UK's first geothermal plant opens, extracts lithium
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- Geothermal Engineering Ltd opened the UK's first geothermal plant near Redruth, Cornwall on Thursday, feeding electricity to the National Grid while also extracting lithium from the mineral-rich hot water — a dual-purpose operation nearly 20 years in development.
- The facility will generate enough renewable electricity to power 10,000 homes, and within a decade GEL projects it will produce enough lithium carbonate to supply approximately 250,000 electric vehicles annually.
- The process drills more than three miles into the Porthtowan Fault Zone to access 190C water; after driving turbines the water cools to 50C — ideal for lithium extraction — and is re-injected through a second, shallower well to recharge the reservoir.
- The 0.6-hectare (1.5-acre) site has created about 100 jobs in engineering, geology and chemistry, with GEL sourcing employees, contractors and raw materials locally, tapping into a Cornish mining heritage that once made one nearby area 'the richest square mile on Earth.'
- Rachel Reeves called the project 'pioneering' and said Cornwall could become 'a vital player' in Britain's energy security, while University of Exeter's Harry Pitts framed it as 'securonomics' — building sovereign capability in critical minerals and energy.
- GEL acknowledged that developing the geothermal reservoirs is likely to cause minor seismicity, though no issues have been reported to date.
Why it matters: For a region the local MP describes as 'one of the most deprived in northern Europe,' the plant fuses two government priorities on a single 1.5-acre site: 10,000 homes of renewable power and a domestic lithium source sized for 250,000 EVs a year within a decade. GEL's 20-year project positions Cornwall as a working test case for 'securonomics' — sovereign control over both energy and battery-grade minerals.
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