The Geothermal Technologies Office’s (GTO) Data, Modeling, and Analysis (DMA) program supports data compilation and collaboration needs by collecting, analyzing, and disseminating data related to geothermal energy.
Expanding geothermal deployment in the United States requires high-quality data and collaboration, and lots of it. Information on all aspects of geothermal development—from resource assessments and drilling to project costs and timelines—is vital to help identify and address barriers to geothermal adoption, assess technical progress across the geothermal sector, and prioritize research.
Work in GTO’s DMA program includes examining nontechnical barriers to geothermal deployment like project permitting, evaluating market trends, conducting technology impact and regulatory analyses, identifying best practices, and outlining investments needed to refine the geothermal research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) portfolio.
GTO places significant emphasis on making data available to industry, academia, financiers, utilities, policymakers, and other stakeholders. All GTO-funded projects are required to upload their data to the Geothermal Data Repository for public use. Those data are complemented by Final Technical Reports that GTO researchers upload to OSTI.gov at project completion.
Data Access and Further Resources
All Data, Tools, and Other Technical Resources
Bureau of Land Management Geothermal Guidance
Geothermal Data Repository (GDR)
DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.gov)
U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
Permitting for Geothermal Power Development Projects
Regulatory and Permitting Information Desktop Toolkit (RAPID)
GTO's DMA Efforts
Geoanalysis Initiative
The DMA team set out to completely restructure its capacity to handle short- and long-term strategic analysis, with a focus on geothermal valuation, deployment, and techno-economic analysis. This is similar to analysis work other renewable energy offices in EERE are doing. With the Geoanalysis Initiative, GTO’s objective is to spur more collaboration and better accounting for geothermal in energy planning models that inform high-impact analyses within and external to DOE. The goal is to create a geothermal analytical capabilities toolkit and ensure that modeling tools integrate geothermal systems effectively. In particular, GTO is working to create tools that better assess geothermal energy’s cost and value for both the generation and demand sides of the bulk energy system.
Through the Geoanalysis Initiative, GTO has pursued a wholesale revitalization of geothermal representation in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) analysis ecosystem and how geothermal technologies are represented within underlying NREL data and models that are subsequently applied to high-impact NREL research. The result of this comprehensive initiative is significant expansion of geothermal representation across nearly all relevant energy system, planning, and foundational modeling work supported by NREL, paving the way for greater awareness of the potential in geothermal technologies and integration of geothermal in broader high-impact energy analyses. Specific successes include:
The Renewable Energy Potential (reV) visualization model is a detailed spatial-temporal modeling assessment tool that empowers users to calculate renewable energy capacity, generation, and cost while taking into consideration grid infrastructure and land-use characteristics and constraints. Prior to GTO’s work under this initiative, reV’s capabilities were limited to calculations for concentrating solar power, solar photovoltaics, and wind. As part of GTO’s work on modeling improvements within this initiative, hydrothermal and enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) resources have been implemented in reV, providing a pathway in power modeling that will help demonstrate the value of geothermal power. reV now accounts for geothermal resource estimates, can incorporate resource depth uncertainties, and provides visualization capabilities for resource-infrastructure-development needs. In 2023, the reV model was selected for an R&D 100 Award, an annual honor R&D Magazine bestows upon the 100 most innovative technologies of the past year.
Urban Renewable Building and Neighborhood Optimization (URBANopt) is a GTO-funded open-source platform for modeling community- and district-scale thermal and electrical networks. Through this GTO effort, geothermal heat pump (GHP) analysis capabilities are now included within URBANopt’s District Energy System module, allowing users to size and simulate custom district GHP systems for building loads connected to the system. URBANopt interfaces with the open-source Ladybug Tools’ Dragonfly module, enabling building architects, engineers, and consultants to model district GHP systems. An open-source ground heat exchanger sizing tool called GHEDesigner, originally developed through an Oak Ridge National Laboratory project with support from Oklahoma State University, is integrated into the URBANopt GHP workflow through capability enhancements contributed by NREL.
NREL’s Renewable Energy Optimization (REopt) is a techno-economic decision support tool that allows users to evaluate the economic viability of a variety of renewable energy options for commercial and small industrial facilities. GTO and Federal Energy Management Program support allowed GHP capability expansions within REopt, including distributed water-to-air, central plant, and hybrid geothermal system configurations. Ongoing GTO-sponsored development aims to couple REopt and URBANopt to enable techno-economic analyses of district GHP systems.
The NREL-developed BuildStock™ (ComStock™ and ResStock™) modeling programs help answer two questions: how is energy used in the U.S. building stock, and what is the impact of energy saving technologies? GTO’s efforts to incorporate GHP modeling into these tools culminated in GHP inclusion for the first time in 2023, enabling users such as building owners and managers to perform scenario analysis to consider adoption, next-generation system performance, and potential benefits of implementing GHPs in their building(s). Users can see how this resource works with other renewable energy technologies to aid in decarbonization, create projections of different technology scenarios and large-scale decarbonization impact analyses, and integrate data with other tools. This project is paving the way for geothermal technologies to become more mainstream and help states, municipalities, utilities, and manufacturers identify which improvements save the most energy and money.
Grid Cost and Total Emissions Impacts from Mass Deployment of Geothermal Heat Pumps
In 2023, the DMA program supported Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to conduct an analysis assessing potential grid-related and other impacts of national-scale mass deployment of geothermal heat pumps (GHPs). The analysis culminated in a technical report detailing researchers’ findings, including significant reductions in electricity demands and the need for grid buildouts.
The Geothermal Data Repository
The Geothermal Data Repository (GDR) provides free public access to data generated GTO-funded research projects, filling an important need for the research community, industry, utilities, energy planners, financiers, and others interested in geothermal. The GDR includes data that touch all aspects of geothermal research, development, and demonstration.
Since its inception, the GDR has provided an accessible home for terabytes (TB) of geothermal data that have been downloaded and used far and wide, fostering the expansion of research and development in geothermal technologies and providing a blueprint for other data access platforms to emulate. By every measure, the GDR has succeeded in rapidly expanding accessibility to critical geothermal data: as of January 2025, the system boasts over 14,000 active users, available data on the GDR now top 287 TB from just 10 gigabytes in 2012, and cumulative data downloads have grown exponentially to reach over 17.7 million.
NREL has built a set of “data pipelines” that can automatically detect and translate high-value datasets into industry standard-based frameworks upon submission to the GDR. The GDR team targeted three initial high-value data types to pilot—drilling data, geospatial datasets, and seismic data (e.g., distributed acoustic sensing)—all of which are now automatically applied to relevant user data upon submission. This paradigm shift takes most of the burden of data standardization off the user and project teams, allowing more project resources to be used on research and development activities and increasing the availability of standardized geothermal data available through the GDR.
Other Initiatives
The DMA program uses data to help inform the direction and prioritization of GTO’s RD&D through analysis and strategic planning. Two prevailing documents that guide GTO are (1) the 2019 GeoVision analysis, which projects growth for geothermal energy through 2050; and (2) the FY2022-FY2026 GTO Multi-Year Program Plan, which provides a high-level technology plan for GTO RD&D to support the growth and long-term contribution of geothermal energy to the U.S. electricity grid and U.S. homes and buildings.
The DMA program’s initiatives seek to develop and improve geothermal tools and resources to help the public and geothermal stakeholders assess regulatory needs, simulate the impacts of geothermal energy on communities, and stay updated on geothermal development and technologies.
Other examples of the DMA team’s work to improve geothermal resources and tools:
- Analysis efforts enabled by the Federal Geothermal Partnerships initiative, a collaboration between GTO and the Federal Energy Management Program focused on establishing a technical assistance framework with an innovative workflow that will result in more accurate models and recommendations and deployment-ready reports.
- Support for engagement with state and local stakeholders such as those in Hawaii and Alaska, with a focus on determining (1) the energy needs of communities; (2) how geothermal may be able to help meet these needs; and (3) potential federal funding mechanisms to assist in developing geothermal resources for selected communities.
- A University of Vermont project that will develop tools to help communities understand the impacts and benefits of consuming energy that they generate locally.
- The U.S. Geothermal Power Production and District Heating Market Report, which identifies where the geothermal power sector is primed for technological innovation and highlights significant opportunities for expanding power production.
Permitting
GTO’s DMA program co-led an interagency task force with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that gathered multiple federal and state agencies to discuss challenges and opportunities related to geothermal regulatory approvals and permitting, resulting in a report of findings. GTO and BLM continue to collaborate with an interagency working group focused on process improvements to geothermal project permitting on public lands.
GTO's 2019 GeoVision analysis and its supporting task force report on barriers examine key regulatory, permitting, and land-access barriers to geothermal development. The modeling in this effort indicates that an expanded Categorical Exclusion for Exploration Drilling and a Centralized Permitting Office could reduce project timelines enough to drive conventional geothermal power capacity to exceed 12GW by 2050 – a 113% improvement over the Business-as-Usual (BAU) baseline.
For more guidance on understanding and addressing the permitting process, visit GTO’s Permitting for Geothermal Power Development Projects page.
Geothermal Hybrid Projects
To establish new opportunities and methods for geothermal power and industrial heat expansion across the United States, GTO supported five national laboratory projects to evaluate the use of geothermal hybrid projects. Hybridizing and linking geothermal energy with other generation technologies can drive operational synergies and optimize the combined beneficial attributes of multiple technologies. Research conducted through this lab call aimed to help build the case for commercial pathways and expand the breadth of viable geothermal resources.
- Idaho National Laboratory: Techno-economic analysis of solar topping cycle hybrid geothermal power plants for retrofit and greenfield applications.
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Techno-economic analysis and market potential of reservoir thermal energy storage charged with solar thermal and heat pumps.
- Brookhaven National Laboratory: Cements and a modeling tool to calculate their viability under various exploitation conditions of high-temperature reservoir thermal energy storage systems.
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: Data Centers project
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory: EXERGETIC project
Non-Technical Barriers
The DMA program commissioned a research and analysis project to assess non-technical barriers to geothermal, resulting in four technical reports:
- Salton Sea Geothermal Development: Nontechnical Barriers to Entry—Analysis and Perspectives
- Non-Technical Barriers to Geothermal Development in California and Nevada (read this report’s accompanying fact sheet as well)
- Economic Impact of Permitting Timelines on Geothermal Power in California, Nevada, and Utah
- Mind the Gap: Comparing the Net Value of Geothermal, Wind, Solar, and Solar+Storage in the Western United States
More information about these (and many more) DMA resources are available on our Technical Resources page and Geothermal Publications page.
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