Solid, reliable and a key to our energy future - this is geothermal’s time to shine

Saturday, 30 May 2026

Steam rises from the cooling towers at Contact Energy's Te Mihi Power Station, Wairakei. The geothermal fields around Taupō and further north have been the site of New Zealand’s pioneering efforts in tapping underground energy.

Mike “MOD” O'Donnell is a US-based commentator with extensive experience as a director and adviser to New Zealand businesses. He is currently NZTE’s regional trade director for North America. This column represents his personal opinions.

OPINION: In two weeks’ time, more than a thousand people will descend on Calgary for the World Geothermal Congress.

That matters for New Zealand. Not just because it’s the biggest gathering this industry has. But because of the timing.

For years, geothermal was the quiet person at the global energy party. Quietly competent. Reliable. Not much drama. The sensible one nursing a Steinlager in the corner while solar and wind soaked up the attention like over-caffeinated extroverts on LinkedIn.

New Zealanders understand this archetype well. Hell, many of us built careers around it. But suddenly the room has changed.

Energy security is back. So is affordability. So is resilience. Carbon matters. Keeping the lights on matters. And governments everywhere are now discovering that “net zero” sounds fantastic right up until the grid falls over on a cold Tuesday evening.

That’s where geothermal starts looking less like an alternative curiosity and more like a grown-up energy solution. The timing feels about right.

New Zealand has been quietly living this future for decades. Depending on how you slice the numbers, geothermal already provides around a fifth of our electricity generation, while renewables overall produce over 80% of our power.

A geothermal power plant in Java, Indonesia. New Zealand expertise has helped the development of such power stations around the world.

That gives New Zealand something increasingly valuable in the global energy discussion: credibility.

We didn’t just publish glossy strategies and host climate conferences. We drilled holes in the ground, built power stations and learnt how to operate them in the real world. Then we exported the expertise to South East Asia, Africa and North America.

Now – according to people like my old mate and uber-technologist Peter Griffin - we’re moving into a new phase. Not incremental improvement. Proper frontier stuff. The first area getting genuinely interesting is supercritical geothermal.

This is where the conversation stops being “renewable energy” and starts sounding more like deep-earth engineering mixed with mild insanity.

New Zealand has identified Rotokawa as the site for its first supercritical geothermal drilling programme. The theory is straightforward enough: drill deeper, go hotter, tap conditions where geothermal fluids carry dramatically more energy.

The practical reality is significantly less relaxing.

Extreme temperatures. Brutal pressures. Highly corrosive chemistry. Conditions that make conventional geothermal look like a school science project.

The Rotokawa geothermal power station near Taupō, in the area where the first supercritical geothermal drilling programme will take place.

But if it works, the payoff is enormous. Several times the output from a standard geothermal well. Potentially transformational baseload generation from a tiny footprint. The sort of energy density that makes power engineers quietly emotional.

The second shift is industrial heat.

This is the part most energy conversations miss. Electricity gets the headlines, but industrial process heat is where a huge amount of global emissions actually sit: powering pulp mills, timber processing, food manufacturing and heavy industry.

And unlike many countries now trying to retrofit solutions in a hurry, New Zealand already does this at scale.

At places like Kawerau, geothermal steam directly powers industrial processes 24 hours a day. No inefficient conversion into electricity and back into heat again. Just direct-use energy quietly doing the hard yards.

It turns out you don’t decarbonise industry with hashtags and glib phrases.

You do it with reliable heat pipes and engineering. Who knew.

The third shift is more strategic.

Geothermal is increasingly being recognised not simply as “another renewable”, but as one of the few renewables capable of behaving like traditional baseload generation.

That distinction matters enormously.

Wind and solar are hugely important technologies. But they also introduce intermittency into systems already under strain. Geothermal largely sidesteps that problem. It just sits there humming away with capacity factors that can exceed 90%.

In an increasingly unstable world, that starts looking extremely attractive.

Especially because geothermal’s already relatively low emissions profile is continuing to improve through reinjection technology and mineralisation work. In short: it scales without making everything else more complicated.

So back to Calgary, where I’ll be in a week’s time.

The World Geothermal Congress only happens every three years. This year’s event runs from June 6–11 and will pull together engineers, investors, scientists, policymakers and energy companies from around the world. And about 150 Kiwis.

But conferences like this are never really just conferences. They are market signals.

You find out where capital is flowing, which technologies are real, which countries are serious, and which executives are merely recycling sustainability buzzwords.

This year the tone will be different, with less theory and more urgency.

Because the world is belatedly realising that energy transitions are not PowerPoint exercises. They are giant physical engineering problems requiring absurd amounts of capital, infrastructure, minerals, talent and political patience. That suddenly plays to geothermal’s strengths.

And it plays to New Zealand’s strengths too.

We have 70 years of operational experience. We have credible engineering capability. We understand industrial heat. We’re building indigenous partnership models that many countries are now studying closely. And we’re beginning to push further into deep geothermal and supercritical systems.

That combination travels well. But the window will not stay open forever. Other countries are moving quickly. Capital is moving quickly. Technology cycles are accelerating.

There’s also a tendency in modern energy debates to hunt endlessly for silver bullets. Geothermal isn’t one.

It’s harder than that. Drilling is complex. Development timelines are long. Upfront capital requirements are serious. You can’t simply install it on a suburban rooftop and post about it on Instagram.

But geothermal possesses a quality that is suddenly becoming scarce in parts of the global energy system: it works. Steady output; proven engineering; decades of operational knowledge; and real-world reliability.

And in a world becoming steadily more chaotic, boringly reliable is starting to look revolutionary. Which is why a thousand people gathering in Calgary to talk about hot rocks suddenly matters a great deal.

Because geothermal may not just be having a moment. It may finally be having its time.

MOD will be chairing the Kiwi company evening at the World Geothermal Congress in Calgary next week.