The New Zealand Association for the Properties of Water and Steam holds its 2026 Symposium at the Novotel in Rotorua from 7 to 9 September, with speakers from Denmark, Switzerland and Japan alongside Contact Energy and Fonterra.
The New Zealand Association for the Properties of Water and Steam (NZAPWS) will hold its 2026 Symposium at the Novotel in Rotorua from Monday 7 to Wednesday 9 September 2026, according to the association's events page and its published 2026 symposium outline. The programme runs 10:30am to 5:00pm on the Monday, including evening networking drinks; 9:00am to 5:00pm on the Tuesday, including a symposium dinner; and a 9:00am to 1:00pm half day on the Wednesday. The outline says the part days at either end are deliberate, provided to facilitate travel to and from the event and to encourage full attendance across the whole programme.
The subject matter is narrow and highly technical: the production and use in New Zealand of steam, and water/steam chemistry issues arising from fossil, geothermal, biomass and electrical boiler systems. Registration is handled through an events portal linked from the NZAPWS events page.
NZAPWS was established in 2012 to bring together producers and users of steam — fossil, industrial and geothermal — along with associated industries and academic researchers in New Zealand, per the association's homepage. Its membership, as the association describes it, spans fossil and geothermal electricity generators, industrial steam users, food and dairy processors, water treatment equipment and services providers, hardware suppliers, universities and the Measurement Standards Laboratory of New Zealand.
The 2026 outline names the symposium's supporters as the International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam (IAPWS) and the New Zealand Geothermal Association. NZAPWS operates as New Zealand's national body within the IAPWS structure, and IAPWS's own meetings archive records that its 2022 annual meeting was held in Rotorua from 27 November to 2 December 2022.
This is a recurring fixture rather than a one-off. The NZAPWS events page lists prior meetings in Rotorua in 2017, 2018 and 2019, and the 2024 Symposium at the Crowne Plaza Queenstown from 27 to 29 August 2024. The 2026 outline describes the coming event as following on from the highly successful 2024 meeting held in Queenstown. Association chairperson David Addison is listed as the contact, with meeting partner MECCA Concepts handling the sponsorship prospectus.
Confirmed speakers in the 2026 outline include Monika Nielsen of Denmark, IAPWS President and chair of Nordic IAPWS; David Addison, NZAPWS chairperson and IAPWS Power Cycle Chemistry chairperson; Ian Richardson, Head of Geothermal Innovation at Contact Energy; Chris Morris, Contact Energy's lead mechanical geothermal engineer; Lukas Stabb of Waltron in Switzerland; and Dr Ken Yoshida of Tokushima University in Japan, who chairs the IAPWS Physical Chemistry of Aqueous Solutions working group. A call for presentations is open to anyone working in the water and steam field domestically or internationally.
The outline is direct about audience: engineers, scientists, operators, vendors and managers who work with, manage, design or maintain industrial, power generating or geothermal steam plants. The published 2024 programme gives a clear picture of the delegate mix in practice, with presenters drawn from Fonterra, Aurecon, Mataura Valley Milk, Waikato University, AGL and a roster of water treatment suppliers including Ecolab, Solenis, Veolia, Nalco, SWAN and Endress and Hauser. Current sponsors listed on the NZAPWS site include Contact Energy, Fonterra, Mercury NZ, IXOM, Spirax Sarco and Ecolab.
Two adjacent events extend the week. The 2026 outline notes the Pressure Equipment Workshop 2026 at the same venue on Friday 4 September, an NZAPWS-supported event for designers, fabricators, operators and regulators, and a field trip planned for Saturday 5 September to Contact Energy's newest geothermal power station, Tauhara.
Novotel Rotorua Lakeside sits at the lake end of Tutanekai Street on the shores of Lake Rotorua. RotoruaNZ's venue listing records 199 accommodation rooms and 11 function rooms, with the largest space seating 350 and an overall capacity figure of 360. The same listing notes an extensive pre-function area suitable for trade exhibitions or catering, which matters for a symposium that on the 2024 evidence runs sponsor displays alongside the technical programme. The hotel is central to local cafes and attractions and close to the Energy Events Centre.
This is a small, high-specification technical meeting of the kind that rarely makes headlines but reliably fills mid-week hotel space in a shoulder-season month. It draws genuine international delegates — Denmark, Switzerland and Japan are all represented on the 2026 speaker list — into a regional New Zealand city in early September, and it is bundled with a workshop and a plant field trip that stretch the visit across the better part of a week.
It also returns to Rotorua after the 2024 edition in Queenstown, continuing a rotation between destinations. Rotorua's geothermal generation base is not incidental to that choice: the Tauhara field trip and the presence of the New Zealand Geothermal Association as a supporter point to a programme built around what is physically nearby. For a sector that talks often about industry clustering, this is an unusually clean example of a conference sited where its subject matter actually is.
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