Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnADVERTISEMENTAaron LarsonThu, June 25, 2026 at 11:58 PM GMT+2 7 min readElectricity 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.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.Terms and Privacy PolicyEU DSA contactPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info