The new consortium is led by the Center for Public Enterprise, a New York–based think tank, and the nonprofit organization Constructive, with geothermal companies, investors, and potential customers serving as advisers to the states. The effort was inspired by CPE’s April 2025 report calling on policymakers to “deliberately build the legal, financial, and market infrastructures” to accelerate enhanced geothermal projects.
As part of the effort, the four participating states will work to coordinate their permitting processes to speed up approvals and have agreed to share data needed to find and build new geothermal plants. They will also work to improve regional grid interconnections for the projects and to create financing mechanisms that encourage both public and private investment.
Among the biggest barriers to scaling geothermal is what CPE has called “a vicious cycle” in project financing.
In order to get money to build projects, developers must first spend millions of dollars to drill exploration and test wells to prove their systems can produce sufficient amounts of energy over time, while also showing they can bring down drilling costs. “However, providing this evidence requires additional drilling and larger operational datasets, which require capital the sector does not possess,” CPE said in a separate 2025 report.
To break that bottleneck, states could work with the federal government to replicate projects like the Utah Forge site across the region and take on much of that risky, expensive early work, according to CPE. They could also provide short-term public loans and create prepayment structures that help boost the cash flow and creditworthiness of projects to attract private investors.
At this week’s launch event, Ben Serrurier, Fervo’s director of government affairs and policy, said his firm is excited to work with the states “on the financing solutions that can have us be drilling more wells in new places, bringing down costs faster … and finding where we can do projects we never thought projects were possible.”
Cox said a key goal of the Mountain West consortium will be to bring “some heft” to Washington, D.C., to advocate for federal funding and policies that support a geothermal expansion. Over 90% of identified U.S. geothermal resources are on federally managed lands, and federal permitting processes can be slow and cumbersome — though recent reforms by the Bureau of Land Management and bipartisan bills in Congress all aim to streamline permitting for geothermal projects.
“If it’s just one state going it alone, that’s great, but you don’t get the attention, the capital, the investment that you need,” Cox said.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, agreed. “The more that we can work to harmonize and de-risk investments in geothermal … we can really support geothermal nationally,” he said.
{
if ($event.target.classList.contains(‘hs-richtext’)) {
if ($event.target.textContent === ‘+ more options’) {
$event.target.remove();
open = true;
}
}
}”
>
