A geothermal turbine resembles the oversized metallic eye of a giant. The round, smooth section of its mast is the iris, at the center of a radial pattern of steel beams. These organic rankine cycle turbines are mounted on sturdy support frames in a large warehouse outside of Brescia, in the heartland of industrial Italy, just an hour’s drive from Milan.
Standing in front of them when I visited last month was Joseph Bonafin, the director of next-generation geothermal projects at Italian ORC turbine manufacturer Turboden, which is owned by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. He wore a white protective helmet and rubber overshoes. Raising his voice over the buzz of the warehouse — with the rumble of a tow tractor driving by, and a phone playing faint rock music from a workstation — he explained that that’s one of the turbines that will eventually be shipped overseas, to next-gen geothermal company Fervo Energy.
“The turbines you’re seeing here have a mechanical shaft capacity of up to 50 MW each,” Bonafin explained, adding that the one assembled in the warehouse is part of a set of 12 that Turboden will supply to Fervo’s Cape Station project in Utah. Six have been delivered already.
Turboden is one of just a handful of companies worldwide that can produce the kind of turbines needed for large-scale geothermal power plants like Fervo’s. Almost none of that production happens in the United States; other players like Exergy, Ormat, and Baker Hughes have their manufacturing capacity spread across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
Now, though, U.S. geothermal is enjoying unprecedented tailwinds thanks to new drilling technology, federal incentives, and a surge of demand and investment from AI data centers. And as a result, these companies are gearing up to serve a market they expect to boom, both expanding their existing capacity and opening new offices overseas.
From bespoke to standardized
Ben Feshbach, associate at RMI’s U.S. Program and one of the authors of a May 2026 report about the geothermal supply chain, explained that, historically, “geothermal electricity production equipment systems have been engineered around traits of the reservoir.”
A developer would locate a resource, determine how much power it could produce, and order turbines built to that exact output. The bespoke process of engineering, manufacturing, and shipping could take well over a year.
But now, next-gen developers like Fervo are starting to use new drilling techniques to engineer the reservoir itself. “The greater control that project developers can exercise over the geothermal reservoir conditions enables more standardization for the surface plant equipment,” Feshbach told me.
Fervo’s entire strategy, in fact, is centered on that standardization. As Dawn Owens, senior VP and head of development and commercial markets, said in an email, the company designed its projects around 50-MW “GeoBlocks,” which use ORC equipment.
Andrea LaGioia, general manager of Turboden’s power generation business unit, said this kind of commitment to a particular technology is key for a supplier like Turboden. Because Fervo can now plan its plants in those 50-MW clusters, it can strike large supply deals. The company’s April framework agreement with Turboden is for up to 1.75 GW of equipment over three years, which builds on earlier agreements between the companies.
“Having a framework agreement that gives us good visibility over the next few years let us begin restructuring internally and reserving capacity, both our own and through contracts with suppliers,” LaGioia said, adding that the company has doubled its output in the past couple of years. “We’re expanding and investing in new production machinery.”
And because the geothermal process is becoming standardized, Turboden can build up a stock, and deliver identical units far faster than it could when every project was bespoke.
It’s not just Fervo that is designing around these standard units. Ryan McGraw, chief development officer at geothermal developer Zanskar, said that this standardization is one of “the bigger unlocks” a developer wants from an equipment provider like Turboden. “It helps us design projects from a very early stage,” McGraw said.
Expanding overseas
To best serve the next-gen geothermal market, Turboden is expanding its U.S. footprint; it opened a subsidiary in Houston, Texas, in 2024, while mapping the U.S. supply chain and identifying potential partners.
Given that there’s virtually no manufacturing of geothermal turbines on U.S. soil at the moment, it’s challenging to find the fabricators, machine shops, and component makers that are already equipped and qualified to build the parts needed for a domestic supply chain. But that work is underway nonetheless.
“The air-cooled condenser is the most significant part in terms of volume, weight, and material of a geothermal plant, and we’re building it in the U.S. for that reason,” LaGioia said. “There are other things like the heat exchangers that are uneconomic to make in the U.S. at the moment. But if the rules change, we have to be ready, and we have already found those who’d make them there.”
At the moment, Turboden sees “no reason, from either clients or economics,” to start manufacturing the core turbine part in the U.S., regardless of domestic content bonuses. But the company is making sure it’s ready to do so if transportation costs and new potential tariffs change things. In that case, it could leverage some of its sister companies under the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries group to start manufacturing stateside.
Competitor Exergy, which is also headquartered near Milan, is taking similar steps to expand overseas. Luca Pozzoni, Exergy’s general manager, told Latitude Media the company has been scouting the U.S. market for over a year, and opened a subsidiary there at the beginning of 2026.
“A company like Exergy, which is starting to scout the local market, is doing so both to find customers and to build a supplier network,” Pozzoni said. “We plan to use the assembly spaces that a sister company can make available to us, and we need to find partners to handle operations.”
As in the case of Turboden, building a U.S. supply chain means finding suppliers that can work from Exergy’s existing designs, such as a machine shop able to take a semi-finished steel part from another supplier and machine it to meet the company’s engineering specifications.
In Exergy’s case, the calculation over how much manufacturing to move to the U.S. is complicated by the company’s ownership: In 2019 the company was acquired by China’s TICA Group. That makes Exergy a foreign entity of concern under U.S. rules, which can give developers pause.
When asked about FEOC requirements, Zanskar’s McGraw said that while the fact that a company is Chinese-controlled is “not an immediate disqualification at all,” a developer buying Chinese equipment would have to run extra analysis to be sure the purchase wouldn’t cost it tax credits that are central to a project’s economics.
Exergy’s Pozzoni acknowledges it’s a concern customers raise. “We’ve hired local consultants to do in-depth analysis, because customers ask about this,” he said. However, he argues the exposure is limited because “the turbine itself is a very small percentage of the whole investment, so the impact is almost none.”
The domestic opportunity
As both Turboden and Exergy exemplify, the U.S. combination of an anticipated geothermal boom and a lack of local manufacturing certainly incentivizes existing players to enter the market.
But, as Feshbach notes, it’s also an opportunity for new entrants.
“There could be a real opportunity to develop international leadership, and I think the United States… [could] do that not just with drilling equipment, but also with the surface equipment manufacturing,” he said. If that doesn’t happen, Feshbach added, “bottlenecks in equipment procurement… could potentially limit the rate of expansion for this really high-promise technology class.”
Startups have already started to emerge. Founded by a former rocket engineer for SpaceX, Critical Energy announced in June that it had raised $22 million in seed funding to make geothermal turbines in the U.S, for example. More are likely to come, especially if the country’s bipartisan support for geothermal translates into more financial support for manufacturers.
As the report Feshbach coauthored notes, the 45X advanced manufacturing credit, which helped the country kickstart solar and storage manufacturing, doesn’t currently extend to the geothermal supply chain.
New entrants in the market are something geothermal power producers want and encourage.
“Although the supplier base for specialized geothermal equipment is relatively limited today, as demand continues to grow, we expect our supplier ecosystem to grow with it,” Owens at Fervo said.
McGraw agreed. Turbines are not the bottleneck that gives him “the most heartburn” at the moment; his central anxieties are the power equipment shortages the entire energy industry is experiencing, of transformers, circuit breakers, and high-voltage technologies. But turbine supplies are likewise“tight” and “timelines are already being a bit strained at this point in time,” he said. “We definitely want more entrants into the market, more people innovating and thinking about how to gain small efficiencies along the way.”
“Existing companies growing their footprint and moving more predominantly into the United States is a good fact,” he said. “And new suppliers starting to enter the market is also a very good fact.”
