Geothermal energy in the US has been on a tear this year. Stocks are up and startups are raising large amounts of capital. Today’s newsletter shows that they’re putting some of that capital to use, paying record prices to snap up federal land leases.

Plus, we share a scoop about FEMA’s internal hunt for employees who anonymously signed a whistleblower letter. You can read these stories on Bloomberg.com. 

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Geothermal goes big

By Renata Carlos Daou

For the first time in years, the US federal government has leased every parcel of public land it has opened for geothermal development — and at record prices. 

Average prices for public land leases for geothermal energy development soared by 282% this year to $127 per acre, driven by growing energy demand from data centers and President Donald Trump’s administration embracing the energy source. The record prices are a major step up from a $33 per-acre average last year, according to data from the US Bureau of Land Management, the agency that conducts the auctions.

Geothermal companies tap the Earth’s heat to generate power. While it currently generates a small share of all US electricity, a wave of new technologies is opening the door for geothermal to play a bigger role, as is policy support. 

“With the current administration, I think the focus is very much on energy security, energy reliability and energy independence,” said Koenraad Beckers, geothermal energy lead at ResFrac, a hydraulic fracturing simulation software designer. “Geothermal checks all those boxes.”

The Trump administration has stymied wind projects and scaled back solar incentives, but geothermal is one type of renewable energy that’s seen some support. In February, Energy Secretary Chris Wright directed his agency to “prioritize affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies,” including geothermal. The tax law Trump signed in July also preserved geothermal projects’ access to tax credits while weakening incentives for wind and solar.

Artificial intelligence’s voracious appetite for energy has also driven interest in geothermal to new highs. Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc. are among the data center operators who have inked deals with geothermal companies to provide much-needed power.

Advances in geothermal drilling techniques are also helping give the industry new life. Companies are deploying methods traditionally used to extract oil and gas, including fracking, to use the Earth’s heat. New technology is making the process cheaper and easier to deploy, while also expanding the areas suitable to drill for geothermal energy. 

These factors are among the reasons analysts at the Rhodium Group project that next-generation geothermal technology can meet up to 64% of expected data center-driven energy demand growth by the early 2030s.

BLM has traditionally leased land mostly in Nevada and Utah. This year, it also offered geothermal leases in Idaho for the first time. The 24,000 acres auctioned in Idaho fetched an average per-acre price of $180, which is $147 more per acre than the 2024 average. The highest bid topped out at $412 per acre. Leases usually last for a decade and the acreage varies widely.

Some companies have been bidding on leases for years. Ormat Technologies Inc., a geothermal energy technology supplier, for example, has paid more than $3.5 million to lease more than 140,000 acres of land since 2014. 

But there are newcomers as well. Chinati Minerals LLC, a subsidiary of geothermal energy company Fervo Energy, submitted winning bids for the first time this year. Fervo and Ormat did not respond to requests for comment.

Winning the land leases is the first step in the process, and it will likely take years for these parcels to start producing energy. Some land may never actively produce, something that’s true for a large number of oil and gas leases. (Those tracts aren’t necessarily idle, though.)

“If current trends are any indication, geothermal developers are likely to once again spend big to secure promising resources,” Stephanie Diaz, a senior associate in tech and innovation at BloombergNEF, wrote in a report.

Talking tech

Drill skills are universal

FEMA searches for critics

By Margi Murphy, Lauren Rosenthal, and Zahra Hirji

Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images North America

Federal Emergency Management Agency personnel who signed an open letter criticizing President Donald Trump’s cuts to disaster funding have been interrogated in recent weeks in an effort to determine the names of colleagues who endorsed the letter anonymously or distributed it, according to people familiar with the investigation and documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.

The interviews with FEMA workers have been carried out by the agency’s division that investigates employee misconduct, and those interviewed have been told they risk being fired for failure to cooperate. The employees have been instructed not to bring counsel, according to people familiar with the process.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, declined to comment “on ongoing investigations.” A FEMA spokesperson said the agency does not comment on personnel issues.

Nearly 200 current and former staffers co-signed the Aug. 25 whistleblower letter, which included a petition to Congress seeking workforce protections against “politically motivated firings.” Of the 192 signatories, 154 chose to remain anonymous.

The probe is unfolding as FEMA faces the final months of hurricane season, which could still whip up storms capable of striking the US. The investigation also comes as the Environmental Protection Agency fires staffers who signed an open letter critical of Trump leadership. At least 15 EPA staffers have been let go, including nine last week, according to Justin Chen, president of the federal union American Federation of Government Employees Council 238.

The Whistleblower Protection Act gives federal employees the legal right to voice opinions on matters of public concern, including potential dangers to public health and safety, without adverse impacts on their jobs.

Read the full story.

Greg Jackson, chief executive officer of Octopus Energy Ltd. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

The UK used to be a shining example of how to act on climate change. It created one of the world’s first climate laws in 2008, which bound the government to reduce emissions on tight deadlines. That law used to have cross-party support, but that’s no longer the case with politicians trying to make climate a wedge issue. Greg Jackson, chief executive officer of the UK’s largest energy retailer, Octopus Energy, joins Akshat Rathi on the Zero podcast to discuss his plan to bring down bills and keep the public on the green side.

Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

“Climate-related shocks are likely to be wide reaching and secular, rather than narrow and cyclical,” said Kevin Stiroh. He was the Federal Reserve’s top-ranking official overseeing climate risk but left earlier this year after it wound down large parts of its work on monitoring how global warming is impacting financial stability.

Brazil repealed a fine of the world’s largest meatpacker that stemmed from the company’s purchase of cattle raised in one of the Amazon rainforest’s most-destroyed reserves. The decision risks unraveling four years of work by state inspectors and prosecutors.

Australia’s coal state Queensland plans to keep running its coal-burning power stations beyond 2035, threatening the nation’s ambitious goal to more than double renewable generation by the end of the decade.

The Trump administration may spend foreign aid on saving polar bears in Greenland and snow leopards in Nepal, the Washington Post reported Thursday. The plan seems at odds with the president’s America First agenda and diplomats and researchers alike are “stunned” by it, the paper said. The State Department said it was exploring creative ways to spend down foreign aid while building ties with partners.  

An oil industry group pointed to a scientist’s involvement in a major climate report as a potential source of bias. Friederike Otto specializes in attribution science, which assesses the influence of global warming on individual weather disasters. The group said her role could lead the United Nations-sponsored research to be “hijacked by climate litigation supporters,” E&E News reported Thursday. The criticism comes amid efforts by the Trump administration to delegitimize mainstream climate science. 

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