Carl Hoiland

For thirty years, the geothermal industry mostly found new reservoirs the way you find a dropped contact lens - by accident. A driller looking for water hits scalding rock. A road crew notices steam where there should not be steam. The best clean baseload power on the continent kept turning up because someone tripped over it. Carl Hoiland looked at that and saw a market built on coincidence, and a fortune in heat that no one had bothered to systematically search for.

Hoiland is the co-founder and CEO of Zanskar, the Salt Lake City company turning that coincidence into a search engine. The premise is blunt: most of America's geothermal energy is invisible from the surface, and the tools to find it - foundation models trained on every scrap of subsurface data the industry ever collected - finally exist. "We just keep finding them by accident," he has said of hidden geothermal systems. "That is a great application for AI."

What that buys you is not incremental. In late 2025 Zanskar announced "Big Blind," a reservoir under the western Nevada desert with zero surface manifestation - no springs, no geysers, no prior wells, nothing. It is, by the company's account, the first blind geothermal system found and confirmed commercial by US industry in more than three decades. Two intermediate wells drilled in July and August 2025 hit a roughly 250°F permeable reservoir at about 2,700 feet. The discovery wells only reached the top of it.

The love of rocks is inherited. Hoiland traces it to his grandfather, who spent most of a working life prospecting - first for uranium, then for gold. The grandson kept the instinct and swapped the commodity. Instead of metal, he chases heat. Instead of a pan and a Geiger counter, he runs probability distributions.

He took the long road through the science first. Hoiland earned a Ph.D. in geological sciences from Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow studying the tectonics of the North American Cordillera and using low-temperature thermochronology to understand fault-hosted geothermal systems. A stint as an NSF GROW visiting researcher took him to Stockholm University. Afterward he was an Activate Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the program that bankrolls scientists trying to turn hard research into companies.

In 2019 he and Joel Edwards, now Zanskar's CTO, founded the company. They named it after the Zanskar range in the Himalayas, a place where, as they like to put it, expedition and geology collide. The pair had both seen the limits of traditional exploration up close: slow, expensive, and prone to missing the real prizes. They set out to make finding clean heat look less like an expedition and more like a query.

Discovery was the proof. Construction is the plan. Before Big Blind, Zanskar showed it could revive what others had given up on: in May 2025 the team tripled production at the Lightning Dock plant in New Mexico, a flagging operation that AI-guided geoscience brought back to life. The Pumpernickel site in northern Nevada hit roughly 280°F at about 2,500 feet, another validation that the models point drills at real heat.

The $115 million Series C, announced in January 2026 and led by Spring Lane Capital with Obvious Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital and a long roster of energy and infrastructure funds, brings Zanskar's total equity to roughly $180 million. The capital is earmarked to scale exploration drilling and, crucially, to start building - the company is planning a fleet of power plants in 20-megawatt increments, sized to slot neatly into Western markets' small generator interconnection rules. Reports point to roughly six 20-MW plants targeted within three to four years, drawn from a multi-gigawatt pipeline.

Hoiland's stated near-term aim is almost financial poetry: lock in at least ten confirmed sites. Ten proven discoveries is the threshold where the project-finance world - the cheaper, patient capital that builds infrastructure - takes geothermal seriously, instead of leaving it to venture money. Find enough heat reliably, and clean baseload power stops being a science project and becomes a balance-sheet asset.

It is a big swing dressed in geologist's restraint. The number Hoiland keeps returning to - terawatt-scale - is the kind of figure that gets a founder either remembered or quietly forgotten. He seems content to let the drill bit settle the argument.