MIT

With reporting by Molika Ashford

(Part 1 of 3 on Geothermal Energy)

As America’s love affair with coal cools off, geothermal energy is getting hot, hot, hot.

Why? Because the secret is out of the bag: geothermal is cheap and abundant.

For $800 million to $1 billion in R&D funding – spread out over 15 years -- geothermal could be deployed on a scale that would produce more than 100,000 MW of additional new (low-emissions) capacity in the US by 2050.

That’s less than the price of one 275 MW clean-coal plant and more than 360 times more energy.