS plants can run around the clock, they can help smooth out the ups and downs of wind and solar without relying heavily on backup fossil fuel plants.
That finding challenges a common argument against renewables — that their variability makes them too expensive or unreliable without massive backup. In the Stanford analysis, the overall cost of energy stayed similar across all clean, renewable scenarios, whether or not EGS was included. Adding a steady source like EGS did not significantly raise or lower systemwide costs.
What did change dramatically was the comparison with business-as-usual fossil fuel use. In both the EGS and no-EGS clean energy scenarios, annual energy costs fell by roughly 60% compared with continued reliance on coal, oil and gas. When the researchers factored in health and climate damages — from air pollution-related illnesses to sea level rise — total social costs dropped by about 90%.
The study also points to major job gains in a fully renewable world. With EGS in the mix, the model projects 24 million net new long-term positions worldwide. That is slightly fewer than the 28 million jobs in scenarios without EGS, simply because fewer wind, solar and battery projects would need to be built if some power comes from geothermal. But either way, the transition creates far more jobs than it displaces.
Beyond the grid, the researchers highlight another emerging use for EGS: powering off-grid data centers. As artificial intelligence, cloud computing and digital services expand, data centers are multiplying and consuming more electricity. Because EGS can provide constant power and has a relatively small surface footprint, it could be well suited to support facilities that are remote from major transmission lines or located in areas where land is scarce.
The technology is still in its early stages. EGS costs are evolving, and only a handful of large projects exist worldwide. In the United States, the first major EGS plant — a 2-gigawatt facility in Utah — was approved in Oct. 2024. The U.S. Department of Energy projects that EGS costs could fall significantly by 2035 as drilling and reservoir engineering improve.
Jacobson noted those improvements are already changing the economics.
“Due to improvements in EGS drilling speeds, EGS costs are declining rapidly,” he said.
Faster drilling does not just save money; it also shortens project timelines. That could give EGS an edge over nuclear power, which often takes more than a decade to move from planning to operation.
“These speeds allow EGS projects to be completed quickly, unlike with nuclear, which requires planning-to-operation times of 12 to 23 years worldwide. Also, unlike nuclear, EGS has no risk of weapons proliferation, meltdown, radioactive waste storage leaks, or underground uranium mining lung cancer risk,” Jacobson added.
Like any new energy technology, EGS faces technical, regulatory and public acceptance hurdles. Engineers must ensure that rock fracturing and fluid circulation are safe and do not trigger damaging earthquakes. Policymakers must update rules and incentives to support geothermal alongside wind, solar and storage. Communities will need clear information about risks and benefits.
Still, the Stanford study suggests that if those challenges can be managed, heat from deep underground could become a quiet workhorse of the clean energy era — cutting land use, bolstering grid reliability, powering the digital economy and helping countries large and small move faster toward a world without fossil fuels.