Green Wombat

illustration: brightsource energy
Green Wombat’s story on the land rush to build utility-scale solar power plants appears in the June issue of Business 2.0 (online here), and this week I’m featuring bonus material on the blog. Today, the focus is on BrightSource Energy. The Oakland, California, startup is the latest incarnation of Luz International, an Israeli company that built nine solar trough power plants in California’s Mojave Desert in the 1980s that continue to produce some 354 megawatts of electricity. Luz went bankrupt after tax breaks for solar power evaporated and its American-Israeli founder, Arnold Goldman, went on to work as a consultant and software executive. In 2004, as global warming worries began to drive demand for renewable energy, he reassembled much of his old team – including some of their now-grown children – and hired Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Woolard, a energy and software veteran, as CEO. BrightSource has developed a solar technology that it calls a distributed power tower. Fields of sun-tracking mirrors called heliostats focus the sun’s rays on a water-filled boiler that sits atop a tower. The intense heat creates steam which drives a turbine to generate electricity. Power plants will be built in 100-megawatt clusters, with a field of heliostats facing a tower. A future hybrid version of the technology will feature a turbine that can also be fired by natural gas so the plant’s operating hours can be extended and it can continue to generate electricity on cloudy days. BrightSource currently is negotiating a contract with California utility PG&E (PCG) to supply 500 megawatts of solar electricity beginning in 2010.

BrightSource itself is something of a hybrid itself – it’s a startup funded by venture capital – VantagePoint Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson –  but carries the tech DNA of one of the world’s pioneering solar power companies. In conversations with Goldman and Woolard, it’s clear BrightSource aims to compete against fossil fuel-generated power by wringing greater efficiencies from solar power and supplementing sun with gas – natural or bio – to create on-demand power plants. "When I was at VantagePoint, I looked at everybody out there," Woolard tells Green Wombat at BrightSource’s sparsely-furnished offices in a downtown Oakland office tower. "And it’s a game where if you’re not careful you might  pick up 2 percent efficiency over here and you don’t realize you might lose 3 percent on the back end. And very few groups, if any, really understood that full optimization from the photon to the electron as did Luz."  Woolard says Goldman’s ability to deliver – Luz built nine power plants in between 1982 and 1991 – gives BrightSource a leg up. "In Israel, they have just this phenomenal R&D and engineering group that’s just incredible," he says. Within five months of securing funding last October, BrightSource had its first heliostat test field up in Jerusalem. A prototype power plant is set to begin operating in early 2008 in southern Israel.

Goldman says sophisticated software design and modeling tools have allowed BrightSource to test its technology virtually, speeding up the engineering process. "Once we got financed we’ve been able to move incredibly fast into structuring, implementation, to hardware, to  test systems," he tells Green Wombat. Showing potential investors hard data that the distributed power technology will work as advertised and deliver lower-cost solar power is crucial as BrightSource finds itself competing against the proven solar trough technology that it pioneered in the ’80s. (A solar trough power plant uses parabolic mirrors to heat tubes of synthetic oil, which create steam that generates a electricity. Goldman abandoned the technology because he believes it had reached the limits of its efficiency.)

The goal is to drive down the cost of solar-generated electricity so its competitive with natural gas-fired power plants. "We think achieving that is as fast as we can and at those levels is critical," he says. "We think if we’re in that range, then we’re basically competing in the southwest with combined cycle plants. They’ve shown themselves to have market opportunities in the tens of thousands of megawatts."  BrightSource plans to build solar power plants and sell them to operators in California and the Southwest. The company has not bid so far on projects for California’s two other big utilities, Southern California Edison (SCE) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE). But BrightSource is pursuing joint ventures in Spain and has formed a subsidiary, Luz II, to develop and license its technology.