Google.Org Doubles Down on Solar Thermal Power

By Alexis Madrigal

May 14, 2008 | 5:18 pm | Categories: Energy

BrightSource Energy, a solar thermal power company, announced they closed a $115 million round of funding from a raft of influential investors, including Google.org, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and BP Alternative Energy.

Google has only announced three investments in alternative energy companies. Two of them have been into companies using solar thermal technology, which uses mirrors to turn liquid into steam that drives a turbine, lending support to a burgeoning but unproven industry.

"We’re very enthusiastic about solar thermal technology," said Dan Reicher, the Director of Climate Change & Energy Initiatives for Google.org. "This second investment obviously indidcates that."

The nineties were a dark time for alternative energy. Now, though, with climate change and expensive oil dominating headlines, scores of new wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and geothermal companies have emerged to take advantage of renewable energy credits and the need for cleaner energy. While wind is further along the commercialization path, its intermittent nature is a major problem for the grid. With nuclear plants looking increasingly expensive and
running into production bottlenecks, solar thermal is emerging as a leading alternative to fossil fuel power plants.

Google’s not the only believer in the technology. Dozens of institutional and venture investors are getting behind solar thermal technology as a possible replacement for coal and natural gas plants.

While Google’s other investment in solar thermal technology, eSolar, was conceived by venture capitalist Bill Gross, BrightSource has deep roots in the field. During the last peak in oil prices during the early 80s, BrightSource’s current engineering team was hard at work for Luz, a company which built over 350 megawatts of solar thermal power plants in the Mojave Desert. Last month, BrightSource signed the biggest solar deal ever, agreeing to deliver 900 megawatts of power to the California utility, PG&E.

In addition to eSolar’s $130 million funding last month, Abu Dhabi’s clean-tech fund, Masdar, has funded a $1.2 billion solar thermal company called Torresol. Yet another player, Abengoa, recently signed a $4 billion deal with Arizona Public Utilities, and Stirling Energy Systems, a company that has adapted the Stirling Engine, a 200-year-old invention, for concentrated solar power, even pulled in a $100 million investment.

Reicher said that BrightSource was a promising contender to eventually reach Google’s goal of developing renewable energy that is cheaper than coal.

"We’ve canvassed pretty much the entire group of solar thermal technologies and in terms of technology, business plan, and team, they stack up very well," he said.

Still, all the solar thermal companies are relatively small and no new plants have been built in the United States in more than twenty years. It’s hard to pick winners at this stage of the game.

"You have this diversity of designs … but until we have more plants that are actually built, it’s going to be hard to know which design will come out on top," Ryan Wiser, a renewable energy analyst at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, told us last month.

Brightsource CEO John Woolard struck a similar note, declining to talk about theoretical power generation numbers or even their technology. Woolard said they were "heavily negotiating" an additional 1,100 megawatts worth of deals. They plan to break ground on their first project, a mockup of which can be seen above, in nine to twelve months.

"It’s going to come down to construction management, your ability to understand and control costs," said Woolard. "We like to keep a high engineering-to-marketing ratio."

That’s because Woolard said the only audience that really matters are the professional engineers at firms like Black & Veatch who evaluate power plants for the big money companies that will actually finance getting "steel in the ground."

"They are really, in a strange way, the ultimate audience or customer," Woolard said.

In the meantime, they’ve made an impact on Reichert, who was Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy.

"We’re impressed with the engineering they’ve done," he said. "If you’ve got reduced cost and higher operating temperatures, that’s a big part of coming down the cost curve for solar energy

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