A recent press release issued in Washington, DC, included an announcement by US senators Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto wherein they sent a letter to the Chair and Ranking Member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development asking them to support the President’s request to include more than $200 million in the Fiscal Year 2023 budget for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Geothermal Technologies Office to support a reliable, clean energy source for the United States.
Noted in the letter written by the Senators, increased investment into geothermal energy offers valuable benefits, including “a renewable energy source available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week”, and to “reduce our dependency on foreign sources of energy” among a few others.
The aforementioned funding would support the development of geothermal in the US through the Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) of the government, which plays a critical role in bringing together different industry partners for R&D opportunities to build innovative, cost-effective tools to explore and produce geothermal energy.
The request of the GTO is to increase its budget to $202 Million USD. The letter outlined US states with valuable resources to pursue, including “western states like Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Hawaii, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah all have significant potential for increased geothermal energy production. With additional funding, the GTO can robustly deploy their multi-year program plan across these states and the rest of the nation, constructing over 28 million geothermal heat pumps and 17,500 geothermal district heating installations by 2050”.
Read the full press release.
