Yesterday Canada’s Financial Post authored an interesting article about the nascent geothermal industry and how the stocks of several of the publicly traded North American companies are appreciating. It’s true investors are late to the party in this segment; geothermal has none of the sexiness of a solar or wind play (we maintain this is so because it’s difficult for an amateur to look at the earth and say “bet there’s some steam here, let’s build a plant.” Unlike solar or wind where most people can notice the natural resource “hey, it’s real sunny here” or “hey, it’s real windy here”…)

We like to think of geothermal as being the deep thinker’s renewable (pun intended.) The resource is most often hidden, it requires an understanding of basic thermodynamics, and it has the best yield in megawatt hours of all the renewables. (OK, we’ll listen to arguments about gravity hydro which is also quite good.) Here’s a quote from the article:

Sierra Geothermal, Nevada Geothermal Power Inc. (NGP/TSX-V), and Western GeoPower Corp. (WGP/TSX-V) are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange. Polaris Geothermal (GEO/TSX) and U.S. Geothermal Inc. (GTH/TSX) are listed on the main Toronto Stock Exchange.

The largest geothermal company in the world is Or-mat Technologies Inc., (ORA/ NYSE) with a market cap of almost US$2-billion. The seventh North American geothermal company is Raser Technologies Inc. (RZ/PCX), which trades on the ArcaEx.

This enumeration of companies is interesting, but there are some pretty major gaps in this analysis starting with the omission of the largest geothermal operator on the planet, Chevron with nearly 2,000 MWe of production power, mostly in Indonesia and the Philippines (and it sports a market cap of $184B.) Also, there is the omission of large private developer/operators like Caithness/ARCLight who have as large, if not a larger geothermal portfolio as Ormat (~370MWe) – Coso alone for Caithness/ARCLight is a set of 260MWe facilities.

That nitpicking aside, the tone of the article is encouraging and this kind of press can only help in getting the message out that geothermal is a large part of the solution in our march toward energy security and independence.