Somebody paid $701 an acre for the right to drill into New Mexico rock this June — a federal record — and the average bid across the whole sale tripled from what land like this went for even a few years back. Only 17% of parcels sold at the government’s two-dollar floor price, down from 76% in 2019. That’s the tell. When almost nobody’s paying the minimum anymore, you’re not looking at leftover land nobody wanted. You’re looking at a line of people who did their homework.

Geothermal isn’t the story I keep circling this month — that’s turbines, and Mitsubishi’s backlog just jumped from 23 GW to 35 GW year over year — but it rhymes with something underneath all of it. Everyone’s trying to buy their way past the same scarcity from a different angle. Mitsubishi and Siemens are selling machines with multi-year waits. OATI, meanwhile, just applied for federal funding on software it says can unlock 10 to 20% more transmission capacity from wires that already exist, no new steel required. The electrical equivalent of finding a spare room by rearranging furniture instead of building an addition.

Drill for something new, buy a machine with a three-year lead time, or squeeze the system you’ve already got. I’d guess the third option gets the least press and probably deserves the most, going by the ratio of press releases to actual freed-up megawatts. Utah runs its own geothermal sale on the 18th. We’ll find out if New Mexico’s prices were a fluke or a floor.

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