The Partnerships to Accelerate Training and Hiring for Geothermal Heat Pumps prize awarding 1.2 million dollars to eight teams this month was launched in December 2024 under the prior administration’s Geothermal Technologies Office, with a total program budget of 3 million dollars that has not changed since. The September 2026 announcement of this month’s winners credits the same unchanged program to advancing “President Trump’s America First Energy Agenda,” issued by a Department of Energy unit that did not exist under that name when the competition began.
The GHP PATHs prize was unveiled on December 5, 2024, structured as a three-phase competition open to companies, nonprofits, training providers, certification bodies and other organizations building regional pipelines to train and hire geothermal heat pump workers. Phase 1, Connect, awarded up to 20 teams 40,000 dollars each for submitting a regional workforce vision. Phase 2, Engage, the stage that concluded this month, awarded up to 8 of those teams 150,000 dollars each for formalizing partnerships and proposing a concrete training and hiring plan, selecting winners including Born Global’s New England Geothermal Workforce Accelerator, Cold Climate Innovation’s Alaska-focused training program, and regional workforce hubs covering the Northeast, Midwest, and Colorado. Phase 3, Execute, will award the remaining teams between 100,000 and 400,000 dollars based on measured outcomes, including the number of workers trained and hired. None of that structure, timeline or funding total has changed since the program’s original announcement 16 months before this month’s award.
What has changed is the office administering it and the political framing attached to its announcements. The program originated under DOE’s Geothermal Technologies Office, part of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. This month’s award was issued instead by the Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office, a renamed unit that groups geothermal development administratively alongside oil and gas rather than alongside other renewable technologies, consistent with geothermal drilling’s technical overlap with hydrocarbon extraction expertise. The announcement itself credits the program explicitly to the current administration’s priorities: acting assistant secretary Curt Coccodrilli said the prize “is helping to advance President Trump’s America First Energy Agenda,” a description applied to a workforce initiative whose design, budget and competition schedule were fixed under a different administration’s energy office more than a year before the current one took office.
That continuity sits alongside a considerably more consequential pattern in how the same Department of Energy has handled other inherited clean energy commitments this year. The department terminated its 1.2 billion-dollar federal agreement backing California’s ARCHES hydrogen hub in October 2025, of which only about 30 million dollars had actually been disbursed, alongside a parallel Pacific Northwest hydrogen hub agreement, and separately withdrew a 1.66 billion-dollar loan guarantee previously extended to Plug Power after the company missed a drawdown deadline for its Antwerp electrolyzer project. Measured in dollars, those terminations dwarf the entire 3 million GHP PATHs program by a factor of hundreds. The distinction is not that geothermal has been spared scrutiny while hydrogen and other technologies have not; it is that a small, already-budgeted workforce training prize with modest per-team awards and a fixed multi-year schedule was simpler to let run its course than a multi-billion dollar hub agreement with large uncommitted future disbursements, and doing so cost the department little while still allowing its announcements to frame the result as evidence of a new energy policy direction.
The program’s actual scale is worth stating plainly against that framing. Eight winning teams splitting 1.2 million dollars this month, drawn from a total program budget of 3 million dollars across all three phases, is a modest sum relative to the residential and commercial heating and cooling workforce the geothermal heat pump industry would need to train at any meaningful national scale, and the prize’s own design acknowledges this by measuring success in Phase 3 through specific counts of workers trained and hired within each team’s defined region rather than through claims about national industry transformation. That modest, regionally scoped structure is also precisely what makes the program durable across a change in administration: a competition built around small, outcome-verified regional grants to organizations already selected through a public process carries little of the political or budgetary exposure that a large, discretionary hub agreement carries, regardless of which administration’s energy priorities the funding announcement chooses to credit.
