MENDOCINO CO., 5/21/25 — A plan to nearly double the amount of electricity drawn from naturally occurring heat deep below Mendocino and Sonoma counties could create thousands of new jobs in the region.

The Sonoma-Mendocino GeoZone project still faces a long list of legal, regulatory and financial hurdles before construction, but the developer is already thinking ahead to hiring.

Sonoma Clean Power CEO Geof Syphers said the not-for-profit power producer is committed to hiring local workers for at least 30% of the jobs it creates. Meeting that goal, he said, will depend on building partnerships with local education and workforce development programs, along with a long-term commitment from California to streamline geothermal energy.

“We’ve been building partnerships with schools and trades and landowners and public officials, permitting agencies,” Syphers said. “But what really needs to happen before the permitting phase begins is we have to change state laws.”

Clean energy makes up a small but growing slice of Mendocino County’s employment, accounting for just under 600 jobs in 2023, according to an analysis of federal data by the nonprofit Environmental Entrepreneurs, which advocates for state and local policies benefiting the environment and economic interests.

Mendocino County workforce and education officials are taking note, gradually ramping up programs to train students to weatherize buildings, install and maintain solar projects and take on other related construction roles.

Noel Woodhouse, an instructor who runs Mendocino College’s sustainable construction and energy technology program, said the program has already evolved since launching in 2011 and will continue to do so. He’s confident that his students’ skills in clean tech, solar and sustainable building would easily transfer to geothermal construction — especially since the non-credit certificate program could rapidly train a large number of students in a short time.

“Our students come out of our program with experience in heavy equipment machinery and ready workers for that type of project,” Woodhouse said.

Clean energy jobs pull in a wide range of professional skills, from plumbing and electrical work to pouring concrete and operating equipment.

“What I love is the people who work in oil and gas know exactly how to operate 100% of the equipment on a geothermal job site, and it’s the same wages,” Syphers said.

Geothermal energy is harnessed by drilling deep below the earth’s surface to access naturally occurring heat. The steam flows to a turbine to drive a generator that in turn produces electricity — a process that can occur 24 hours a day.

Mendocino County, along with neighboring Sonoma and Lake counties, sits on one of the country’s prime geothermal zones. The world’s largest complex of commercial geothermal power plants, known as The Geysers, is located in the Mayacamas Mountains near where the three counties connect. Owning the majority of the units there, Calpine Corporation generates about 725 megawatts of electricity using geothermal energy. Sonoma Clean Power’s GeoZone proposal aims to build another 600 megawatt geothermal power plant.

The labor needed to develop 600 megawatts of new geothermal energy capacity will require hundreds of white-collar workers and thousands of construction workers during the building phase, and the project will create about 1,000 permanent jobs, Syphers said.

“Today, about 400 people from Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino work at The Geysers,” Syphers said. “If we can roughly double that for permanent jobs, that’s very exciting to me.”

Connecting students to skills and employers

As director of employer partnerships for Mendocino College, Pamela Heston-Bechtol’s job is making connections between students and employers. She combs through job postings at least once or twice a week and distributes opportunities to respective departments.

“It’s giving our students as much exposure as possible to be able to see themselves in those jobs by inviting industry to our advisory committees and inviting our students to job shadowing,” Heston-Bechtol said.

The Mendocino County Office of Education also offers career technical education programs with various pathways for youth. Eric Crawford, the office’s director of career and college programs, and Natalie Spackman, a workforce development coordinator with North Bay Construction Corps, together work with high school seniors interested in construction trades to complete a 14-week program.

“At the end of the instruction, they get a tool belt, and then they go out for boot camp for two weeks, and they work with contractors for 80 hours on a live build site and find out what it’s really like to do the work,” Crawford said, noting that this helps students determine which type of work interests them most.

At the completion of camp, the contractors are invited to interview students and potentially offer them jobs.

The newest career technical education program set for Ukiah High School, called Roots of Success, will train high school students specifically for green energy fields. However, Spackman said that basic training in construction gives students skills that transfer to a variety of work, especially given the state’s regulations for the trades to go green.

“No matter where they go, contractors ultimately work for their customers — what’s in demand?” she said. “The skills that they’re learning, that’s going to translate.”

Leaders from both the high school and college workforce development programs agree that while there’s plenty of work for their students and a growing demand for clean energy workers, trades training is hindered by a severe shortage of teachers.

Crawford said anyone with three years of experience in a specific field can get a designated subject teaching credential and become qualified by the state of California. Woodhouse said that Mendocino College’s minimum qualifications include an associate degree and experience in the field.

Other challenges, Woodhouse said, are those stacked against the students in a county with high rates of substance abuse and poverty. To address those, he highlighted support systems at the college that include a food pantry, mental health services and transportation, among others.

A student perspective

Kevin Vasquez says participating in the Mendocino College program changed the course of his life.

When he was 11 years old, Vasquez received a message at school that his father wouldn’t be able to pick him up. He had been deported.

“I felt violated that they took my dad from me,” he said. “I started drinking alcohol, trying to escape.”

The quiet habit morphed into an addiction that left him aimless and jobless in his 20s. Yet he remembered his father, an immigrant from Mexico who had worked tirelessly in stone masonry to give him a better life. He knew he needed to make something of that life, but he needed help first.

He went through rehabilitation, where a counselor suggested he check out Mendocino College’s construction program. For Vasquez, that program sparked light in the darkness.

“It got me back out there, doing what I love, which is building with my hands,” said Vasquez, who now offers help to other students as a lab tech.

For Vasquez, the prospect of GeoZone tapping into more renewable energy within the county brings an exciting opportunity to put his skills to use at a potential union job.

Mendocino County’s hiring contractors are small, and while they offer great one-on-one experiences, Woodhouse said, they’re not unionized.

Syphers shared that Mendocino County workers won’t need to be union members to work on the GeoZone project.

“You don’t have to be a union signatory to get hired through a union and then work on these projects,” he said. “That gives you an option to decide later if you want to become a signatory and be part of the union.”

The construction phase for GeoZone is projected to be six or seven years out, but Syphers said those years will be spent cultivating relationships with local schools, unions and smaller contractors.

Ultimately, he hopes the state will streamline permitting and make long-term commitments to invest in geothermal work.

“That’s how we actually get unions to open apprenticeship centers in Mendocino County,” Syphers said.

While the Biden administration helped streamline the geothermal process nationally, most of California’s geothermal opportunities are not on federal land, he pointed out. Sonoma Clean Power has worked with California Assemblymembers Diane Papan, D-San Mateo, and Chris Rogers, D-Santa Rosa, to introduce assembly bills 526, 527 and 531, which all aim to advance geothermal energy development.

“Everyone universally agrees California is the best place in the United States to do this if the permitting changes,” he said, noting that the state requires a full environmental review that can take anywhere from two to eight years. “This region has enough geothermal potential to support areas beyond Sonoma and Mendocino. That’s really, really valuable for the state.”

This reporting is part of a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and Canary Media, South Dakota News Watch, Cardinal News, The Mendocino Voice and The Maine Monitor. Data visualizations from Big Local News at Stanford University. Support from Ascendium Education Group made the project possible.