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Industry collaboration Geothermal New Zealand combines expertise for export

Industry collaboration Geothermal New Zealand combines expertise for export Geothermal New Zealand, website snapshot
Alexander Richter 16 Apr 2012

The Geothermal New Zealand is an evolving collaboration that intends to extend the skills of the New Zealand geothermal energy sector to international markets.

A recent article from New Zealand goes into a little bit of history of New Zealand and Indonesian relations as they concern geothermal energy.

In the 1970s there was an aid programme of New Zealand and Geothermal NZ Ltd, was a collaboration of several firms to pioneer geothermal power in Indonesia. The company (GenzI) installed a geothermal plant that was inaugurated in 1983 and is still running today.

So as part of a current trade delegation with the NZ prime minister touring Indonesia, Mike Allen ran Geothermal NZ Ltd. at the time. Mike is today the chair of Geothermal NZ, an umbrella group for several companies involved in geothermal development and related services in New Zealand.

The group was formed following the recent development drive in New Zealand with projects like the Kawerau and Nga AwaPurua projects. Japanese Sumitomo was so impressed with the work done by New Zealand firms with those projects, that it proposed further collaborations offshore. So Geothermal NZ was formed not to only work with Sumitomo, but looking at offshore opportunities. East Africa and Chile are markets have been looked at, but Indonesia based on the historic ties is naturally an obvious market for the group.

Geothermal New Zealand, so the article “combines the expertise of a number of New Zealand companies that are relatively small and don´t necessarily have the capacity to go and do independent marketing in Indonesia”, so the combined efforts make this easier for  trade missions like the current one to Indonesia.

The group appears and promotes the combined expertise in discussions with potential partners in Indonesia, and likely in other markets as well.

Something I  personally believe would also be a good model for the Icelandic efforts on the Icelandic Geothermal Cluster … maybe an even international collaboration combining expertise would make sense? Just dropping the thought.

Source: New Zealand Herald