内容摘要：Google has announced that its innovative advanced geothermal plant in Nevada is now operational and

Google has announced that its innovative advanced geothermal plant in Nevada is now operational and connected to the grid, pioneering an approach that promises to unlock clean, always-on geothermal energy across a much larger range of locations.

Where most geothermal projects need to seek out areas where highly-fractured, highly-permeable hot rocks are easy to get to, the Nevada plant, built in partnership with Fervo, is a pilot to prove a technique borrowed from the oil and gas industry.

As we wrote when Fervo announced its test results in July, the idea is to do for geothermal what fracking did for oil and gas, opening up resources that would otherwise be inaccessible. The company does this by drilling horizontally into deep rock, then injecting pressurized fluid to fracture the rock, creating the kind of fractured, permeable rock you need to harvest geothermal heat energy.