The Canadian startup's closed loop system, which circulates fluid through sealed underground pipes without fracking, faces a delayed second loop and an open question about who funds it.
Under the rolling farmland south of Munich, Eavor Technologies drilled something the geothermal industry had never quite managed before: a sealed network of deep wells that circulates fluid through closed underground pipes, harvests heat from hot rock without fracking or a natural reservoir, and uses it to spin a turbine. The first of four planned loops at the Canadian startup's flagship Geretsried project started delivering electricity to Germany's grid late last year, a milestone the company itself frames as crucial because nothing like it had reached commercial-scale generation before.
That first loop works. The second one is the open question.
Eavor is now publicly revising the timeline for Loop 2, which had been targeted for earlier this spring, and is actively searching for new project partners and outside investors to fund the next phase, according to Matt Toews, the company's co-founder and chief technology and operating officer. "We're looking to make Loop 2 happen as soon as practical and in the best form that we can," Toews told Canary Media, which reported the status update today.
The Geretsried site is designed to deliver 8.2 megawatts of electricity and 64 megawatts of district heating once all four loops are running, and the project has backing from a 91.6 million euro grant under the EU Innovation Fund. Those numbers describe the design point, not what is currently operating. What is currently operating is one loop, with the rest of the system waiting on capital and a revised schedule.
The reason for the slip is not financial, at least not on the record. Toews said the company hit major engineering challenges while drilling the initial deep wells for the closed-loop network. The company says it has fixed the problems, but the fixes ate into the timeline. Eavor's own diagnosis, and Toews's revised framing of when Loop 2 will start, are the only public version of those events; no independent technical review has been published.
That matters because Geretsried is the closest thing the next-generation geothermal field has to a working, grid-connected proof point. Conventional hydrothermal plants tap existing hot-water reservoirs; Eavor's design instead seals a heat exchanger inside the rock itself, which in principle lets the technology work in many more locations but pushes more of the drilling difficulty onto the operator. Loop 1 reaching the grid was the industry's first data point on whether that trade actually pays off at scale. The data point is positive. It is also one.
The unresolved part is the partner question. Eavor has not named which outside investors or project partners it is in conversations with, and the new Loop 2 timeline is explicitly unspecified, per Toews. The company frames the search as a structural choice about who helps it build the next-generation system, not a rescue. Whether that framing holds depends on who eventually shows up, and on what terms.
The rest of the enhanced-geothermal field is watching. Several competing efforts, including projects pursuing similar closed-loop designs and others using different approaches to fracture hot rock, are still years from grid connection. Eavor's experience is the first concrete read on the drilling cost and schedule risk that any next-generation geothermal developer will eventually face. The lesson so far is that the engineering can be made to work. The lesson still to come is who is willing to pay for it twice.