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Posts Tagged ‘financial crisis’

Ausra exits solar power plant building business

Posted in Ausra, BrightSource Energy, energy, enviro startups, environment, eSolar, First Solar, green financing, green startups, green tech, PG&E, renewable energy, San Diego Gas & Electric, solar energy, solar power plants, Stirling Energy Systems, SunPower, tagged , , , , , on January 27, 2009| 5 Comments »

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photo: Ausra

When Green Wombat sat down for a chat with Ausra founder David Mills back in September 2007, he allowed that it was not unreasonable to expect the Silicon Valley solar startup to soon be building several massive megawatt solar power plants a year. The optimism was not unwarranted. After all, in the space of 12 months Ausra had relocated from Sydney to Palo Alto, raised $40 million from A-list venture capitalists and was about to ink a deal with utility PG&E for a 177-megawatt  solar power project.

That was then. This month Ausra laid off 10% of its 108 employees amid a move to stop building Big Solar projects – for now – to focus on providing its solar thermal technology to other power plant developers and to industries that use steam. (Ausra’s compact linear fresnel reflector technology deploys flat mirrors that sit low to the ground and concentrate sunlight on water-filled pipes that hang over the mirrors. The superheated water creates steam which drives an electricity-generating turbine.)

“I think our competitors will figure this out sooner or later but nobody’s going from a five-megawatt project to a 500-megawatt project. No one’s going to finance that,” Ausra CEO Bob Fishman told Green Wombat. “If you look at the amount of money it takes to be involved in the project development business, that’s not something a startup can do.”

At least any time soon. Ausra last year opened a robotic factory in Las Vegas to make mirror arrays and other components for the many power plant projects it had on the drawing boards. Just three months ago the company flipped the switch on its five-megawatt Kimberlina demonstration power plant outside Bakersfield. But as the credit crunch hit, financing for billion-dollar solar power projects evaporated. Then in October, Congress passed legislation allowing utilities like PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) to claim a 30% investment tax credit for solar projects. As the only well-capitalized institutions left standing in the energy game, utilities are stepping forward as investors.

PG&E CEO Peter Darbee says he’s prepared to make direct investments in solar power plants – projects the utility needs to comply with a California mandate to obtain 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and 33% by 2020. Under pressure to meet those targets, California utilities have signed more than four gigawatts worth of power purchase agreements with solar power plant startups like BrightSource Energy, Solel, Stirling Energy Systems and eSolar. Utilities also have begun signing deals for electricity produced by smaller scale photovoltaic power plants built by companies like First Solar (FSLR) and SunPower (SPWRA).

Fishman said Ausra will complete the 177-megawatt Carrizo Energy Solar Farm in San Luis Obispo County on California’s central coast to supply electricity to PG&E. “If Peter Darbee wants to own Carrizo rather than buy the electricity, we’re willing to do it. It makes sense,” he says.

Ausra will also will complete a second big solar power plant planned for Arizona. But the company has quietly let drop a Florida project for utility FPL (FPL) and is negotiating to offload lease claims it filed on federal land in Arizona and Nevada for solar power plants during the solar land rush.

“Other projects in the pipeline we’ll be selling to utilities or developers for a modest amount of cash with a commitment that those developers must use our technology,” says Fishman.

Fishman notes that the cost of licensing a solar power plant can be $5 million to $10 million a year – and in California it’s a multi-year process – so Ausra will realize some immediate savings by morphing into a technology provider.

Customers for Ausra’s technology include oil companies that could inject solar-generated steam in oil wells to enhance recovery of thick petroleum as well as food processing plants and other heavy users of steam. Fishman just returned from a trip to the Middle East where he says he held talks in Kuwait, Qatar and Dubai about using Ausra’s technology for oil recovery and desalinization.

Going forward, he says Ausra’s focus will be on medium-sized power plants. “Maybe next year we’ll do four projects of 50 megawatts a year. It’s a walk before you run situation,” says Fishman. “The financial customers and financial community are going to insist we do medium scale before we do large scale. We’ll still want to do very large projects but given the project finance market, it’ll be a few years from now.”

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Layoffs hit the wind industry

Posted in alternative energy, Clipper Windpower, energy, green collar jobs, green financing, green policy, wind power, tagged , , , on January 20, 2009| 15 Comments »

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photo: Todd Woody

As President Barack Obama embraced renewable energy in his inaugural speech Tuesday, Clipper Windpower laid off 90 employees – about 11% of its workforce – as the global financial crisis throws a spanner in the once-booming wind industry.

The Carpinteria, Calif.-based turbine maker has seen business slow as customers delay existing orders and put off new ones because they cannot obtain financing for wind farms, Clipper CEO Doug Pertz told Green Wombat.

“In the short-term, the impact to Clipper is a reduction in 2009 turbine production,” he said. “We know that 2009 will be a challenging year, however, remain optimistic that this economic situation is temporary.  We trust that the new Obama administration will, in the not-too-distant future, enact policy to enable better financing options for wind energy projects and aggressively promote the growth of renewable energy development.”

Clipper is one of only two U.S.-owned turbine makers – the other being General Electric (GE) – in an industry dominated by European manufacturers and wind farm developers.

Like their counterparts in the solar industry – which also has been shedding workers in recent weeks – wind companies depend on tax incentives to lure investors. But with traditional investment banks all but extinct on Wall Street and other investors hoarding their cash, there’s been little appetite of late for investing in so-called tax equity partnerships to provide funding for massive wind farms or solar power plants.

Pertz said Clipper’s production is down 20% from the 750 megawatts worth of turbines it manufactured in 2008 and that he expects double-digit declines for 2009. “Customers with large balance sheets are being much more conservative and smaller independent wind developers are seeing that it is much more difficult to obtain tax-equity financing,” he noted.

Wind and solar industry lobbyists are pushing Congress to make the investment tax credit and the production tax credit refundable so those companies that don’t have tax liabilities can trade the credits for cash that can be used to finance renewable energy projects.

Founded in 2001 by wind industry veteran James Dehlsen – his first wind company is now owned by GE –  Clipper makes a 2.5-megawatt turbine called the Liberty at its Cedar Rapids, Iowa, factory that powers wind farms built by FPL (FPL) and BP (BP). Other customers include Queen Elizabeth II, who bought the prototype of a 10-megawatt offshore turbine being developed by Clipper in the U.K.

One bright spot for the wind industry, said Pertz, is an expected move by well-capitalized utilities to take ownership stakes in wind farms if a national standard is enacted requiring them to obtain a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable sources.

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