Interview: David Baldwin and Tim Latimer on Scaling the Biggest Clean Energy IPO on Wall Street

OpenMinds Executive Director David Baldwin interviews Fervo Energy co-founder and CEO Tim Latimer at a Greentown event. They discuss taking enhanced geothermal from a startup idea that experts said could not be done to what the event host called the largest clean energy IPO in history, and why Fervo moved its headquarters to Houston.

Key points

• Latimer, a former oil and gas drilling engineer, saw that shale-era drilling advances could make enhanced geothermal cost-effective.
• Fervo's Sawtooth 7 well in Utah reached nearly 20,000 feet in measured depth in 21 days, nearly 10x faster than the pre-Fervo benchmark of about 50 days for a 5,000-foot well.
• Studies done with Princeton found that adding geothermal to the Western U.S. grid could make delivering electricity 10 to 20% cheaper over 20 years.
• Fervo signed a 3 gigawatt geothermal framework agreement with Google, and Latimer expects geothermal to add tens of gigawatts in the U.S.