Ormat Brand Guidelines: Yavne 1965, the Ormat Energy Converter & Geothermal Power

A Yavne company of 1965.

Ormat was founded in 1965 in Yavne, Israel, by the engineer Lucien (Yehuda) Bronicki and Yehudit “Dita” Bronicki, according to English and Hebrew Wikipedia. Its first name was Ormat Turbines; it later became Ormat Industries. Hebrew Wikipedia explains the name as a blend of “or,” the Hebrew word for light, and the start of “matechet,” the word for metal.

The idea came from a laboratory. English Wikipedia says that in the late 1950s Lucien Bronicki worked in a government physics laboratory, where he developed a turbine that could make electricity from a range of heat sources, including solar, using the organic Rankine cycle, which he co-developed with Harry Zvi Tabor; he then left the laboratory to put the idea into production. In a 2009 interview with Scientific American, Bronicki called the cycle “an old invention” that had never really been used, and said Ormat’s contribution was to extend the range of usable geothermal resources to lower temperatures. Hebrew Wikipedia, citing the newspaper Davar in 1966 and 1976, says the company began with small turbogenerators known for running for years without maintenance.

Its early projects included solar power. In the 1980s Ormat built a solar pond power station north of the Dead Sea, a 5-megawatt plant that used the temperature differences between layers of water; Hebrew Wikipedia says it supplied electricity for about three years before government support ended, and English Wikipedia says it operated until 1988. The company then applied its technology to geothermal heat and to recovering waste heat from industrial processes. English Wikipedia dates its geothermal work at the Kawerau Power Station in New Zealand to 1986, and equipment for a regional heating system on Iceland’s Sudurnes peninsula to 1989.

From equipment maker to power producer.

For its first decades Ormat sold equipment. In the 1990s, English Wikipedia says, it decided also to own and operate power stations; Hebrew Wikipedia, citing Haaretz in 2003, places the change of business model in the early 2000s, when it began building plants it owned and selling the power under long-term contracts. Ormat Industries was listed in Tel Aviv in 1991. Ormat Technologies, set up in 1994 as its American subsidiary, floated on the New York Stock Exchange in 2004, and in February 2015 the two were merged into Ormat Technologies, which now trades in both New York and Tel Aviv, Hebrew Wikipedia says. In May 2017 the Japanese group ORIX agreed to buy the stakes held by the FIMI fund and the Bronicki family’s investment company, the same source says, citing Calcalist. Dita Bronicki stepped down as chief executive in 2014, and Doron Blachar, previously the finance chief, became chief executive in July 2020.

The core product is the Ormat Energy Converter, a power unit that, in the company’s words, “converts low-, medium- and high-temperature heat into electricity.” Ormat calls itself “the only vertically integrated company engaged in geothermal and recovered energy generation”: it designs, makes, owns and operates the plants. It says it has engineered and built plants totalling about 3,600 megawatts of gross capacity for itself and for utilities and developers worldwide, and in February 2026 gave its own generating portfolio as 1,695 megawatts, including 385 megawatts of energy storage in the United States, with geothermal and solar plants in the United States, Kenya, Guatemala, Indonesia, Honduras and Guadeloupe. Its manufacturing operation is in Yavne, where the company was founded, Canary Media reported in July 2026, while its head office is in Reno, Nevada. Bronicki told Scientific American in 2009 that most of its plants are air-cooled, with the geothermal fluid injected back into the ground.

Power producers on show.

Independent power producers sell something nobody can see, so they lean on the places that make it. Their websites and reports tend to draw on a familiar set of pictures: gas turbines in clean halls, cooling towers against a pale sky, the domes of nuclear stations, rows of wind turbines and solar panels caught at dawn, and control rooms where operators watch walls of screens. The plant stands in for the product.

Many of these companies also face households directly. In the competitive retail markets of Texas and parts of the Northeast and Midwest, a single generator may own several retail electricity brands, each with its own name and look, alongside the parent’s corporate name. Vistra and NRG Energy both present themselves this way, as a “family” of brands, and some of those names are older than the parent that now owns them: TXU became the Texas company’s name in 1999, Vistra in 2016.

A newer theme is the long-term power contract with technology companies. In 2026, World Nuclear News reported 20-year agreements under which Amazon Web Services and Meta buy output from Vistra’s nuclear plants, and such deals now sit beside data-centre pages and press releases in the way these companies describe their future.

The rest of the visual record is practical: community and safety pages, plant fact sheets, sustainability reports and investor decks built around capacity charts measured in megawatts and gigawatts. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — where it came from, who owns it and what it runs — and marks clearly where a statement is the company’s own.

Heat from below, power for data centres.

Ormat’s newest chapter is about computing. In January 2026 it signed its first power purchase agreement with a data-centre operator, a 20-year deal for about 13 megawatts from its Salt Wells plant in Nevada for Switch, Latitude Media reported. In February 2026 it agreed a portfolio power purchase agreement with the utility NV Energy for up to 150 megawatts of new geothermal capacity to support Google’s operations in Nevada, with projects expected from 2028 to 2030; that agreement was subject to approval by the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada, which the companies expected in the second half of 2026, and was not confirmed as approved at the time of writing. Ormat is also returning to enhanced geothermal: Canary Media reported that its Desert Peak project in Nevada connected a 1.7-megawatt enhanced system to the grid in 2013, that it is planning a new pilot there with SLB and another with Sage Geosystems, and that in June 2026 it unveiled designs for a 100-megawatt generating unit.

Not every site has been straightforward. Ormat’s Puna Geothermal Venture on Hawaii island was surrounded by lava during the 2018 Kīlauea eruption, which damaged some equipment, and the plant did not operate for about two years afterwards; in October 2026 the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, carrying a Hawaii Tribune-Herald report, said it was producing about 15 megawatts net, that drilling of four wells was beginning, and that some residents have opposed the plant for decades.

For a design guide, Ormat shows how a company built on one machine can present the same technology as a turbine maker, a power producer and now a supplier to data centres. Compare Brookfield Renewable, another listed owner of renewable power plants, and NextEra Energy, another American renewables producer. For this guide we use a basalt brown, a magma orange and a sinter ochre with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ormat’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.