Oil and gas isn’t the only source of energy lurking under our feet. Drill deep enough and the Earth’s temperature stays consistent enough that it can be a source of heating and cooling for homes, offices, and data centers.
But in many regions, geothermal wells today bottom out at around 500 feet, a limitation that is largely dictated by the sort of drilling equipment that’s typically used.
“It’s pretty shallow, and you’re going to need two or three times the amount of space if you only go to those depths,” Joselyn Lai, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Energy, told TechCrunch.
To minimize geothermal’s footprint, Bedrock drills deeper.
“In a cooling dominant location that can very well be 800 to 1,000 feet, which is three times more space efficient. And in a heating dominant location, that can very well be 1,000 to 1,200 feet or even more, which is two times more space efficient,” Lai said.
Because it doesn’t need as much land, Bedrock has been targeting commercial buildings where land tends to be at a premium. It completed its first two installations last year, one at an office building in Austin, Texas, and another at a resort in Utah. For installations like these, Lai said that the company expects to be profitable on a project basis in the next year.
Bedrock has also started to explore applying geothermal cooling to data centers. Last fall, the startup partnered with Dominion Energy to study the space.
One of the main challenges is that data centers are one-way users of geothermal energy. Since servers generate heat 24/7, data centers would be dumping heat into the ground year round. Contrast that with other users like office buildings, which tend to cool in the summer and heat in the winter, leading to a more balanced annual energy budget.
Still, it’s looking promising, Lai said. What’s underground can make a difference: fast flowing ground water, for example, can cool things off more quickly. The boreholes would need to be spread out compared with other installations, raising overall costs. But Bedrock’s data analysis, developed with experience gleaned from the oil and gas sector, suggests that geothermal would be a good fit for data centers, especially when paired with solar farms, which also need large tracts of land.
“Broadly speaking, cooling with geothermal is about twice as efficient as cooling with water and air, especially at the hottest times of the day when it’s very, very humid, which is what happens in a lot of states that have data centers,” Lai said.
Geothermal’s other benefit is how consistently it uses electricity. Because the Earth’s temperature is relatively stable, the heat pumps that transfer energy to or from a geothermal reservoir don’t have to ramp up or down to compensate for changes in air temperature, as air-source heat pumps do. For large electricity users like office buildings and data centers, that can be a boon to the bottom line since utilities typically charge heavy users more when their demand spikes.
Lai said that the outlook for geothermal remains promising enough that the company continues to invest in expanding operations and research and development, focusing on automation to speed installations. To support that growth, Bedrock recently raised a $12 million Series A led by Titanium Ventures. Energy Impact Partners, and Sustainable Future Ventures with participation from Cantos, Elemental Capital, First Star Ventures, Overture Ventures, Toba Capital, and Wireframe Ventures.
