Project InnerSpace, the leading independent research organization focused on accelerating geothermal energy, and XPRIZE, the world's leader in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions to solve humanity's grand challenges, today announced a collaboration to design a major incentive prize targeting breakthroughs in integrated geothermal surface plant systems, including turbo-machinery and other surface system components. The prize design, funded by Project InnerSpace, aims to catalyze the innovation and supply chain transformation needed to accelerate deployment and unlock the next phase of geothermal growth at scale.
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, turbo-machinery remains a central bottleneck, with limited manufacturing capacity, long lead times, and highly customized designs poised to slow the pace of project development as geothermal scales.
A Prize Designed to Unlock Scale
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 customized, 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, turbo-machinery 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 turbo-machinery 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.
