Joselyn Lai

The first half kilometer of dirt under any building in the world holds free thermal energy. Joselyn Lai's entire company rests on that one stubborn fact. "There is free thermal energy in the shallow subsurface, that first half kilometer, everywhere in the world, and it's not that hard to tap into it," she says. The hard part was never the physics. It was the cost, the space, and the months it took.

Bedrock Energy, the company she co-founded in 2022 and runs as CEO from a building on East Cesar Chavez Street in Austin, does something the geothermal industry mostly refused to do: it drills deep. Conventional residential geothermal wells stop around 300 to 850 feet. Bedrock's go 1,000 to 2,000. Deeper wells mean more thermal contact per hole, which means fewer holes, which means a parking lot instead of a soccer field. The footprint shrinks by more than 60 percent, and suddenly a downtown office tower or a multifamily block can sit on top of its own power plant.

Lai is not a driller by training. She is a Harvard economics graduate who spent roughly a decade in sustainability startups - sustainable agriculture, transportation, a strategy seat at Bain & Company, and a stint as Head of Operations at PickTrace, a Y Combinator-backed company digitizing farm labor. What she kept running into was the same wall: green ideas that did not pencil out. Her response became something close to a personal creed.

So she went looking for a partner who could make the numbers work. She found Silviu Livescu, a former chief scientist at Baker Hughes who had spent a career building the drilling tools that pull oil and gas out of the ground. They were introduced through the climate investor Overture Ventures. Livescu's insight was almost subversive: the same coiled-tubing drilling techniques the oil industry perfected for extraction could be pointed straight down at clean energy instead. Bedrock's team is now stocked with oil-and-gas veterans who traded crude for comfort.

The choice to build on old, proven technology rather than invent something speculative was deliberate. Geothermal works. It has worked for decades. What was broken was the business case, and that is a much friendlier problem for an economist than reinventing thermodynamics. "We make it cheaper, make it take up less space, do it faster so it doesn't create delays in your construction process," Lai says. Bedrock layers autonomous drilling hardware over AI-driven subsurface models, gathering real-time data as the bit goes down so each well is faster, cheaper, and more predictable across wildly different geologies.

Heating and cooling is the single largest energy expense in real estate, and Lai's argument to building owners is unsentimental: this is a money decision before it is a climate one. "Heating and cooling buildings is the largest energy expense in real estate, and geothermal HVAC can cut that energy bill in half, improve resilience, and reduce air pollutants for residents by 90 percent," she says. The financial kicker lands harder. "You could be adding something like $10-15 in value per square foot of your property, which could be millions of dollars."

And the asset does not wear out the way people expect. "These assets can last - my goodness, they can last 100 years," she says. "Solar lasts 20 years, but a geothermal field really could be the lifetime of the building or longer." A landlord installs it once and it quietly outlives the mortgage, the renovation, possibly the owner.

The early customers are the ones who run hot all the time: hospitality, multifamily, healthcare, and increasingly data centers. In 2024 Bedrock completed its first two installations - an office building in Austin with CIM Group and a Utah resort - and partnered with Dominion Energy to study geothermal cooling for data centers, where the heat never takes a seasonal break. By 2025 the pipeline stretched across Texas, Colorado, and Utah, and Lai expects projects to turn profitable on a per-project basis within a year.

The vision she keeps returning to is mundane in the best way: she wants geothermal to be boring. As common as a solar panel on a roof, as unremarkable as a thermostat. The technology is ancient, the heat is free, and the only thing standing between a building and its own underground power plant was a business model nobody had bothered to fix. Lai is fixing it from the ground down.