The Hottest Thing in Clean Energy

by | Apr 5, 2025 | The Atlantic

The United States is in the midst of an energy revolution. Under the Biden administration, the country shoveled unprecedented sums of federal dollars into clean-energy projects—battery factories, solar farms, nuclear plants—while also producing and exporting record volumes of oil and gas. President Donald Trump has vowed to ramp up energy production further, but takes a skeptical view of solar and wind power. But Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” mantra extends beyond fossil fuels. His administration is embracing geothermal energy, which is primed for a very American boom.

In the United States, geothermal energy, which uses the Earth’s heat to create electricity, supplies less than half of 1 percent of the country’s electricity, but few other clean-energy sources offer as much promise right now. Many climate activists support geothermal energy as a renewable power source that generates zero-carbon electricity. A recent report from the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm, projected that geothermal could meet as much as 64 percent of new electricity demand from data centers by the early 2030s. America is far behind rivals such as China and Russia in manufacturing solar panels or building nuclear plants. But geothermal makes use of an area of the U.S. industrial base that has grown in recent years—oil and gas production.

Cindy Taff, whose company, Sage Geosystems, is anticipating geothermal’s potential growth, told me about a recent drive she took through southern Texas that illustrated that overlap. “The same drilling rig that drilled our well in September was on a lease right off the highway drilling an oil-and-gas well,” she said, laughing. “It’s just the same.”

Taff came from the oil industry: She was once a vice president at Royal Dutch Shell who commanded a team of 350 employees using hydraulic fracturing (better known as fracking) to drill their way through five countries’ bedrock. Fracking had driven an oil-and-gas boom starting in the mid-2000s, and her team had looked at using the same technique to tap the Earth’s underground heat. At Shell, “we never actually drilled wells” to try it on geothermal energy, she told me. “It was frustrating.” The opportunity looked big enough to her that she started Sage.

Much like oil and gas, geothermal energy, which harnesses the planet’s molten core to make steam, had long been confined to the places where access came easy—the American West, where Yellowstone’s famous geysers hint at the heat below, or volcanic Iceland. In those places—generally volcanic hot spots where magma flows at shallow depths in the Earth’s crust and underground water reservoirs—geothermal energy can be a substantial source of power. Currently, it provides roughly 10 percent of Nevada’s electricity generation and as much as 5 percent of the power California produces; Iceland generates 30 percent of its electricity, and Kenya nearly half, from geothermal. Traditional coal or nuclear plants generate heat to turn water into steam, which spins turbines to make electricity. Geothermal power stations do the same using hot water from underground reservoirs.

Sage uses fracking technology to crack open hot rocks even deeper underground, enabling access to heat in more locations. The company’s drillers then inject water into the well, prying open the stone fissures and creating an artificial reservoir. When Sage releases that water, the pressure from underground shoots it upward, and the heat creates vapors that spin turbines and crank out electricity. This system can also serve as storage for weather-dependent wind and solar: Extra electricity from turbines and panels can pump water into Sage’s wells that can be released later to produce electricity.

Sage expects to have its first energy-storage facility up and running in Texas in the coming weeks, but already has a deal to sell power to Meta’s data centers. And a similar start-up, Fervo Energy, demonstrated that it could use fracking technology to successfully produce 24/7 carbon-free energy back in 2023, at a pilot project in Nevada.

Geothermal does have certain advantages compared with other sources of renewable energy. Solar and wind need large areas of land, huge volumes of minerals, and a massive new network of transmission lines. (Plus, China dominates those industries’ supply chains.) Hydroelectric dams are less dependable in a world where water is growing scarcer and precipitation harder to forecast. Nuclear reactors cost billions of dollars and take years to build; the U.S. depends heavily on counties such as Canada, Kazakhstan, and Russia for uranium fuel, and has yet to establish the infrastructure to either permanently store or recycle nuclear waste.

For now, most of the efforts to debut next-generation geothermal technology are still in the American West, where drilling is relatively cheap and easy because the rocks they’re targeting are closer to the surface. But if the industry can prove to investors that its power plants work as described—which experts expect to happen by the end of the decade—geothermal could expand quickly, just like oil-and-gas fracking did.

That the “enhanced” geothermal industry piggybacks on technology from the fossil-fuel industry also puts it in a position to grow. “In the U.S., our manufacturing base is falling apart. But we have a ridiculously good industrial base in oil and gas,” Charles Gertler, who until recently worked at the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office and co-authored a report outlining a pathway for the industry’s growth, told me. “The fact that you can just rely on many of the same tools and people and technologies and supply chains is the reason a lot of folks are so excited.” Investors have been cool on the industry since a handful of conventional geothermal projects went under two decades ago. But Gertler estimated that, if five to 10 new geothermal projects prove successful, banks will open their wallets again.  

Unlike other renewable-energy sources, the emerging geothermal sector has received little direct support from the federal government. By the time Fervo had demonstrated it could frack for geothermal energy, the Biden administration had already passed two monumental climate-spending laws, which directed billions of dollars toward technologies such as solar, wind, and nuclear power, but just $84 million for early-stage geothermal. Companies such Fervo and Sage could still benefit, though, from tax credits for producing zero-carbon electricity, if Republicans in Congress don’t repeal key parts of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

“I don’t know where that’s going,” Representative Celeste Maloy, the Utah Republican in whose district Fervo is building its first large-scale plant, told me. But she said slashing the requirements for obtaining federal permits—which her party is eager to do—could give the industry enough of a boost that “it almost doesn’t matter what happens to the IRA incentives.” (No company has made that case to her, she allowed.)

Like any energy industry, geothermal has external costs that could become bigger issues as it grows. In 2017, an early experiment in enhanced geothermal energy in South Korea triggered a serious earthquake . (Earthquakes doubled in Texas in 2021 thanks to oil and gas companies injecting sludgy wastewater into underground wells.) Locations with particularly good hot-rock resources could end up overlapping with threatened species, just as one of the nation’s biggest lithium projects ran up against an endangered wildflower or one of California’s largest solar farms put tortoises at risk . Environmentalists primed to see anything with Big Oil’s fingerprints on it as suspicious will find plenty of connections between this industry and fossil-fuel companies. And, as the industry scales up, it will use larger volumes of water.  

Fervo, for one, has been pushing to use water too brackish for agricultural or municipal purposes, Tim Latimer, Fervo’s chief executive, told me: “So we’re not really fighting with people over water even though we’re in the western desert.” Other companies, such as XGS Energy, are boring more conventional wells and keeping water contained in closed-loop pipes, eliminating the risk of losing any water at all in the process.

Electricity has to come from somewhere, though, and as demand surges, the Trump administration is winning over support even from some Democrats to keep coal plants open longer. Meanwhile, gas power plants are expanding. To keep the lights on—while keeping utility bills and global temperatures down as much as possible—the country will need to employ all available resources of clean power, and perhaps especially those the current administration is willing to support.

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Who Needs Intimacy?

by | Apr 5, 2025 | The Atlantic

Over the past decade or so, an influential set of female novelists has been circling a shared question: Given how often women are forced to understand themselves as fundamentally in relation to others (most commonly a child and/or a partner, but also parents, extended family, friends), is it possible for a woman to have an authentic, independent self? If a female narrator is extracted from her core relational ties, what kind of consciousness is left?

I am thinking here of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, whose narrator, divorced and currently apart from her children, travels and observes the world with a sense of self so hollowed out as to render her more a conduit for the musings of her interlocutors than a full-fledged character. I also have in mind Jenny Offill’s alienated wife in Dept. of Speculation , as well as Ottessa Moshfegh’s parodically disaffected protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation . Katie Kitamura’s last two novels, A Separation and Intimacies , are exemplars of this form. Her female protagonists lack the normal trappings of selfhood: They have no names, ages, or detailed backgrounds. They are loners, dispassionate and disassociated, floating through foreign places in dreamlike Woolfian internal monologue. They recall Emerson’s turn of phrase “I become a transparent eyeball.” Who are they? They’re rarely sure.

“I don’t really know what ‘authentic’ means,” Kitamura said in a recent interview about her new novel, Audition . “When you take away all of the role-playing, all of the performance, what is left? I don’t know if that’s your authentic self, or if it’s a profoundly raw, destabilized, possibly non-functioning self.” Audition, which Kitamura describes as the final entry in a loose trilogy , lingers over this curiosity about the instability of the “self,” and her bafflement at how authenticity could have anything to do with something so clearly assembled and performed.

The narrators of A Separation and Intimacies are translators, one who specializes in contemporary fiction and the other who works as a simultaneous interpreter. Her latest is yet another woman whose job is to become a vessel for other people’s words: She is a stage actor. This is a kind of stakes-raising for Kitamura. Translators are intended to be, at least in theory, impersonal transmitters of language, but an actor is someone for whom the performance of emotional authenticity is paramount, someone who is supposed to make the words convincingly their own. The actor’s career is itself a string of alter-selves.

Kitamura’s narrator is again nameless, and we learn almost nothing of her childhood, family of origin, or race, though we’re given clues that she is not white and that she is middle-aged. Her vocation requires the skill of transformation and self-abnegation, as well as a receptiveness to language and emotion not her own. Accordingly, she feels attuned to the ways in which selfhood can be permeable and subject to manipulation by persuasive narrative. The actor finds that an all-consuming story is a thrill, but “also a danger for a person of my disposition, for whom the managing of these borders was not always easy.”

This instability is a signature of Kitamura’s women. They tend to be encased in rigid professional or class structures that they observe and enter through language—a medium that Kitamura portrays as forceful but morally ambiguous. The narrator of Intimacies, who serves as an interpreter in trials of war crimes—her job, she reflects, is “to repeat the unspeakable”—comes to think that she’s neutralizing the crimes, or causing them “to recede further and further into some state of unreality.”

Audition’s plot revolves around a rupture in the border between reality and unreality for the narrator: A young man, Xavier, shows up when she’s rehearsing a new play, introduces himself, and confesses that he’s been looking for her. An article he’d read about her described her “giving up a child” many years ago, and he thinks he was that child. The actor stares at him. “He was evidently in the grip of some serious delusion,” she thinks, “or else he was a grifter of some kind, it was one or the other.”

As he talks, she acknowledges to herself that his story, if misguided, is also “a little bit comprehensible.” Back when she was single, she’d had an abortion, which had been obfuscated in the article. And she’d had another brush with maternity: Much later, after marrying her husband, Tomas, she became pregnant again. Tomas had grown emotionally attached to their future as parents and was quietly devastated when she miscarried. She was comparatively cool about the end of the pregnancy, a difference in responses that silently drove a wedge between them.

The encounter with Xavier highlights these facts of her life—she never gave birth, never became a mother—while also stirring a sense of doubt. She had noticed the way that Xavier sits back in his chair and gives a little sigh. “I realized with a growing sense of horror that I myself had made that exact gesture, had utilized it, to be more precise, many times in my work.” It is the kind of twinning of small gestures that occurs between parents and children, those epigenetic tics that subconsciously signal that two people are family. Not that she has concrete reason to question her own life history, but the assuredness with which she has just declared Xavier to be delusional or manipulative begins to waver.

[From the July/August 2024 Issue: Rachel Cusk’s lonely experiment ]

This tiny reflex draws attention to how little we know of this actor’s body (except that it has seemingly never carried a child to term)—a distancing of corporeal experience shared across the recent fictional array of silvery, cerebral female consciousnesses. Writing in The Atlantic about Cusk’s 2024 novel, Parade, the critic Nicholas Dames described this variety of fiction as a slow process of almost ascetic, transcendent self-erasure: “No more identities, no more social roles, even no more imperatives of the body—a clearing of the ground that has, as Cusk insists, particular urgency for writing by women, who have always had to confront the limits to their autonomy in their quests to think and create.” Kitamura’s actor has been constrained by both her gender and her race. As a woman of color, she has been forced repeatedly to play “only parts that were commensurate with erasure,” characters who “were quite literally silent, a moving image, and nothing else.”

The trend of alienated and disembodied female narrators can be read as a collective rejection of the social “imperatives” of the body, allowing, as the novelist Heidi Julavits suggested in her review of Cusk’s Outline, “a more complex portrait of a person—a self instead of a set of gender stereotypes.” This is a Pyrrhic victory, one that seems to preclude the possibility that a woman could create and think in concert with her body.

What’s more, these narrators commonly achieve their spectral detachment only in the ambivalent or ruinous aftermath of procreation. Offill’s narrator in Dept. of Speculation decided in her youth to skip marriage and motherhood in favor of being “an art monster,” and the novel tracks her struggle, after reversing her earlier decision, to reconcile herself to the life of a mother-wife-writer. In Outline, the narrator reveals that she has recently moved from the countryside to London, bidding farewell to “our family home,” after having “stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.” Kitamura’s actor, too, has achieved a kind of creative and professional zenith only after renouncing the prospect of such a home, and Xavier’s claim suddenly confronts her with the alternative reality of being a very different kind of character: a mother.

His declaration/question is destabilizing precisely because it is in some way seductive. Kitamura has talked about her abiding interest in the “psychological and ethical repercussions of allowing yourself to be a vessel for language,” and one can detect in her work a broader query: What are the repercussions of allowing yourself to be a vessel at all—whether for language, for art, for a child, for a beloved’s needs and desires?

This becomes the through line of Audition, which plays again and again with the idea that the shared reality of intimate relationships is merely the result of the performances that unfold between people and the flawed interpretations they invite. For the actor, what transpires is not an escape from the motherhood plot, but a vertiginous, possibly delusional slide into it. Unsure of who she and Xavier are to each other, she also begins to lose her grip on what Tomas actually knows and feels about her, and she about him.

As the novel progresses, this sense of unreality sharpens. On arriving at her apartment,

I felt as if I were entering a space long uninhabited, for a brief moment it was as if I had come into an apartment that looked exactly like my home in every last particular, down to the vase on the table in the hall and the coats hanging from the rack, and yet was not my home at all.

When she later runs into Xavier on her way to rehearsal, he seems to have completely forgotten about his claim on her and behaves warmly but professionally, explaining that the play’s director has taken him on as an assistant. “I found myself wondering if I had misunderstood or misinterpreted or even misremembered the entire unlikely thing,” she confesses. A pattern emerges: She is sure of her interactions, and sure of herself, until she is not.

Audition is broken into two parts. At the end of the first, the actor and Tomas are approaching a moment of confrontation. Part two opens with a feeling of déjà vu: The actor and Xavier are sitting across from each other in a restaurant, as they were earlier in the book. Months have passed, rehearsals are over, and the show has become a smash hit. Now Tomas is at the table and Xavier is her son—is their son. He’s asking to come live at home with her and Tomas. Tomas is making a toast. “As he lifted his glass I gazed at Tomas and then at Xavier, their faces soft and smiling in the light, united in the same expression, each an echo of the other.” When she hugs Xavier later, she remembers “what it was like to embrace him as a child, the animal scent of the skin at his neck.”

This disjuncture—a total reassembly of the terms of the story—goes unremarked upon and unexplained. The actor carries on in the same stream-of-consciousness style as before, acknowledging no memory of the terms of part one. Are we in a parallel universe? Are we in the same universe, and the narrator has somehow become psychologically destabilized? Is this a game?

As interactions among the actor, Tomas, and Xavier spiral into an ever more baroque and unsettling drama, another option suggests itself: Perhaps the three of them have embarked upon a shared performance, constructing a family where there was none, and doing it so faithfully that they never, not even in their own thoughts, break character. In a moment of strain, the actor realizes that all along, they

had been playing parts, and for a period—for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another person—the mechanism had held.

But the glamour between the actor and Xavier has dissipated, “as if it had suddenly occurred to both of us that his lines were insufficient, my characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible.”

This is the revelatory moment that these novels of female alienation inevitably confront: the dissolving of any illusion that intimacy is possible, the failure of the narratives that unify a family, the crumbling of the relational identities (mother, wife) that have pinned her in place. Instead of floating uneasily through the world of the book, the narrator rises skyward, like a balloon, totally untethered.

The formal moves by which Kitamura delivers the actor to this place are unusual and interesting, yet the trajectory toward giddy estrangement is familiar—such a staple of all these plots that it arguably now defines a subgenre of the contemporary literary novel. Why has this become a “type” of fiction, and this narrator a kind of woman with whom the literary world is preoccupied?

The untethered narrator enacts, to a degree, a welcome fantasy: that the alienation generated inside long marriages and complex parent-child relationships—or intrinsic to living in a fraying social and political world—can both provide inspiration for profound art and also be left behind entirely. In the same way, this arc imagines that the body’s burdens, demands, and constraints can be readily abandoned for an escape into pure consciousness. “I wondered also if that wasn’t the point of a performance,” the actor reflects:

that it preserved our innocence, that it allowed us to live with the hypocrisies of our desire … We don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.

But one can’t—women especially can’t—elude embodiment and entanglement in the end. Not in this country, not anywhere—not even in novels, however attenuated their characters become. We are ensnared in the real, as much as we might wish it were otherwise. The book’s end finds the actor reassembling her marriage, hoping to make peace with Xavier, and attempting to create art from inside the confusing mess of a self that she could not escape. No matter how lost in her mind or subsumed in a fiction she becomes, she must return, over and over, to her own life, home, and marriage. The tethers don’t actually vanish simply because she feels untethered.

[From the January/February 2017 issue: Rachel Cusk remakes her fiction in Transit ]

She is once again up on a stage, speaking into a theater’s waiting dark, following “a chain of words, sturdy as a cable, a voice that has been given to me.” She is playing a character patterned after her, “a woman who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real.” But this space of performance—of generating something and someone new out of the material of herself—is where she feels the most real: “Here, it is possible to be two things at once,” she recognizes. “Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind.” I won’t give away who has written the monologue. And Kitamura pulls back, too, declining to forecast a next chapter of the actor’s marriage or what new creation she might forge with her layered selves. But the question that could carry us beyond this spate of novels about the untethered woman beckons: What will this woman make once she’s back in her body and back on the ground?

This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “Who Needs Intimacy?”

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