Last month, a startup called Endurance Energy sailed 300 miles off the coast of Oregon to test something new: deploying geothermal power at an underwater volcano.

In a vent field around 5,000 feet underwater, they drilled a two-inch-wide, 52-foot-deep well that tapped into 500-degree heat beneath the ocean floor—the first fully encased well of its kind. Later, as 10-foot waves crashed around their ship, they lowered a three-ton generator to the sea floor to test its ability to create electricity from that heat.

The full process didn’t work exactly as planned, and the experiment stopped when a power cable failed. But when the team connected the generator to a natural vent in the sea floor, the generator briefly produced power. (For 8.7 seconds, it produced more power than it consumed.) The company says that it’s an important proof point for its ultimate vision: a network of undersea power plants that could provide baseload clean energy.

While tiny experiments happened in the past, that vision is new. “No one’s ever tried this even close to the commercial scale that we’re going after,” says Andrew Redd, founder and CEO of Endurance Energy.

Redd previously worked as an engineer at SpaceX. “I wanted to go after something that was going to be both really good for the world but also extremely compelling from an employee perspective,” he says.

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