Project InnerSpace and XPRIZE to design geothermal surface systems prize

The collaboration comes as geothermal stands at a critical inflection point. While significant progress has been made in subsurface technologies and drilling, surface systems are emerging as a key constraint on deployment speed, cost, and replicability. As outlined in Project InnerSpace's March 2026 report, Spinning Up, Not Out: Scaling the Turbo-machinery Supply Chain for Rapid Geothermal Deployment, turbomachinery remains a central bottleneck, with limited manufacturing capacity, long lead times, and highly-customised designs poised to slow the pace of project development as geothermal scales.

The planned XPRIZE is being developed to address these structural bottlenecks directly by encouraging more modular, integrated, and high-performance geothermal surface plant architectures that can operate efficiently across real-world geothermal conditions and be deployed more rapidly at scale. Rather than narrowly focusing on a single component, the evolving design is aimed at surfacing solutions that lower costs, cut lead times and improve flexibility, manufacturability, and ease of deployment.

This broader systems framing reflects what the design team has gathered through interviews with manufacturers, developers, and technical experts: many of today's geothermal surface systems are still highly customised, creating long lead times, slowing project delivery, and limiting opportunities for supply chain learning. In many cases, the current market does not reward the type of risk-taking needed to pursue more transformative designs. At the same time, turbomachinery performance is deeply coupled with the broader surface plant. Heat exchangers, cooling systems, and other balance-of-plant components account for a substantial share of cost and directly impact overall system efficiency and deployment timelines. Addressing turbomachinery in isolation is unlikely to unlock the full step-change needed for rapid geothermal scale-up. The prize is intended to create a lower-pressure, high-visibility pathway for research, development, and demonstration that can accelerate innovations the market is not yet set up to deliver on its own.

Through the prize design process, the team is also exploring how to avoid over-constraining the solution space. Rather than prescribing a single technology pathway, the competition is expected to focus on performance-based outcomes that leave room for different approaches, including innovations in turbines, working fluids, heat exchange systems, and other integrated surface plant configurations. The goal is to identify designs that can deliver competitive system performance across a range of operating conditions, while enabling step-change improvements in standardisation, manufacturability, transportability, and deployment speed.

“The subsurface solutions that will drive scaled development of next-generation geothermal energy are well on their way thanks to several years of disruptive innovation and frontier spirit in the field. We now need to match that momentum above ground,” said Jamie Beard, Executive Director of Project InnerSpace. “In short order, the turbomachinery supply chain will be the bottleneck standing between next-generation geothermal and the gigawatt scale deployment the world needs. XPRIZE's model of ambitious, results-driven competition is exactly the kind of forcing function that can accelerate this transition.”

“XPRIZE was built on the idea that the right incentive, at the right moment, can unlock innovation that markets alone are too slow or too constrained to deliver,” said David Babson, PhD, EVP of Energy, Climate, & Nature at XPRIZE. “In geothermal, the opportunity is increasingly about creating more deployable, efficient, and scalable systems that can translate growing capital and demand into real projects on the ground. We are excited to work with Project InnerSpace to shape a prize that can help do exactly that.”

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