Reading & Listening · Last reviewed August 2026
A short and deliberately un-exhaustive list: the documents that shaped the analysis on this site, plus the grid-side research that explains why geothermal is drawing attention at all.
Read the demand material even if you only care about geothermal. The case for the sector rests on a power-system problem that has nothing to do with geothermal, and reading only geothermal sources will hand you a distorted picture of it.
How this list works
001 / The Demand Picture
Start here. These four explain the load growth and the supply gap that make the geothermal question worth asking.
NERC · January 2026 · PDF
The ten-year reliability outlook for North America: +224 GW of summer peak demand against 105 GW of announced retirements. The single best statement of both sides of the problem. Note the scope is North America, not the U.S. alone.
Grid Strategies · December 2025 · PDF
Where the 166 GW figure on the home page comes from, built from utility forecasts filed with FERC. Its authors have also publicly argued that those same utility forecasts embed unrealistically high load factors, so read it alongside its own caveats.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory · June 2026
The interconnection queue holds roughly 1,312 GW of generation and 749 GW of storage waiting for a grid connection as of end-2025, with active gas capacity up 86% year on year. The best available answer to "if demand is so high, why isn't supply arriving?"
Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy · June 2026
A literature review rather than a new estimate, which is exactly its value. It reconciles the competing load-growth forecasts and breaks the total down by driver. The fastest way to see how much of the demand story is not data centers.
002 / The Sector
Taxonomy, resource potential, cost trajectories, and the case for and against next-generation geothermal.
True North Institute · June 2026 · PDF, 8MB
The most complete single document on the sector as it stands, and the source of the EGS / GGS / ACL / SHR taxonomy used throughout this site. Long at 147 pages, but the structure makes it navigable.
True North Institute also invests in the sector it writes about. It is a named participant in Hephae Energy Technology's $17.8M Series A, announced July 2026, and Hephae is profiled on our market map. We have found no position disclosed in the whitepaper itself.
That does not make the research unreliable, and we lean on it more heavily than on any other single document. It does mean you should read it the way you would read any interested party, and it is why claims that rest on this whitepaper alone are labelled as such rather than presented as settled.
International Energy Agency · December 2024
The report that moved geothermal into mainstream energy analysis: up to 800 GW deployable worldwide, and up to 15% of global electricity demand growth to 2050. Covers heat as well as power, so read with the scope difference in mind. The executive summary carries most of the argument.
Rhodium Group · March 2025 · PDF
Models behind-the-meter geothermal against hyperscale data-center growth and finds 55–64% of it could be served economically, or 15–17 GW. The most rigorous version of the argument this site's home page is built on. Supported by Project InnerSpace, which funds geothermal.
International Energy Agency · commentary
Short, and the quickest read on the list. Useful as a current check on capital flows against the longer 2024 report, and on which policy levers the IEA thinks actually matter.
U.S. Department of Energy · March 2024 · PDF
The oldest item here and still the clearest articulation of what commercial scale-up requires: ~90 GW by 2050, and roughly $4.5B to finance the first ten first-of-a-kind projects. Read it as the baseline that later reports revise.
Clean Air Task Force · February 2025
The best plain-language entry point to superhot rock, the highest-ceiling and least proven branch of the sector. CATF advocates for SHR, so read it for the technical explanation rather than the odds.
Ongoing · data resource
Not a report but a global subsurface resource map, and the dataset behind both the IEA's geothermal work and the Rhodium data-center analysis above. Worth knowing that a single nonprofit, which is also the largest nonprofit funder of geothermal in the world, supplies the underlying data for several of the headline numbers in circulation.
003 / Listening
Individual episodes date quickly; a good show stays worth subscribing to. Listed at the show level for that reason.
Hosted by Elizabeth Cambre · Vallourec New Energies
A strong interview series covering operators, developers, association leadership, and local officials on the ground. The value is in the guests rather than the host's employer.
Produced by Vallourec, a steel-tubular supplier to the geothermal sector and a counterparty to developers this site covers. It is the one company-produced item on this list, included because the interviews are genuinely worth the time. Release schedule has been intermittent.
Short on purpose. This list grows only when something earns a place on it.
004 / Following
The reports above explain the sector. This is where you find out what happened in it this week.
Reykjavík · publishing continuously since December 2008
Daily geothermal news, and the field's institutional memory. It describes itself as "the global platform for geothermal intelligence," and the depth of the archive is a genuine research asset. If something happened in this sector over the past fifteen years, it is probably documented there. A great deal of what is on this site was easier to verify because their reporting existed first.
Deliberately broader in scope than NartIntel. ThinkGeoEnergy covers the whole geothermal market, including direct use and ground-source heat pumps, which have their own sections there, where this site covers power generation only. For anything heat-related, they are the better source, and for breaking news they are the faster one.