Overview
- The Mountain West Geothermal Consortium unites Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico to align state policies and tools for faster geothermal buildout, a move announced Wednesday.
- The group is convened with help from Washington, D.C. nonprofits Center for Public Enterprise and Constructive to provide technical expertise, shared data and model finance programs for developers and states.
- Consortium leaders say they will focus on clearing permitting hurdles, creating financing mechanisms, collecting regional resource data and improving developer-utility coordination to make projects bankable.
- Current installed geothermal capacity in the four states is roughly 90–100 megawatts but private projects in Utah, including Fervo Energy’s Cape Station, are expected to add about 100 megawatts by early 2027.
- Federal research and policy support underpins the effort: the Department of Energy estimates about 300 gigawatts of U.S. geothermal potential with three-quarters in the West, and recent bipartisan Senate legislation seeks to expand deployment.