Three years after the federal government listed a tiny Nevada toad on the endangered species list, a geothermal company seeking to develop a project near the toad’s only known habitat in Northern Nevada is suing the government over the listing.

Ormat Technologies, headquartered in Reno, is suing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and U.S. Department of the Interior, saying that the Dixie Valley toad was placed on the endangered species list “without any evidence” that its population is declining. 

Its endangered status has prevented construction of the company’s planned geothermal power plant in Churchill County. Ormat first applied for federal approval for the project a decade ago and received a green light, starting construction in 2022 before the toad was listed as endangered.

In a lawsuit filed last week in the District of Columbia’s U.S. District Court, Ormat argued the wildlife service violated the law by listing the toad because it was not in danger of extinction at the time of listing. 

Conservationists counter that the building of the geothermal plant will lead to the toad’s extinction. 

“The scientific consensus among independent hydrologists is that the Dixie Meadows geothermal project would drive the Dixie Valley toad toward extinction,” said Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), calling the lawsuit “frivolous” and “a waste of time and money."

The environmental group says that if Ormat proceeds with construction of its Dixie Meadows project, it would irreparably alter the toad’s habitat and threaten it with extinction. One of the concerns is that geothermal pumping in the area could affect the quality, temperature, or quantity of water in the wetlands where the toad lives.

Donnelly said the group intends to intervene in the lawsuit on behalf of the USFWS and the toad.

Ormat said the decision to list the toad was “arbitrary and capricious” and that USFWS based its decision on worst-case-scenario projections. Ormat further asserted the service did not take into consideration the company’s technology, which it said won’t negatively affect the region’s water supply.

The listing of the toad has “caused concrete and particularized harm to Ormat, including by impairing its significant investment of time, money, and other resources in a critically needed new renewable energy project in Churchill County,” according to the lawsuit.

Ormat is asking the court to overturn the toad’s endangered listing, thereby allowing construction to proceed.

The lawsuit is the latest wrinkle in the saga between the toad, the federal government and the geothermal plant, which could continue to be drawn out should the court agree to take the toad off the list.

In May, the interior department announced it would implement emergency permitting procedures for the review of geothermal energy projects as part of President Donald Trump’s national energy emergency declaration, including several other Ormat projects in Nevada.

In July, The Nevada Current reported that the interior department is planning to authorize the Dixie Meadows geothermal project under the “emergency” permitting procedures, a process the federal government says will “fast-track” energy projects and their review.

If the project receives emergency permitting authorization, the CBD said it will sue the Trump administration for violating the Endangered Species Act.

Just a fraction of Nevada’s geothermal power

The Dixie Valley toad was historically considered a part of the Western toad species, but in 2017 was determined to be a unique, smaller species. The toad lives only in the Dixie Meadows complex, which consists of a series of springs spread across roughly 760 acres of wetland fed by underground springs.

In 2022, the service issued an emergency ruling — its first in more than a decade — that protected the toad under the Endangered Species Act. Prior to its listing, the toad was involved in yet another lawsuit when CBD sued the wildlife service for failing to list the toad up to that point. 

Several decades ago, geothermal energy was produced in a manner that usually resulted in the heated water pulled from the Earth evaporating into the atmosphere. Technology has since been developed to create closed systems that pull the water from the Earth, use its heat to warm a separate fluid that powers a turbine, then reinject the cooled water into the Earth, where it heats back up over months. The process takes place thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface.

Ormat uses this more modern technology at other Nevada facilities, and the company says the technology sustains the amount of geothermal fluid and pressure in the geothermal system.

“The Service disregarded the best available scientific and commercial information about the technology to be deployed and the hydrology of the site, instead adopting CBD’s worst-case assumptions,” according to the lawsuit.

In the wake of the toad’s listing, Ormat proposed changes it said would provide additional protections for the toad, including substantially reducing the size of the project. The company, which operates several geothermal energy facilities in Nevada, originally sought to produce 60 megawatts of power; the company reduced the scope of its project to 12 megawatts.

The scale of power that would be produced at the plant is a fraction of the amount of geothermal power produced in the state. Geothermal accounts for just 8 percent of the state’s energy production. Nevada consumes 11 times more energy than it produces; most of the power produced in the state (53 percent) comes from natural gas plants.

In 2024, Nevada produced a quarter of the nation’s utility-scale electricity generation from geothermal energy — only California generated more.

Geothermal energy is produced primarily in Northern Nevada. If the state’s more than two dozen geothermal plants were all operating at maximum capacity during the same hour, they could theoretically produce up to 827 megawatts of power collectively — enough to power more than 661,000 houses.

Ormat did not reply to an email from The Nevada Independent before deadline.