The only renewable Trump kept goes public

On the morning of May 12th 2025, Tim Latimer, the chief executive of Fervo Energy, sat before the House Natural Resources Committee and made a pitch that would have sounded incoherent from any other clean-energy executive. The federal government, he told the panel, could "unleash geothermal dominance" by implementing "sound federal land management policies"—phrasing that echoed the "energy dominance" framework of Mr Trump's January 2025 executive order declaring a national energy emergency. Mr Latimer, a former BHP drilling engineer who began his career in the Eagle Ford shale, was not arguing that geothermal could survive the new administration's clean-energy retrenchment. He was arguing that geothermal belonged inside it.

On Monday, that argument acquired a price tag. Fervo, of Houston, filed terms for an initial public offering that would raise as much as $1.33 billion and value the company at roughly $6.5 billion at the top of its $21–$24 share-price range. The offering will price on May 12th, exactly one year after Mr Latimer's testimony. JPMorgan, Bank of America, RBC and Barclays are leading. Shares will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker FRVO.

The price tag is partly a power-supply story (the company has roughly $7.2 billion of potential power-purchase revenue under contract, most of it for data-center demand) and partly a political-architecture one. On July 4th 2025, less than two months after Mr Latimer testified, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The legislation eliminated the production and investment tax credits for solar and wind projects whose construction begins after July 4th 2026, with placed-in-service deadlines of December 31st 2027. Geothermal, hydro, fuel cells, nuclear and other firm-power technologies kept full credit eligibility through 2033, with a phased step-down to 2036. Three days after signing, Mr Trump issued an executive order directing the Treasury to enforce the solar-and-wind termination "strictly". Most analysts at the time read the bill as a clean-energy retrenchment. The more precise reading is that it was a redistribution: against the intermittent, in favor of the firm.