fresh funding

Chesapeake Energy backs Houston geothermal tech co. in $17M series A

Houston-based Sage Geosystems announced the first close of $17 million round led by Chesapeake Energy Corp. Photo via sagegeosystems.com

A Houston geothermal startup has announced the close of its series A round of funding.

Houston-based Sage Geosystems announced the first close of $17 million round led by Chesapeake Energy Corp. The proceeds aim to fund its first commercial geopressured geothermal system facility, which will be built in Texas in Q4 of 2024. According to the company, the facility will be the first of its kind.

The venture is joined by technology investor Arch Meredith, Helium-3 Ventures and will include support from existing investors Virya, LLC, Nabors Industries Ltd., and Ignis Energy Inc.

“The first close of our Series A funding and our commercial facility are significant milestones in our mission to make geopressured geothermal system technologies a reality,” Cindy Taff, CEO of Sage Geosystems, says in a news release. “The success of our GGS technologies is not only critical to Sage Geosystems becoming post-revenue, but it is an essential step in accelerating the development of this proprietary geothermal baseload approach. This progress would not be possible without the ongoing support from our existing investors, and we look forward to continuing this work with our new investors.”

The 3-megawatt commercial facility will be called EarthStore and will use Sage’s technology that harvests energy from pressurized water from underground. The facility will be able to store energy — for short and long periods of time — and can be paired with intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar. It will also be able to provide baseload, dispatchable power, and inertia to the electric grid.

In 2023, Sage Geosystems debuted the EarthStore system in a full-scale commercial pilot project in Texas. The pilot produced 200 kilowatt for more than 18 hours, 1 megawatt for 30 minutes, and generated electricity with Pelton turbines. The system had a water loss of less than 2 percent and a round-trip efficiency (RTE) of 70-75.

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This article originally ran on InnovationMap.

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A View From HETI

A new joint venture will work on four projects supplying 5 gigawatts of power from combined-cycle power plants for the ERCOT and PJM Interconnection grids. Photo via Getty Images.

Houston-based power provider NRG Energy Inc. has formed a joint venture with two other companies to meet escalating demand for electricity to fuel the rise of data centers and the evolution of generative AI.

NRG’s partners in the joint venture are GE Vernova, a provider of renewable energy equipment and services, and TIC – The Industrial Co., a subsidiary of construction and engineering company Kiewit.

“The growing demand for electricity in part due to GenAI and the buildup of data centers means we need to form new, innovative partnerships to quickly increase America’s dispatchable generation,” Robert Gaudette, head of NRG Business and Wholesale Operations, said in a news release. “Working together, these three industry leaders are committed to executing with speed and excellence to meet our customers’ generation needs.”

Initially, the joint venture will work on four projects supplying 5 gigawatts of power from combined-cycle power plants, which uses a combination of natural gas and steam turbines that produce additional electricity from natural gas waste. Electricity from these projects will be produced for power grids operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and PJM Interconnection. The projects are scheduled to come online from 2029 through 2032.

The joint venture says the model it’s developing for these four projects is “replicable and scalable,” with the potential for expansion across the U.S.

The company is also developing a new 721-megawatt natural gas combined-cycle unit at its Cedar Bayou plant in Baytown, Texas. Read more here.

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