This piece form TWW’s John Karakoulakis was first published by RealClear Energy on June 25, 2025 and can be accessed here.
How a Small Colorado University Became a National Leader on Geothermal Energy
By John Karakoulakis
June 25, 2025
If you follow national energy policy, you may have noticed that geothermal technology is trending, so to speak.
Geothermal technology harnesses the constant temperature below ground – sometimes hundreds of feet deep, sometimes thousands of feet – to provide energy for heating, cooling and generating electricity.
Geothermal uses many of the same drilling and fracking techniques used in the oil and natural gas industry, and it produces energy consistently around the clock – unlike other renewable sources like wind and solar that are highly weather dependent.
This may explain why the Trump administration is paying so much attention to geothermal as part of its broader energy dominance agenda.
“This is just an awesome resource that's under our feet,” U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told a geothermal energy event held in Washington, D.C. in March. “Let’s work together to better energize our country, improve quality of life, drive [artificial intelligence] innovation, support manufacturing reshoring, and stop rising electricity prices.”
Make no mistake – it’s a good thing that official Washington is paying more attention to geothermal. But like most good ideas in America, it didn’t get started in D.C.
Instead, you can look to the communities of the American West, starting with Grand Junction, Colorado.
More than 15 years ago, Colorado Mesa University started a major geothermal energy program on its campus in Grand Junction. While planning the construction of Dominguez Hall, it’s first new academic building in years – CMU leaders saw an opportunity to change the way the campus met its cooling needs in the summer and its heating needs in the winter.
They identified geothermal heat pumps as the optimal solution for heating, ventilation, and cooling. Starting with a single series of boreholes, drilled to a depth of 500 feet, CMU’s geothermal energy system has expanded into four interconnected borehole fields linked by an 18-inch diameter pipe that snakes across the entire campus.
This “central loop” now serves an area of 1.2 million square feet across 16 buildings. Through Western Colorado’s hot summers and cold winters, the system effectively moves cooled air and heated air between buildings and even within individual rooms to ensure year-round comfort.
But the innovative design doesn’t stop there. When the central geothermal loop accumulates excess heat, it isn’t wasted. Instead, this surplus energy is diverted to CMU’s Olympic-sized swimming pool and the campus irrigation and domestic water systems, which together act as heat sinks.
CMU’s geothermal system now provides a staggering 90% of the energy required to operate its campus buildings. The system currently saves roughly $1.5 million per year in energy costs, and total savings since 2008 stand at almost $16 million. Those cost savings support lower tuition rates and increased scholarships for CMU students.
The CMU system is now viewed as a model, not just for other universities, but for small cities across the country that want to upgrade their cooling and heating systems with cost-saving geothermal technologies.
Another Western community that’s leading the way on geothermal is Milford, Utah.
About 12 miles northeast of town, construction is underway on the Cape Station advanced geothermal plant – a large-scale facility that will use underground heat sources to generate electricity.
Cape Station is scheduled to start sending electricity to the grid in early 2026. With a planned capacity of 500 megawatts, the facility will generate roughly half as much electricity as a large-scale nuclear reactor – making it the largest advanced geothermal project in the world.
In part, the site outside Milford was chosen because of its proximity to a major geothermal research center and the presence of transmission lines that will connect the power plant to major centers of electricity demand.
But another major factor is the region’s oil and natural gas industry, which has the supply chains and skilled workers that can also be applied to advanced geothermal energy projects.
Ronald Reagan once observed that “small towns and townships have always played a vital part in American life.” Hopefully, our current generation of leaders in Washington, D.C. will remember these wise words across a range of issues, energy included.