Electricity demand is climbing at a pace the power industry hasn’t seen in a generation, and the companies trying to feed it with geothermal energy are mostly racing in one direction: drill faster. Ormat Technologies is making a different bet. The company that has built and run geothermal plants for six decades thinks the constraint that matters most isn’t underground at all. It’s the power plant sitting on top.
Earlier this month, Ormat introduced the Ormega100, which it calls “the largest binary surface power generation unit in the industry”—a single unit rated at up to 100 MW gross, engineered to run unmanned, with turbine efficiency the company says exceeds 90%. The launch arrived alongside the firm’s enhanced geothermal system (EGS) strategy, two subsurface pilot programs, and a record first quarter. But the more revealing story is the logic underneath the hardware, and the executive who articulated it was candid about a posture that sets Ormat apart from the field: the company is, by its own description, deliberately not trying to be first.
A T-Shirt Instead of a Tailored Suit
Daniel Moelk is Ormat’s executive vice president for Subsurface, Wells, and NextGen, responsible for essentially everything the company does below ground. He joined the company about a year ago after roughly two decades in the geothermal industry that took him from Iceland, where he was educated, through Europe and Indonesia to a global role now based in the U.S. His case for the Ormega100 starts not with megawatts but with manufacturing.
Geothermal plants, Moelk argued, have always been built one at a time, each fitted to the particular resource beneath it. That precision came at a price. “A tailor-made suit costs more than a T-shirt from the shelf,” he said, “and when you need more and more of those, a standardized unit will shorten delivery times, it will increase reliability, and with standardization you get so many more advantages, from spare parts to general maintenance.” A standardized large unit, in his framing, “will de-bottleneck the growth for the industry.” The same evolution, he noted, that gas turbines and wind turbines went through as projects scaled and economics forced bigger, more uniform machines.
Designing from a blank sheet rather than adapting an existing platform let Ormat rethink the plant from every angle. Two of those choices stand out for plant operators. The Ormega100 is built to run autonomously, and Moelk was specific about what that means: not lightly staffed, but rather, completely unmanned. “We will have a remote control room for multiple plants, but the plants are supposed to run unmanned during normal operations,” he said, with “dedicated centralized maintenance crews” dispatched as needed. The design also aims to compress major maintenance to roughly once a decade. Ormat says the modular configuration—one generator paired with two turbines—can cut project timelines by about 30%.
Behind the design sits an unusual alignment of incentives. Ormat builds these units primarily for itself. “We very much know the needs of the largest client we have, because it’s ourself,” Moelk said, “so we always design from the aspect that we will be the party operating those things predominantly.” A company engineering a plant it intends to own and run for decades optimizes differently than a vendor selling to a third party—a point that doubles as a pitch to the outside buyers Ormat also hopes to supply.
Ready, but Not Rushing
Where Ormat’s strategy diverges most sharply from the newer entrants is timing. Asked about the wave of geothermal startups drawing attention, such as Fervo and Quaise, Moelk didn’t claim Ormat was the fastest at implementing EGS technology. In fact, he claimed the opposite, and framed it as a choice.
“Other companies are implementing it. We are taking another pathway where we want to de-risk the technology a little bit more before we go to the larger projects,” he said. “That’s why we have currently two pilots to test a couple of things.” Those pilots—an alliance with SLB, which capitalizes on its high-temperature hard-rock drilling technology and reservoir modeling capabilities, and an investment and cooperation agreement with Sage Geosystems—are sited at existing Ormat facilities. The choice was deliberate: energy the pilots generate can plug straight into a power plant already standing, which can absorb the excess. Once the pilots hit Ormat’s targets, the company “will deploy in a very-large-scale EGS project,” Moelk said.
That patience comes with an admission a more promotional account would smooth over: there is no first Ormega100 site or timeline yet. Ormat may well be the first to build one, given that it is its own largest customer, but “it is too early right now to earmark a specific project,” Moelk said. Still, the company hopes to announce an EGS project later this year.
Moelk was also careful to right-size expectations about the technology’s reach. EGS has expanded the geography for geothermal “by a multiple” because it no longer requires a natural hydrothermal system—but it still needs hot, compact rock, which isn’t everywhere. The far horizon, where “you can throw a dart on a land map” and find a workable geothermal solution regardless of what’s below, may still be a decade away and will depend on technologies beyond EGS. The Ormega100 itself, Moelk noted, is agnostic to the resource: hydrothermal, EGS, or closed-loop, “wherever a geothermal project can be deployed, there can also an Ormega100 unit be constructed.”
The Case for the Incumbent
Ormat’s argument for why it can afford this measured approach rests on scale and balance sheet. It is the industry’s largest operator, with 1,140 MW of installed geothermal capacity at the end of 2025, dozens of operating fields, and roughly 500 wells worldwide. Its vertically integrated structure keeps origination, land and water rights, interconnection, geoscience, drilling rigs, manufacturing, and operations in house. Manufacturing runs through the company’s facility in Yavne, Israel, where Ormat was founded, while global headquarters are now in Reno, Nevada.
Crucially, Moelk said, the company funds its growth from a profitable existing business rather than having to raise capital. “We are not operating against a limited runway,” he said, which lets the company “be purely technology focused” instead of capital-raise focused. The first-quarter numbers support the claim of execution capacity: Ormat reported record revenue of $403.9 million, up 75.8% year over year, with adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of $194.9 million. On the commercial side, the company has signed roughly 200 MW of new power purchase agreements (PPAs) tied partly to data center demand, including a portfolio PPA of up to 150 MW with Google and a much smaller 20-year agreement with Switch in Nevada—evidence that hyperscalers, in Moelk’s words, “are already part of our business.” He added, “They’re a very, very, very big market driver for our industry right now.”
What Could Slow It Down
For all the optimism, Moelk was direct about the obstacles that sit outside Ormat’s control, and they are the ones a utility planner or regulator will recognize. Permitting authorities, he said, are “labor short,” and doing something new “requires a lot of conversations” because it is hard to permit what isn’t yet understood. Additional resources on the regulatory side, he argued, would help the whole industry scale.
The bigger structural worry is the grid. Ormat’s long-term ambition with EGS is centralized, gigawatt-scale generation, and that runs straight into the condition of American transmission. “The transmission grids—the power grids—by age and how fractured they are, they are a challenge already,” Moelk said. “I’m not sure if our utilities in the U.S. are well-prepared enough for this transformation. I hope they are.” It was a notably unguarded assessment from an executive launching a product, and a reminder that the surface unit and the subsurface pilots solve only the parts of the problem a single company can solve alone.
That tension—a company convinced it has the technology, the demand, and the balance sheet to move now, constrained by permitting capacity and an aging grid it doesn’t own—is the real shape of the geothermal moment. Ormat is betting that the patient, integrated incumbent is built for it. “We’re living in very exciting times when it comes to the potential of geothermal energy,” Moelk said. After 20 years and a few boom-and-bust cycles in the industry, he sounded like a man who had learned not to mistake a window of opportunity for a sure thing.
—Aaron Larson is POWER’s executive editor.
