Sage Geosystems brings its first geothermal plant online in Texas
Sage Geosystems ran a 3MW enhanced geothermal pilot near Christine, Texas for over 120 days and reported water losses below 10% of the volume cycled.
Photo by Markus Distelrath on Pexels
Sage Geosystems has run a 3MW enhanced geothermal pilot plant near Christine, Texas for more than 120 days of grid-connected operation, and reported losing under 10 per cent of the water it cycled through the reservoir. The Sage Geosystems geothermal facility, which the company calls its SMECI plant, was placed in service and disclosed on 19 August 2026. Canary Media, which reported the milestone the same morning, described it as only the third enhanced geothermal system connected to the US grid.
The plant sits on land next to San Miguel Electric Cooperative’s lignite-fired power station in Atascosa County, under a 2024 land use agreement. Sage built its own substation and sells intermittently into ERCOT. The company began selling electricity in the second quarter of 2026.
Water loss is the number Sage is putting forward
Enhanced geothermal works by fracturing hot, dry rock and moving water through it to pick up heat. Water that migrates into the surrounding formation is water that never comes back up, so loss rates set both the efficiency and the economics. Sage states it “demonstrated water losses of less than 10% across multiple cycles, indicating that most of the water remains in the system”.
That result should be read against the company’s own earlier target. In August 2024, Sage told POWER Magazine that water losses for the Christine project were “targeted to be less than 2%”, citing a 2023 pilot in Starr County that had reported the same figure. The delivered result is above that target, and Lev Ring, Sage co-founder, president and chief technology officer, now frames below 5 per cent as the forward goal. Neither Sage nor Canary Media published a measurement methodology, and no third-party verification is claimed.
Cindy Taff, co-founder and chief executive, said the results “validate the core elements of our approach […] and provide a clear path toward reliable, commercial-scale geothermal power”. Ring framed the technical claim more narrowly: “Commercial geothermal isn’t just about creating a reservoir; it’s about creating one whose performance can be engineered, predicted, and consistent.”
How Sage’s method differs from Fervo’s
Sage pumps and stores large volumes of water in an engineered fracture network. Pressure builds mechanically as the hot water pushes against the surrounding rock, and is released when a valve at the wellhead opens. Canary Media states this “is different from other enhanced projects, which use fractures to flow water between two wells without pressure”. Fervo Energy, the best-known operator in the field, uses horizontal well doublets with continuous flow. The Christine facility is single-well.
Sage has renamed its approach twice. It marketed a “Geopressured Geothermal System” in 2024, switched to “Pressure Geothermal” in January 2026, and the 19 August release uses neither, describing instead a “proprietary EGS approach”. Conventional geothermal, by contrast, depends on what Taff called “very unicorn geology”: the few places where heat, water and permeable rock coincide near the surface. The engineering problem of reaching heat elsewhere is the subject of our overview of the future of geothermal drilling.
The three US grid-connected enhanced geothermal projects to date are small, and two of the three capacity figures need qualifying.
| Project | Operator | Capacity | Grid connection | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Desert Peak 2, Churchill County, Nevada | Ormat Technologies | 1.7MW added | April 2013 | A 38 per cent output gain from stimulating an existing well, funded by $5.4m from the US Department of Energy and $2.6m from Ormat. Canary Media, citing Ormat, reports it no longer generates power |
| Project Red, Blue Mountain, Humboldt County, Nevada | Fervo Energy | 3.5MW peak | 30 October 2023 | Fervo’s own two-year data give average gross output of 2.1MW and average net output of about 1.4MW |
| SMECI facility, Christine, Atascosa County, Texas | Sage Geosystems | 3MW | Second quarter 2026 | The 3MW rating dates from the 2024 project announcement; Sage’s 19 August release states no capacity figure |
Sources: US Department of Energy EGS demonstration projects page; Ormat press release, 10 April 2013; Fervo Energy, 13 April 2026; Sage Geosystems and Canary Media, 19 August 2026; POWER Magazine, 15 August 2024.
What comes next, and what slipped
Sage’s next step is Nevada, not Texas. Under a commercial agreement announced by Ormat on 28 August 2025, Sage will pilot its technique on hot dry rock at an existing Ormat plant, supplying hot water to equipment that is already built and already connected. That removes the cost and delay of a new grid interconnection. Ormat holds the right to develop, build, own and operate plants using Sage’s methods if the pilot succeeds. The site has never been named by either party. Ormat’s first-quarter 2026 filing records that it paid $25 million on 16 January 2026 for under a 20 per cent stake in Sage, and received $12 million of equity in exchange for future services, carrying the investment at $37 million as of 31 March 2026.
Taff told Canary Media that Sage expects to begin drilling its first Nevada well later this year, produce electricity in 2027 and reach full-scale production in 2028, and that the Texas results will “directly inform and de-risk” the Ormat work. That timeline appears in no Sage or Ormat release or filing, and Sage has not said how large the Nevada system will be.
The 150MW agreement with Meta, announced on 26 August 2024, has moved behind it. Both parties described the deal as covering “up to 150 MW” and said the first phase would “aim to be online and operating in 2027”. Canary Media now reports that Sage will begin developing the Meta capacity only once full-scale production is reached in 2028. The site has still not been named, and neither release uses the term power purchase agreement.
Background
Enhanced geothermal remains a rounding error in US generation, and the gap between what is running and what federal projections assume is wide.
Geothermal produced about 16 billion kilowatt-hours in the United States in 2025, roughly 0.4 per cent of national generation, from plants in seven states. California accounted for 68.6 per cent of that output and Nevada 24.7 per cent. No federal dataset breaks out enhanced geothermal separately, because EIA collection forms have no category for it; the only commercial EGS capacity documented in the 2025 US Geothermal Market Report is Fervo’s Project Red.
Sage Geosystems was founded in 2020 in Houston by Cindy Taff and Lev Ring, both former Shell drilling executives, with the premise that oilfield fracturing and completion techniques could be redirected at hot dry rock. Its earliest funding came from the climate investor Virya and the drilling contractor H&P, at an undisclosed amount. Federal support has come from defence rather than energy budgets: three Air Force and Army awards totalling about $2.7 million between February 2021 and August 2024, including a $1.9 million enhanced geothermal contract at Ellington Field in Houston. Separate demonstrations at Fort Bliss and NAS Corpus Christi were announced in 2024 without disclosed values. The company closed a $17 million Series A first close in February 2024 led by Chesapeake Energy, which it said would fully fund the Texas project, and over $97 million in Series B in January 2026 co-led by Ormat and Carbon Direct Capital.
The wider field is drawing capital on the strength of demand for round-the-clock clean power, a theme visible in the $26.1bn of climate tech venture funding recorded in the first half of 2026, in which low-carbon data centre technology took 34 per cent of the total. Fervo has 500MW under construction at Cape Station in Utah, with first power from its initial 100MW phase targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026, and companies such as Quaise are pursuing deeper heat still, as covered in our report on Quaise’s $134M raise for superhot geothermal energy. Against that, Sage’s Texas result is modest in megawatts and specific in what it tests: whether a pressure-cycled fracture reservoir holds its water well enough to be modelled and repeated.
Sources: Sage Geosystems via Business Wire; Canary Media; POWER Magazine; Ormat Technologies; Sage Geosystems via Business Wire; US Department of Energy; US Energy Information Administration; Fervo Energy
Featured image: photo by Markus Distelrath on Pexels (free Pexels license).
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I specialize in sustainability education, curriculum co-creation, and early-stage project strategy. At WINSS, I craft articles on sustainability, transformative AI, and related topics. When I’m not writing, you’ll find me chasing the perfect sushi roll, exploring cities around the globe, or unwinding with my dog Puffy — the world’s most loyal sidekick.
