Climate tech companies are going public. What’s next?

This year, there’s been a wave of notable energy companies going public via IPO in the US. The solar and battery company Solv Energy went public in February, to the tune of $6 billion. X-energy, which is building small modular nuclear reactors, did the same in April, and its stocks surged on its first day of trading to hit a $11.5 billion market cap. Most recently, the geothermal company Fervo Energy went public in mid-May, and its market cap is now about $12.4 billion . Those are all success stories in the IPO world. And it certainly doesn’t feel like a coincidence that all these companies are racing to provide electricity in an era of rising demand (partly due to data centers). Let’s take a look at how these firms are doing, what this moment says about the grid, and what’s coming next. Let’s start with Fervo Energy, a company we’ve covered a lot over the years that’s working to develop enhanced geothermal energy. (We included it on our 2025 list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch.) While conventional geothermal requires finding specific spots with hot rock, water, and fractures to support a power plant, Fervo essentially uses fracking techniques to create the necessary conditions. The company was founded in 2017, and it raised about $1.5 billion from investors over the years before its IPO. Fervo’s first commercial project, Cape Station in Utah, is expected to have a capacity of about 500 megawatts. The first unit is set to start generating power for customers by October and the next two units by January 2027. The new funding from the IPO could help the company scale. Fervo currently has over 600 megawatts’ worth of binding power purchase agreements. And it has leases for land that could together generate more than 40 gigawatts of electricity. (As of 2024, the entire US geothermal fleet had a capacity of just 4 gigawatts .) The company also has an eye on cutting construction and drilling costs—its Cape Station plant is expected to cost about $7 per kilowatt , whic