Our goal is to compete with the cost of fossil fuels all around the pacific. The company is built around low cost, large scale, fast to deploy power generation.
Our CapEx is driven by 3 major verticals: drilling, power generation, and power transmission.
- Drilling is expensive from a day rate perspective, but since our wells are shallow and productive the cost/MW is quite reasonable.
- Our generators are modular, binary systems that use CO2 as a working fluid. They are very power dense due to the CO2 power cycle, the high temperature heat source, and the effectively infinite cold sink. Since we design and build the generators ourselves in our Seattle factory, we can work the cost down aggressively. The largest expense right now in the generator are the heat exchangers.
- Transmission cost is addressed through amortization over larger projects. Transmission for a 1GW project is approximately half the cost of a 50MW project with the same distance to shore. In either case, we are helped by the very high capacity factor of geothermal.
Our OpEx is reduced by not doing any in-situ maintenance. Instead we swap generators when they come to the end of their maintenance cycle, then refurbish them back at the factory. We recovered, charged, and redeployed Adelie in about 16 hour and it honestly felt extremely slow compared to what will be able to do.
Other big knobs on LCOE are Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) and plant life. WACC will go down as we prove reliability, and since our generators are power dense and modular we can deploy more projects in more regions at a faster rate to improve bankability. Plant life is helped by refurbishing and swapping generators so even if the generator is designed for only a few years of operation, the overall project will remain operational for 30+ years.
Our CapEx is driven by 3 major verticals: drilling, power generation, and power transmission.
- Drilling is expensive from a day rate perspective, but since our wells are shallow and productive the cost/MW is quite reasonable.
- Our generators are modular, binary systems that use CO2 as a working fluid. They are very power dense due to the CO2 power cycle, the high temperature heat source, and the effectively infinite cold sink. Since we design and build the generators ourselves in our Seattle factory, we can work the cost down aggressively. The largest expense right now in the generator are the heat exchangers.
- Transmission cost is addressed through amortization over larger projects. Transmission for a 1GW project is approximately half the cost of a 50MW project with the same distance to shore. In either case, we are helped by the very high capacity factor of geothermal.
Our OpEx is reduced by not doing any in-situ maintenance. Instead we swap generators when they come to the end of their maintenance cycle, then refurbish them back at the factory. We recovered, charged, and redeployed Adelie in about 16 hour and it honestly felt extremely slow compared to what will be able to do.
Other big knobs on LCOE are Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) and plant life. WACC will go down as we prove reliability, and since our generators are power dense and modular we can deploy more projects in more regions at a faster rate to improve bankability. Plant life is helped by refurbishing and swapping generators so even if the generator is designed for only a few years of operation, the overall project will remain operational for 30+ years.