Drilling for the Right Investors

How Dr Ryan Law Powered Up Britain's First Geothermal Power Plant

In February 2026, the UK switched on its first deep geothermal power plant. Its founder says the drilling was never the hard part.

In February 2026, Geothermal Engineering Ltd (GEL) brought online the UK’s first commercialscale geothermal electricity plant, generating three megawatts of continuous renewable power from wells extending more than five kilometres into the granite beneath Cornwall. That’s enough to supply approximately 10,000 homes through a long-term agreement with Octopus Energy.

We asked Dr Ryan Law how it feels to have the project online,

"Relief," he says.

Then, almost in the same breath, an awareness of "many more challenges to come." It is a revealing first answer. Most founders savour the milestone, but Law is already looking ahead to what's next.

A Long Road to Delivery

So what kept the company alive through eighteen years of development, in a sector most British investors would not touch?

In many ways, the answer can be found in the geology. United Downs sits on the old United Mines, once, as Law notes, "the richest square mile in the UK."

The brine that rises up the well carries around 350 parts per million of lithium, significantly higher than many comparable European geothermal resources, including projects in Germany that typically operate at closer to 180 parts per million.

Geothermal power on its own was a punishing pitch for many years. Law describes the economics as "oil and gas risk with utility return." High risk going in and modest, regulated reward coming out. Hard to love, if you are an investor.

Lithium is what changed the picture.

"We wouldn't have even mentioned it," Law says of the early years. The team then ran fluid tests in 2021, and the focus really sharpened from 2022 as the world began asking where its critical minerals came from.

Adding a mineral to the mix, Law says, "makes all the difference to your investment picture."

This is where the model becomes elegant. The power plant pays for the expensive deep drilling and cools the brine to exactly the temperature lithium extraction needs. The lithium "just comes out the backside of the power plant." The utility cost — usually the killer in European lithium processing — is one he controls, because he generates his own power.

Did he, then, set out to produce lithium carbonate specifically?

Here, Law is honest about the best approach. He could make hydroxide. He doesn't — yet.

"We'd be unwise to do that right now," he says. The processing cost is too high for the volumes involved. "Right now, carbonate is the right product for us. But that may shift."

Choosing the Right Investors

Asked how GEL will evolve as it scales, Ryan launches into a discussion on the critical importance of the right investors and the industry expertise they bring. Thrive Renewables entered the project early, bringing immense expertise across the power market. Kerogen Capital came next, bringing subsurface expertise out of oil and gas.

Most recently, in May 2026, ABN AMRO is the same logic again: banking discipline to match the company's ambition, and, crucially, a board-level mandate for geothermal lithium already in place.

"Every time you bring in an investor," he says, "bring in the right one."

Choose badly, or go it alone, and a founder risks drifting into "a sort of weird world of believing everything you say."

It is an unusually clear-eyed thing for a chief executive to articulate. The right capital, in Law's telling, is more than money,it is the additional skills injected with each investment round.

The target at United Downs is around 2,000 tonnes of lithium a year by 2028 from the wells already drilled. More wells mean more fluid, and more production. They also mean a raise of roughly £300 million. That, he concedes, "is a harder sell."

What comes next for GEL?

The next key step is the finalisation of a long-term offtake agreement, securing a committed buyer in the same way leading geothermal projects in Germany have already successfully achieved.

Dr Ryan Law notes, “you don’t really have a business” without that level of secured

demand. Work in this area is progressing well as the project moves into its next commercial phase — as he puts it, “watch this space.”

He wears a great many hats — geologist, chief executive, policy translator, fundraiser. When it is put to him that this is a lot for one person, he laughs. "Just tell my shareholders that."

The plant is on. The resource is rich. But Law's own account points somewhere else. The thing that will decide whether GEL scales is not under the ground, it is who he chooses to stand beside him. So far, he has chosen well.