8 Things We Learned From Fervo’s IPO Filing
Fervo, the enhanced geothermal company that uses hydraulic fracturing techniques to drill thousands of feet into the Earth to find pockets of heat to tap for geothermal power, is going public.
The Houston-based company was founded in 2017 and has been a longtime favorite of investors, government officials, and the media (not to mention Heatmap’s hand-selected group of climate tech insiders) for its promise of producing 24/7 clean power using tools, techniques, and personnel borrowed from the oil and gas industry.
After much speculation as to when it would go public, Fervo filed the registration document for its initial public offering on Friday evening.Here’s what we were able to glean about the company, its business, and the geothermal industry from the filing.
1. Fervo thinks enhanced geothermal will be huge
The main theme of the document, known as an S-1, is the immense potential enhanced geothermal — and, thus, Fervo — has.
The company says that its Cape Station site in Utah, where it’s currently developing its flagship power plants, had “4.3 gigawatts of capacity potential” alone. That’s more than the 3.8 gigawatts of conventional geothermal capacity currently on the grid. Enhanced geothermal technology, otherwise known as EGS, “has the potential to make geothermal generation as ubiquitous as solar generation is in the U.S. today,” the company projects. (There’s about 280 gigawatts of installed solar capacity currently in the U.S., according to the Solar Energy Industries Association) “A broader subset of our reviewed leases represents over 40 gigawatts” of capacity, the document goes on.
Like all investor pitches, the S-1 features some eye-popping “total addressable market” figures. Citing analysis by the consulting firm Rystad, the document says that if there’s a sufficient shortfall in capacity due to retiring power plants (98 gigawatts by 2035), the annual market for enhanced geothermal would be approximately $70 billion by 2035, and that this would represent some $2.1 trillion in revenue potential over 30 years.
2. Scaled generation isn’t happening yet, but will likely come soon — and there’s plenty more to come
The company is already producing 3 megawatts at its Nevada Project Red site for the Nevada grid as part of a deal with Google. It also expects to begin generating power from the Cape Station site “by late 2026,” according to the filing, and get up to 100 megawatts “by early 2027.” In total, Fervo has “658 megawatts of binding power purchase agreements,” which it says represents ”approximately $7.2 billion in potential revenue backlog.”
Beyond that, Fervo says it has 2.6 gigawatts “in advanced development,” and “over 38 gigawatts” in “early-stage development,” where it’s still doing feasibility studies to “validate and confirm the path toward commercial development.”
3. Costs are high but should come down
Fervo says that the energy produced from its Cape Station facility will come in at around $7,000 per kilowatt. That’s already cheaper than “traditional and small modular nuclear power,” which the Department of Energy has estimated costs $6,000 to $10,000 per kilowatt, the filing says. Fervo is aiming to get the total project costs down to $3,000 per kilowatt, at which point it says it would outcompete natural gas without any of the price volatility due to fuel costs going up and down.
But Fervo’s upfront spending is still immense. Fervo says that it expects some $1.2 billion in capital expenditure this year, of which only $125 million is going toward the first phase of its Cape Station project, which it has said would deliver 100 megawatts of power. (Meanwhile, the $940 million it expects to spend on the second phase, which is due to be 400 megawatts, is mostly unfunded.) The company says the public offering will fund “project-level capital expenditures,” as well as land holdings and general corporate expenditures.
4. Fervo is very tied up with Google.
Google comes up some 36 times in the document, most times in reference to the “Geothermal Framework Agreement” Fervo signed with the hyperscaler this past March. The S-1 describes the deal as a “3-gigawatt framework agreement … to advance and structure potential power offtake opportunities for current and planned data centers in both grid-connected and alternative energy solutions.” This deal, the company says, “establishes a structured process for the development of geothermal projects across specified regions of the United States,” and could involve the offtake by Google of up to 3 gigawatts of Fervo-generated electricity by the end of 2033.
What the framework is not is a power purchase agreement. One of the risk factors Fervo lists in the IPO document says, “The GFA is a non-binding agreement, and does not obligate Google to purchase power from us.” Instead, it is “a binding framework under which we may propose geothermal development projects to Google, but it does not obligate Google to accept any project, execute any power purchase agreement or provide us with any project financing.”
The agreement also places limits on Fervo, including from whom it can accept investment or financing. (The deal outlines a “broad category of entities defined as competitors,” which are all no-nos.) Overall, the company says, the arrangement gives Google “significant priority over our near-term development pipeline and may limit our flexibility to pursue alternative commercial, strategic, or financing arrangements that would otherwise be available to us.”
5. Fervo’s leadership and founders will maintain substantial control
Upon going public, the company will have two shares of stock: Class A shares available to the public, and Class B shares owned by its founders, chief executive officer Tim Latimer, and chief technology officer Jack Norbeck. These Class B shares will have 40 times the voting rights of the class A shares and will allow Latimer and Norbeck to “collectively continue to control a significant percentage of the combined voting power of our common stock and therefore are able to control all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval.”
These arrangements are familiar with venture-backed, founder-led software companies. Alphabet and Meta are the most prominent examples of large, publicly traded companies that are under the effective control of their founders thanks to dual class share structures. Tesla, rather famously, does not have a dual class share structure, which is why CEO Elon Musk convinced his board to award him more shares so that he would maintain a high degree of influence over the company.
6. The company is spending a lot with almost no revenue
While other technology companies such as Stripe pile up billions in revenue without any near term prospects of going public, Fervo largely has spending to report on its income statement.
In 2025, the company reported just $138,000 in revenues with a $58 million net loss; that’s compared to a $41 million net loss in 2024. The revenues were “ancillary fees associated with rights to geothermal production at Project Red,” the company said. “This type of revenue is not expected to be significant to our long-term revenue generation, as we have not yet commenced large-scale commercial operations.”
And there’s more spending to come.
Fervo expects that the second phase of its Cape Station project will “require approximately $2.2 billion in capital expenditures through 2028,” which it hopes to pay for with project-level financing.
8. It’s still figuring out its tax credits
Fervo said it is “continuing to evaluate the effect of the OBBB” — that is, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which slashed or curtailed tax credits for clean energy companies — and that it wasn’t able to “reasonably” estimate the effect on its financial statements by the end of last year. The company does say, however, that it “may benefit from ITCs and PTCs (including the energy community and domestic content bonuses available under the ITC and PTC, in certain circumstances) with respect to qualifying renewable energy projects,” referring to the investment and production tax credits, which acquired a strict set of eligibility rules under OBBBA. It cautioned that the current guidance regarding tax credit eligibility is “subject to a number of uncertainties,” and that “there can be no assurance that the IRS will agree with our approach to determining eligibility for ITCs and PTCs in the event of an audit.”
The company also disclosed that earlier this month, it reached a deal with Liberty Mutual, the insurance company “to sell and transfer tax credits generated at Cape Station Phase I,” taking advantage of a provision of the law that allows credits to be sold to other entities with tax liability, and not just harvested by investors in the project.
