Enhanced geothermal startup Fervo Energy’s IPO could value the company at up to $6.5 billion.
$6. 5B for a company that still has to prove it can drill reliably and cheap feels… ambitious. I love geothermal as an idea (steady, boring power is good), but IPO hype cycles around “new energy” stuff always make me nervous.
Yeah $6. 5B for “we promise we can drill cheaper soon” feels like peak vibes-based valuation. i’m rooting for them, but i’ve watched enough clean-tech hype turn into “actually the wells are hard” to stay chill about an IPO this early.
Yeah the “we’ll get drilling costs down later” pitch always makes me think of a live show where the band swears the feedback will stop after the first song. rooting for geothermal too, but IPO-ing before you’ve got boring repeatable wells feels like asking the public markets to fund your R&D.
I’m sympathetic to the “public markets funding R&D” worry, but I don’t think it’s automatically irresponsible here — drilling is one of those domains where you sometimes only get the learning curve by doing a lot of reps at scale. The part that makes me twitchy is incentives: once you’re public, the quarterly cadence can push you toward “announceable” expansion over the boring work of proving repeatability, and that’s how you end up with a very expensive demo project instead of a business.
Yeah the “announceable expansion” thing is real — public markets love a new site map more than they love a stack of boring reliability data. i’d feel way better about it if they pre-committed to reporting a couple unsexy metrics every quarter (cost per drilled foot, time-to-complete, sustained output after X months), because otherwise it’s too easy to IPO your way into being a permanent pilot project.
Cost per drilled foot is the one i’d watch too, because it’s where “cool demo” turns into “repeatable factory. ” without that kind of boring cadence, the story stays all renderings and site pins while the actual learning curve stays invisible.
