U.S. Geothermal Electricity Siting Regulation and Zoning Ordinances (2026)

This is a collection of documented state and local ordinances governing utility-scale geothermal electricity projects throughout the United States. The data were compiled using the Infrastructure Continuous Ordinance Mapping for Planning and Siting Systems (INFRA-COMPASS) tool, which uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify and extract ordinance requirements for geothermal exploration, drilling, wells, power plants, and related infrastructure. The data include requirements such as setbacks, drilling hours, noise and height limits, zoning districts, permits, fencing, lighting, visual and seismic studies, bonding, decommissioning, and prohibitions. Extracted records include supporting ordinance excerpts and section references when available. URLs for the source documents are included in the accompanying spreadsheet.

The ordinance GeoPackage file included below contains the jurisdiction shapes for each ordinance. Note that the ordinance GeoPackage file is formatted for ingestion by NLR's reVX setbacks tool and therefore does not contain any of the state-level regulations. A list of all jurisdictions searched during this collection is provided in CSV and GeoPackage format.

**NOTE**: This data was collected with the help of generative AI. The Large Language Models used for this effort make mistakes. Always validate the data for critical use cases. The INFRA-COMPASS version used for collection is v0.18.0. The LLMs used for collection are OpenAI GPT-4 (document/content filter) and OpenAI GPT-5 (value extraction).