Harvest Earth

Last week, New Zealand Ambassador Catherine McIntosh arrived at the Maibarara Geothermal plant in Batangas with her delegation of 20 who have trained, learned, traveled, crossed oceans and cultures trying to coax heat from the bowels of the earth, and are now ready to share to Filipinos what made geothermal tick in NZ.

Maibarara, a few of its kind churning a wee portion in the renewables of the country’s energy mix, produces 32 megawatts of electricity. Clean, baseload, indigenous, they call it.

Those words matter, though they feel like they’re designed to make you nod politely or feel good about something a tad too abstract.

NZ, of course, has been doing geothermal for decades. Geothermal energy is a national obsession there. They who have the maps, the tech, instincts, the engineers who know when the ground will cough and when it will hum.

And the delegation shows it. The systems are precise. The advice subtle but direct. The lesson is always: measure, observe, don’t cut corners. That’s what makes their energy mix efficient, resilient. That’s what the Philippines can learn.

The Philippines could do it, too, if it listens, if it invests, if it trusts the slow, incremental work of our natural ways to harvest the earth.

Geography matters. New Zealand, like the Philippines, is stitched from islands, fault lines, volcanoes, the restless earth. The delegation shows, quietly, that these parallels are never mere coincidences as much as opportunities.

When an island shivers, when magma and water meet, the energy is waiting to be drilled. The Philippines has that same chaos, opportunity, the same geography that laughs at certainty and rewards careful, relentless engineering.

McIntosh spoke about the long partnerships between NZ and the Philippines: the Manaaki New Zealand Scholarship Program, Filipino engineers who trained abroad then returned home to apply their skills.

The partnerships through fresh New Zealand private investments. Western Energy is opening an office in Manila. MB Contact and Seequent are here to speed up learning, reduce mistakes, bring proprietary best practices into a system that will inevitably stumble without guidance.

You think about how these small human exchanges are what really move the world, not the politics nor the release embassies around the world or some foreign ministry in Djibouti we pretend to read.

But also, there is hope. That electricity reaches homes, that knowledge circulates, that mistakes are minimized, that clean energy actually counts for something beyond the rhetoric.