There is so much energy stored in the ground beneath our feet that experts at the Department of Energy (DOE) believe geothermal power could generate 60 gigawatts, or nearly 10% of the nation’s electricity, by 2050.
Karl Hoyland, co-founder and CEO of Zanskar, believes this high figure is too low, mainly because it discounts the potential of conventional geothermal.
DOE’s numbers assume advances in enhanced geothermal, which uses hydraulic fracturing technology to access hot rocks deep underground. Companies like Fervo and Sage Geosystems are pursuing that angle, and experts agree it has tremendous potential. By contrast, traditional geothermal power generation, which harnesses natural hotspots, has stagnated, generating just 4 gigawatts in the United States, and has grown by only about 1 gigawatt over the past decade or so.
Traditional geothermal has been held back by outdated assumptions, Hoyland told TechCrunch.
“They underestimated how many undiscovered systems there were, probably more than an order of magnitude,” Hoyland said. With modern drilling technology, “we can get a lot more energy out of each one, perhaps an order of magnitude more out of each one. All of a sudden, that number goes from tens of gigawatts to potentially terawatts.”
Zanskar state is relying on AI to break the traditional geothermal slump. Along the way, the startup has restarted a declining power plant in New Mexico and discovered two new power plants with a combined potential of more than 100 megawatts.
With these successes, Zanskar has raised 115 million in Series C led by Spring Lane Capital with participation from All Aboard Fund, Carica Sustainable Investments, Clearvision Ventures, Cross Creek, GVP Climate, Imperative Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Munich Re Ventures, Obvious Ventures, Orion Industrial Ventures, Safar Partners, StepStone Group, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments. We were able to win a million dollars. Tranquillion, Union Square Ventures, University Growth Fund, UP.Partners.
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Hoyland said many potential geothermal areas have been overlooked because people have been looking for surface evidence of hot springs and volcanoes. But about 95% of all geothermal systems lack such tellurium, he added. “We just keep finding them by accident. This is a great application of AI.”
To find new geothermal resources, Zanskar first feeds a variety of data, including past serendipitous discoveries, to a supervised machine learning model. Once a promising site is identified, the company sends a team to the site to verify its findings.
After that, Zanskar has to come up with a development plan. To do so, the team is using another AI approach called “Bayesian Evidence Learning” (BEL), which was developed for this very purpose. In BEL, existing data helps build a set of hypotheses known as the “prior,” and the model disguises those hypotheses and spits out probabilities for each. Where there is a gap, startups have built geothermal simulators to fill the void.
So far, Zanskar’s approach has worked well. In the previous funding round, the startup was able to explore three sites, each of which was considered successful. “Three out of three,” said Zanskar co-founder and CTO Joel Edwards. “What happens if we try 10?”
Hoyland said the company has enough sites in its pipeline to support at least 1 gigawatt of generating capacity. For now, they’re focused on the western United States, where the potential is greatest. He hopes to find at least 10 verified sites that support project finance investors in Zanskar courts, offering access to lower-cost funds than venture capital. If the company can do that, it could overcome the valley of death that has afflicted many other climate change technology startups.
Hoyland is not convinced that Zanskar has solved all the challenges associated with discovering geothermal resources, but he is optimistic that the company is on the right path.
“We now know this is the future of exploration,” he said. “This is going to change geothermal energy in the short term.”
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