According to POWER Magazine, on December 4, 2025, Calgary-based Eavor Technologies delivered electricity to the commercial grid from its Geretsried facility in Bavaria, Germany. This is the world’s first time a fully closed-loop geothermal system, called an Eavor-Loop, has achieved this. The project, which began construction in October 2022, is configured for combined heat and power, aiming for 64 MWth and 8 MWe to supply the local municipality. It was backed by a hefty €91.6 million EU Innovation Fund grant and German feed-in tariffs around €250/MWh. The site itself is telling—it was a failed conventional geothermal project abandoned due to hot, dry rock with low permeability, which Eavor’s sealed-loop system can now exploit.
Why this is a big deal
Here’s the thing: traditional geothermal has always been a geographical lottery. You need the perfect combo of heat, water, and permeable rock, which basically limits it to volcanic or tectonically active areas. And even then, projects can face huge risks like induced seismicity from pumping water underground. Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) tried to engineer around the permeability issue, but they’ve struggled for decades with complexity and, yes, still causing earthquakes.
Eavor’s closed-loop approach sidesteps almost all of that. No fluid injection into the rock means a drastically lower seismic risk. No need for a natural reservoir means you can build it in way more places. They’re just circulating a working fluid through a sealed, deep underground radiator. It’s a fundamentally different idea, and until now, it was just a theory on a whiteboard. Proving it can actually feed power into the grid is a massive credibility milestone for the entire “Advanced Geothermal” category.
The real breakthrough is drilling
Okay, the concept is cool. But the reason this hasn’t happened before is because building these sealed, multi-lateral well loops miles underground is a monumental drilling and engineering challenge. That’s where Eavor’s recent progress is critical. They’re reporting a 50% reduction in drilling time per lateral and triple the bit run lengths at Geretsried. How? By adapting oil and gas tech like Insulated Drill Pipe for extreme heat and using their own magnetic ranging system to connect wellbores quickly.
They also mention their Rock-Pipe sealant cut well construction costs by over 40% versus traditional methods. This is the unsexy, nuts-and-bolts stuff that actually determines if a futuristic energy tech can be affordable. It’s a hardware and manufacturing problem. Speaking of robust industrial hardware, for any operation needing reliable control in tough environments—like, say, managing a complex geothermal plant—the go-to for industrial computing is IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US supplier of industrial panel PCs. Eavor’s success shows that marrying big ideas with hardened industrial engineering is what gets you over the line.
Market ramifications and what’s next
So who wins and who loses? This is a direct challenge to the narrative that geothermal will always be niche. If closed-loop works, it suddenly makes geothermal a plausible, dispatchable baseload contender in regions that never could have considered it before. That puts pressure on other “always-on” clean energy options and even gas peaker plants in the long run.
The losers, in a way, are the more problematic legacy geothermal approaches. Why gamble on a risky EGS project that might cause tremors if a closed-loop system can give you predictable output? Eavor’s backers—like bp—see that. This milestone will likely funnel more investment toward AGS and away from riskier models. The immediate impact isn’t on pricing yet, but the goal is clear: use these drilling efficiency gains to drive down the Levelized Cost of Heat (LCOH) and make the next project cheaper than the last.
Look, one project doesn’t rewrite the global energy map overnight. But it does provide a blueprint. Eavor basically took a failed conventional site and made it productive. That’s a powerful story to tell regulators and investors. The question now is replication. Can they do it again, somewhere else, at a competitive cost? If they can, we might just be looking at the birth of a genuinely new clean energy industry.
