Share of utility-scale installed capacity, by source
This interactive map and sortable table show the major geothermal power plants and complexes in the United States, 34 plants color-coded by the three plant technologies: dry steam (1), flash steam (9) and binary cycle (24). US geothermal capacity is about 3.9 GW, almost entirely in the western states, led by California and Nevada, with plants also in Utah, Oregon, Idaho, New Mexico and Hawaii. Plants are shown across all statuses: active (29), in development (3) and decommissioned (2) (geothermal currently has no standby plants), including next-generation enhanced geothermal (EGS) projects now under construction. Together, the 29 active geothermal plants mapped here have a combined capacity of about 3,500 MW (~3.5 GW).
Capacity is what is installed; generation is what actually ran. Geothermal holds 0.26% of US utility-scale generating capacity and produced 0.35% of the electricity in 2025, an implied capacity factor of 51.6% on a nameplate basis. Nuclear is the extreme case in one direction, at 7.32% of capacity for 17.70% of generation; solar is the extreme in the other, at 12.50% for 6.67%.
Sources, basis and how the totals reconcile
Sources. Generation is EIA Electric Power Monthly, Table 1.1, Net Generation by Energy Source: Total (All Sectors), annual 2025 row. EIA marks 2025 and 2026 values as preliminary; 2024 and earlier are final, so these shares may be revised. Capacity is this site’s own datasets from EIA-860 (2025 early release), reconciled against EIA-860M (June 2026).
Basis. Both charts cover utility-scale plants of 1 MW or larger, generating sources only. Battery storage is excluded from the capacity chart because it shifts power rather than producing it, and estimated small-scale rooftop solar (93,148 GWh in 2025) is excluded from the generation chart so the two stay comparable.
Totals. The generation slices sum to 4,434,820 GWh. EIA’s published net total is 4,429,502 GWh, being that figure less 5,320 GWh of net pumped-storage hydro, which EIA reports as a negative because pumping consumes more electricity than generation returns, and a further 2 GWh that EIA attributes to independent rounding. Pumped storage is left out of the pie because a negative value cannot be drawn as a slice. Percentages use largest-remainder rounding at two decimal places so each chart adds to 100.00%.
Category notes. EIA reports wind, biomass and geothermal as one 526,246 GWh category; the split here carries a one-unit adjustment on wind so the three reconcile to that published total. Biomass covers wood and wood waste, black liquor, landfill gas, sludge waste, agricultural byproducts and biogenic municipal solid waste. Other fossil gas is blast furnace gas, gaseous propane and other manufactured waste gases; Other is hydrogen, non-biogenic municipal solid waste, batteries, purchased steam, sulfur and tire-derived fuel. One definitional seam is worth knowing: EIA-860 files gaseous propane under petroleum products, while Table 1.1 files it under other fossil gas, so the same fuel sits in the Petroleum slice on the capacity chart and the Other fossil gas slice on the generation chart. Only one 2.3 MW plant is affected.
Share of utility-scale electricity generated, by source
EIA preliminary data
Geothermal is a baseload resource: unlike solar or wind it runs at close to full output around the clock. The only real diurnal shape comes from ambient temperature, because air-cooled binary units lose condenser efficiency when the afternoon is hot and regain it overnight, so output peaks in the early morning and dips in the late afternoon.
Method: this is a modeled profile, not metered data. The 24-hour mean of 51.6% is the implied annual capacity factor, calculated as 2025 generation from EIA Electric Power Monthly Table 1.1 divided by the nameplate capacity of the active fleet on this page multiplied by 8,760 hours. EIA’s own published capacity factors use net summer capacity as the denominator and therefore run higher. The hourly shape applies the documented operating behaviour of this technology to that mean and is indicative rather than measured; metered hourly output would come from the EIA Hourly Electric Grid Monitor, which is not yet wired into this page.
| # | Plant | Type | State | Nearest city | Operator | Status | Capacity | Online |
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The oldest design. Steam is drawn straight from an underground reservoir and piped directly to spin the turbine. It needs a rare, very hot, vapor-dominated resource; in the US that is essentially only The Geysers in California.
The most common utility-scale type. High-pressure hot water (above ~360°F) is sprayed into a lower-pressure tank, where it “flashes” to steam that drives the turbine. Used across the Imperial Valley, Coso and several Nevada fields.
Hot geothermal water heats a second fluid with a low boiling point through a heat exchanger; that fluid vaporizes and drives the turbine in a closed loop. It works at lower temperatures, so nearly all newer US plants, and enhanced geothermal (EGS) projects, are binary.
Dry steam plants use steam piped directly from the reservoir; flash steam plants (the most common) drop high-pressure hot water to a lower pressure so it “flashes” to steam; and binary-cycle plants pass geothermal heat to a second working fluid with a low boiling point, in a closed loop. Most newer US plants are binary because they run at lower resource temperatures.
About 3.9 gigawatts of installed nameplate capacity as of 2024, the most of any country, producing roughly 0.4% of US utility-scale electricity. Almost all of it is in the western states.
EIA reports utility-scale geothermal plants in seven states: California and Nevada dominate, followed by Utah, Hawaii, Oregon, Idaho and New Mexico. California alone accounts for roughly two-thirds of US geothermal generation.
The Geysers in northern California, a complex of dry-steam plants in Sonoma and Lake counties with about 1.5 GW of operating capacity, is the largest geothermal development in the world.
Enhanced geothermal systems create or improve a reservoir by drilling and stimulating hot, low-permeability rock, using techniques borrowed from oil and gas. This unlocks sites without natural hydrothermal flow. Fervo Energy’s Project Red (Nevada) and its Cape Station project (Utah) are leading US examples.
Unlike wind and solar, geothermal runs around the clock regardless of weather, with capacity factors often above 70–90%. That makes it a dispatchable, baseload source of carbon-free electricity.
Geothermal is the most geographically concentrated source on the website. Almost every plant sits in the West, where tectonic activity brings heat close to the surface. The biggest clusters are at California’s Geysers, the largest geothermal complex on Earth, and across Nevada’s basin-and-range country. Binary-cycle plants, which use a secondary working fluid to capture lower-temperature resources, dominate the count, while a few flash and dry-steam plants tap the hottest reservoirs.
At roughly 3.5 GW of active capacity, geothermal is small, but it offers something wind and solar cannot: round-the-clock, weather-independent renewable power. That is why its development pipeline is watched closely. Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), which engineer reservoirs in hot dry rock rather than relying on natural steam fields, could unlock the resource far beyond the volcanic West, and the first next-generation projects are now under construction. If EGS scales, geothermal could graduate from a regional curiosity to a national source of firm clean power. For the bigger picture, see how it fits the overall US power mix.