Japan has decided to get serious about geothermal energy for the first time since the 1990s. METI’s new geothermal target – 7.7 GW of installed capacity by 2050 – sounds modest next to solar or wind ambitions. Yet it marks a radical step-up from today’s geothermal fleet, which supplies just 0.3% of Japan’s power.

To reach that goal Japan will need to develop much bigger geothermal projects while leaning on advances in new technologies. Otherwise, at the current average size, the country would need to go on a drilling spree and find space for over 1,000 additional geothermal stations. There are only about 20 that exceed one megawatt in capacity today and only one that surpasses 100 MW.

Japan was once an early geothermal pioneer. The Matsukawa plant in Iwate Prefecture, launched in 1966, was the country’s first full-scale geothermal facility and remains operational today. In the decades that followed, regional utilities built stations across Kyushu and Tohoku, bringing capacity to almost 300 MW in the mid-1990s and over 500 MW by the early 2000s.

Since then, the sector’s expansion has stalled. National parks overlap many of the best geothermal zones, and onsen operators resist new drilling near hot springs. While Japan has developed world-class turbine technology and exported it to Iceland and Indonesia, among other countries, domestic capacity additions have slowed to a trickle, almost at the same level today as a quarter of a century ago. Firms like INPEX and Fuji Electric still invest in major geothermal projects – but they are abroad.

Now, policy is changing. METI’s new geothermal roadmap treats the sector as a strategic complement to intermittent renewables. Unlike solar and wind, geothermal offers stable baseload generation. That gives it renewed political appeal, especially amid calls by Japan’s new PM Takaichi to improve the nation’s infrastructure resilience and source more energy locally.