NPR has a report on the looming completion of the 377 MW Ivanpah solar thermal power project in California - Massive Solar Plant A Stepping Stone For Future Projects.

The largest solar power plant of its kind is about to turn on in California's Mojave Desert.

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System will power about 140,000 homes and will be a boon to the state's renewable energy goals, but it was no slam dunk. Now, California is trying to bring conservationists and energy companies together to create a smoother path for future projects.

To get the best view of the Ivanpah solar project, you have to go up to the top of a 400-foot concrete tower. Below, close to 200,000 mirrors shimmer across a dry, dusty valley. "It's very exciting," says Dave Beaudoin, the construction manager for the $2 billion project located about an hour southwest of Las Vegas. Each mirror is about the size of a garage door, and it's mounted on a pole so it can be pointed at the tower. "We can keep the sun's energy — the rays of the sun — targeted back to the solar tower," Beaudoin says.

All of those mirrors generate about a thousand degrees of heat. It isn't the solar technology most of us think of: dark panels on rooftops. These mirrors heat a giant boiler on top of the tower, where water turns into steam. Beaudoin says that steam powers a turbine that generates electricity.

Greentech Media reports that Brightsource has needed to get some additional funding to complete the plant and is now looking to sell the technology in future rather than build projects - BrightSource Raises Another $35M for Ivanpah and CSP.

BrightSource Energy just collected $15 million of a modest $35 million tranche of venture funding. (It's modest relative to the hundreds of millions the company has raised over the last decade.) ...

Woolard's resignation came on the heels of a BrightSource press release that described the company "evolving from being a U.S. project developer to becoming a global technology provider that also offers development support as well as engineering and operational services." That's tough language to decode, but forgoing project development to become a "technology provider" is reminiscent of a startup's transition to a licensing model -- not always a good sign for a startup. ...

Several months ago, we reported that BrightSource's giant Ivanpah solar thermal project in the Mojave Desert was 92 percent complete. The 377-megawatt project consists of three 459-foot-tall towers encircled by arrays of garage-door-sized heliostats. A total of 173,500 computer-controlled heliostats will eventually reflect the sun onto the receiving towers, heating water to create steam that will drive turbines that produce electricity. Future projects from BrightSource will include thermal energy storage as per Solar Reserve's projects. Another CSP vendor, GlassPoint, directs its steam toward enhanced oil recovery, rather than electrical power. Two BrightSource Energy projects have recently been shelved due to permitting issues. BSE terminated power purchase agreements for the proposed Hidden Hills and Rio Mesa CSP solar power tower projects....

Former CEO Woolard said, "The problem we're trying to solve is [... how to] decarbonize the power supply and maintain system reliability at the lowest total cost to customers." Woolard noted that each picture-window-sized heliostat mirror, installed at the rate of one per minute at the $2.2 billion Ivanpah project, is capable of providing power to approximately one home, without the "hidden integration costs to the consumer" that come with wind and solar.

Since BrightSource was founded, its competition -- natural gas and solar photovoltaics -- has gone through disruptive price drops. CSP has not yet had the opportunity to scale like those two technologies.

RenewEconomy has an article on a new mirror design that could dramatically increase the efficiency of solar thermal plants - ‘Perfect’ mirror could lead to concentrated solar breakthrough.

Researchers at MIT in the US have stumbled upon a new method to trap light that could lead to a wide variety of applications, not least of all a vast improvement in the efficiency of concentrated solar power generation.

The breakthrough involves what is being described as a kind of “perfect” mirror, which works in a way that deviates from known scientific laws, pitting light waves against light waves, and setting up two waves that have the same wavelength, but exactly opposite phases — where one wave has a peak, the other has a trough — so that the waves cancel each other out. Meanwhile, light of other wavelengths (or colors) can pass through freely.

The NYT has a look at interest in using solar thermal power plants to provide dispatchable power complementing the output from the rapidly growing solar PV base - Storehouses for Solar Energy Can Step In When the Sun Goes Down.

Two California companies are planning to deploy the storage technology: SolarReserve, which is building a plant in the Nevada desert scheduled to start up next year, and BrightSource, which plans three plants in California that would begin operating in 2016 and 2017. Together, the four projects will be capable of powering tens of thousand of households throughout a summer evening.

Whether the technology will be widely adopted remains to be seen, but companies like Google, Chevron and Good Energies are investing in it, and the utilities NV Energy and Southern California Edison have signed long-term contracts to buy power from these radically different new power plants.

One crucial role of the plants will be complementing solar panels, which produce electricity directly from sunlight. When the panels ramp down at dusk or on cloudy days, the plants will crank up, drawing on the stored thermal energy.

That job will become more important if photovoltaic panels, which have plunged in price lately, become even cheaper and sprout on millions of rooftops. As the grid starts depending more heavily on solar panels or wind turbines, it will need other energy sources that can step in quickly to balance the system — preferably ones classified as renewable. …

The Energy Department seems to agree: in September it gave SolarReserve a $737 million loan guarantee for its project in Nevada. The plant will generate 110 megawatts at peak and store enough heat to run for eight to 10 hours when the sun is not shining. ...

Technical details of the SolarReserve and BrightSource plants vary slightly, but both will use thousands of computer-operated poster-size mirrors aiming sunlight at a tower that absorbs it as heat.

SolarReserve absorbs the heat in molten salt, which can be used immediately to boil water, generating steam that turns a conventional turbine and generator. Hot salt can also be used to retain the heat for many hours for later use. BrightSource heats water that can be used immediately as steam or to heat salt for storage.

The plants rely on salt because it can store far more heat than water can. But once molten, it must be kept that way or it will freeze to a solid in part of the plant where it will be difficult to melt again. “You’ve made a commitment to those salt molecules," said John Woolard, the chief executive of BrightSource.

The technology is not complicated, but the economics are.

The simplest, least expensive path for solar thermal is to turn the heat into electricity immediately. But the companies are a bit like the farmer who harvests the grain and stores it in a silo rather than shipping it straight to market on the expectation that prices will be higher later. They are betting that in revenue terms, the hour at which the energy is delivered will be more important than the amount generated.

The notion is that widespread adoption of solar panels — whether on rooftops or in giant arrays in the desert — will change the hours at which prices are highest.

Today, electricity prices usually peak in the late afternoon and evening on hot summer days. “Photovoltaic panels will do a pretty good job of chopping that peak" in the late afternoon, said Paul Denholm, a solar specialist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
In other words, the new price peak will be pushed to later in the day, to just before and after sunset, when solar photovoltaic production is small or nonexistent, he and other experts say.

Forbes reports that solar thermal power developer Brightsource is looking to exploit CSP's primary advantage over solar PV - the ability to store anergy for dispatchable generation - BrightSource Strikes World's Biggest Solar Energy Storage Deal.

BrightSource Energy said Monday that it has struck a deal to add energy storage systems to three massive solar thermal power plants it will build to supply electricity to utility Southern California Edison.

Energy storage will allow the plants to operate into the night, meaning that BrightSource can now forgo building one 200-megawatt solar station that previously was needed to meet its obligation to generate 4 million megawatt-hours of electricity annually for the utility.

“It’s a huge advantage,” John Woolard, BrightSource’s chief executive, said in an interview Monday. “We came out very strongly with what I believe is the largest solar storage deal in the world.”

BrightSource spokesman Keely Wachs said in an e-mail that only six of the seven planned solar “power tower” stations will need to be built, saving some 1,280 acres of desert land. If approved by state regulators, the amended contracts with Southern California Edison will also result in lower costs for utility customers, the company said.

Both issues have come to the forefront as some environmentalists increasingly object to industrializing swaths of California’s Mojave Desert for solar power plants. Solar thermal developers, meanwhile, compete against ever-cheaper photovoltaic power plants as the price of solar modules continues to fall.

When four of the nine big solar thermal power plants approved by the California Energy Commission last year changed ownership, the new developers announced they would switch to solar panels like those found on residential rooftops and which convert sunlight directly into electricity.

Bloomberg has an article on enhanced oil recovery using solar thermal energy in California - Chevron Uses Solar-Thermal Steam to Extract Oil in California.

Chevron Corp. (CVX), the second-largest U.S. oil company, began extracting crude from a southern California field using steam produced by a 29-megawatt solar- thermal power plant. BrightSource Energy Inc.’s system uses mirrors to focus sunlight on a boiler at Chevron’s Coalinga, California, enhanced oil recovery project, the solar company said in a statement after extraction began today.

Solar-thermal technology companies such as BrightSource are targeting industrial users in the oil-recovery and food- processing industries as customers as well as power generation. Mining and metals processing are also very promising, especially in remote areas where power can also be generated along with heat, Charlie Ricker, BrightSource senior vice president of business development, said today in an interview. ...

The Coalinga plant consists of 3,822 mirror systems, or heliostats, each with two 10-foot (3-meter) by 7-foot mirrors mounted on a 6-foot steel pole focusing light on a 327-foot solar tower. Steam created by the heat is fed into the oil reservoir, making it easier to bring to the surface. The system began generating steam in August, Kristin Hunter, a spokeswoman for Oakland, California-based BrightSource, said today in an e- mail.

Areva SA’s Areva Solar, Seville, Spain-based Abengoa SA, Erlangen, Germany-based Solar Millennium AG (S2M) and Burbank, California-based eSolar Inc. are competing with BrightSource with their own solar-thermal technology. Glasspoint Solar Inc., based in Fremont, California, makes solar steam generators for the oil and gas industry using mirrored troughs inside of glasshouse enclosures to protect the mirrors.

Enhanced oil recovery, or EOR, fits very well with solar temperatures, Glasspoint Vice President John O’Donnell, said today in an interview.

Some 32 percent of California’s industrial and commercial gas use is for EOR as its use grows in the U.S. and all over the world, O’Donnell said. The state produces about 40% of its oil using EOR and in a few years that will grow to 60%, he said.

The company can produce heat for EOR for about $3 per million British thermal units, compared with about $4 for a comparable natural-gas plant in the U.S. and between $10 to $12 for other conventional solar thermal technologies, O’Donnell said. “We are the only ones below natural gas right now in the U.S.”

The Climate Spectator has a look at advances in the solar thermal power industry - Solar thermal shoots for the sky.

BrightSource is currently building a 392MW solar thermal plant called Ivanpah in the Mojave Desert in California, and has just unveiled plans for a new 500MW plant just 60km to the south. Solar towers use software to control thousands of tracking mirrors, known as heliostats, to directly concentrate sunlight onto a boiler filled with water that sits atop a tower. Ivanpah will feature three towers each of 450 feet (137 metres, or the equivalent of a 33-storey building), at the centre of three modules that will each have a capacity of 130MW. Just by comparison, the solar tower research facility launched at the CSIRO’s flagship facility last month by Prime Minister Julia Gillard stands 30m high.

Last week, the company released plans for a 500MW plant at Hidden Hills, some 60km north of Ivanpah, and about the same distance west of Las Vegas, that will feature 750-foot towers (228m), the equivalent of a 55-storey building. According to the company, the extra height will enable it to pack more heliostats into a smaller area, reduce the space required, and boost the economics of the project significantly. Each of 750-foot towers will cost around 40 per cent more than the 450-foot towers, but their capacity will be doubled, and each will be able to generate 250MW, instead of 130MW at Ivanpah.

BrightSource also unveiled a molten salt storage option to go with its solar towers. Rather than aiming for energy produced 24/7, as has been achieved at the Gemasolar plant in Spain, the company says just six hours of storage would more than double the amount of output from the same plant – from 1,900 hours a year to more than 4,000 hours – and deliver a huge cost advantage. This will particularly be the case in when pushing output into the high-value evening peak, and will give it an advantage over other renewables such as wind and solar PV, where economically viable storage options are proving more elusive.

Carlos Aguilar, the head of international development for BrightSource, says the storage option will not likely be used at the Ivanpah project, because the summer peak load tends to fall in summer afternoons when Californian air conditioners are in most demand. But it will be applicable in other regions where local factors mean that peak loads occur later in the evening. “What we are trying to do is adapt to each plant’s needs,” he tells Climate Spectator in an interview. “When you have load curves that go into the evening – that affects the value of the energy.”

Aguilar has arrived in Australia for a week-long visit which will take him to most capital cities. Like other solar developers, BrightSource’s interest in Australia – which already has some of the best solar resources in the world – has been renewed by the government’s plans to introduce a carbon price, and create a new body, the Clean Energy Finance Corp – which will have up to $10 billion to invest to boost the deployment of new technologies.

“Australia is one of the most important markets, longer term, for solar thermal – without a doubt,” he said. “The solar research you have is fantastic. The other important reason is policy. There clearly is a focus on developing a regulatory environment that is favourable to this technology. The carbon price, when it comes into law, is an example. But there are many factors that will influence this. How fast it is going to develop we really don’t know. That’s the reason for me to visit.”

BrightSource and other solar developers in the US have benefited greatly from the use of loan guarantees from the US Department of Energy. Such mechanisms are also likely to be used now in Australia, both to help financing of some coal-fired power stations that may be affected by the carbon price, but also to help roll-out new technologies under the CEFC.

Australia currently has several large-scale solar thermal projects under planning or development. Two – a 250MW gas fired booster plant in Queensland using Areva’s compact linear Fresnel reflector technology, and a 150MW solar PV plant in NSW – will be sponsored by the Solar Flagships program; a 40MW plant using solar dish technology developed at the ANU will be built in Whyalla; and a 44MW solar boost plant will be added to the Kogan Creek coal-fired power station.

The second round of the Solar Flagships program will also likely support more and smaller utility-scale solar projects, and there have been calls for this to support solar tower and storage technologies. However, even without the Solar Flagships, some consortia – such as one supported by investment bank Investec – are expressing interest in developing projects, particularly in WA, where energy prices are high and there is a shortage of power in regional areas, and a particular problem with peak loads.

Australia, however, is not the only country to have a flagships program. South Africa launched the bidding process for its version lat week, while Morocco is expected to have a solar tower-specific round of grants next year. India is also preparing a new round of bids for its solar program, which aims to have 20GW installed by 2022, and the China market also looks promising. “They are very large markets, we will see how those evolve,” Aguilar says.

Technology Review has an article on solar thermal power company Brightsource and its molten salt energy storage technology - Energy Storage for Solar Power.

BrightSource Energy has become the latest solar thermal power company to develop a system for generating power when the sun isn't shining. The company says the technology can lower the cost of solar power and make it more reliable, helping it compete with conventional sources of electricity.

The company, based in Oakland, California, is building one of the world's largest solar thermal power plants. The 392-megawatt solar plant in Ivanpah, California, however, will not include the storage technology. Instead, BrightSource is working with utilities to determine which future projects could best benefit from storage.

Solar thermal systems use mirrors to focus sunlight, generating temperatures high enough to produce steam to drive a turbine. One of the advantages of the solar thermal approach, versus conventional photovoltaics that convert sunlight directly into electricity, is that heat can be stored cheaply and used when needed to generate electricity. In all solar thermal plants, some heat is stored in the fluids circulating through the system. This evens out any short fluctuations in sunlight and lets the plant generate electricity for some time after the sun goes down. But adding storage systems would let the plant ride out longer periods of cloud cover and generate power well into, or even throughout, the night. Such long-term storage could be needed if solar is to provide a large share of the total power supply.

BrightSource is using a variation on an approach to storage that's a decade old: heating up a molten salt—typically, a combination of sodium and potassium nitride—and then storing it in a tank. To generate electricity, the molten salt is pumped through a heat exchanger to generate steam. BrightSource CEO John Woolard says one big factor in making this technology economically attractive is the use of power towers—in which mirrors focus sunlight on a central tower—that generate higher temperatures than other solar thermal designs. That higher temperature makes it possible to store more energy using a smaller amount of molten salt. "It's a much more efficient system and much more cost effective, overall," he says.

Storage allows a thermal power plant to run more hours in the day, so they can more quickly recover the cost of expensive steam turbines and generators. Woolard says that while a solar thermal plant without storage can generate electricity about 2,700 hours a year, BrightSource's storage system increases that to 4,300 hours. The increased output more than offsets the added cost of storage. A study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, estimates that storage in a power tower system could cut costs per kilowatt hour by 25 to 30 percent.

At least two other companies are pairing power tower technologies with molten salt storage. Torresol Energy has built such a system at a 19.9-megawatt solar thermal power plant near Seville, Spain, and demonstrated that it can run the power plant through the night using stored heat. In the United States, Solar Reserve plans to build a power tower with molten salt storage in Riverside County, California.

The Economist has an article on Brightsource's solar thermal power power project(which recently received a US$168 million investment from Google) at Ivanpah in the Mojave desert - Solar Power: Desert Dawn.

IT LOOKS like a planetary tattoo designed to be seen from space, a vast set of concentric circles inscribed in the skin of southern California’s desert. Ground was broken on the Ivanpah power plant, which is to be one of the biggest solar installations in the world, last October. Already, some of the rings of mirrors which will eventually concentrate acres-worth of desert sunshine on to collectors perched atop 140-metre-high towers are in place. And as of this week, so is the financing.

BrightSource, based in Oakland, California, announced on April 11th that it had finalised $1.6 billion in loans for Ivanpah from America’s government. At the same time it announced that Google had taken a $168m stake in the project.

Ivanpah needs all this money because BrightSource’s technology requires it to be vast compared with other types of solar installation. Most solar power comes from photovoltaic cells that turn sunlight directly into electricity: installations of this type can be any size. BrightSource’s system, like other “solar thermal” technologies, concentrates the sun’s heat to drive turbines; and the high-performance steam turbines it relies on are big. The three to be installed at Ivanpah will together have a greater capacity than all the “utility scale” photovoltaic plants yet built in America.

It was once thought that photovoltaic installations might attain a similar size as they spread across America’s West (a prospect viewed with alarm by some environmentalists). There are now indications that this won’t happen. Nathaniel Bullard of Bloomberg New Energy Finance has been looking at photovoltaic projects registered with California ISO, the state’s grid operator, since 2007. Their median size started off close to 100MW; now it is around 20MW. Not all these projects will be completed—but it seems a reasonable assumption that bigger ones may be more likely to fall by the wayside. If so, the average size will drop even more dramatically.

Mr Bullard thinks the photovoltaic business is learning that small, if not exactly beautiful, is easier to get past environmental controls and planning consents, and handier if you want to feed into existing grids. “Brownfield” industrial sites near towns beat desert skies.

This is not to say that big photovoltaic projects are finished. The day after the Department of Energy bestowed its beneficence on Ivanpah, it offered a conditional loan of $1.2 billion to SunPower, a maker of high-efficiency photovoltaic cells, for a 250MW project, the California Valley Solar Ranch near San Luis Obispo. SunPower will build and operate the plant; NRG Solar, a subsidiary of NRG Energy of New Jersey, will own it. (NRG Solar is also investing up to $300m in Ivanpah.)

Such big projects make sense for large solar-cell producers like SunPower and Arizona-based First Solar, since they provide reliable demand with which to keep their manufacturing plants running at peak efficiency. Tom Werner, SunPower’s chief executive, says that although the Solar Ranch project is “on the large side”, there is a role for photovoltaic plants of all sizes, and his company has plenty more of similar scale in the pipeline. As experience grows, he hopes to find banks, rather than governments, to finance them.

Whereas being extremely big remains optional for photovoltaics, for thermal-solar companies such as BrightSource it is a must. BrightSource hopes that in time its technology will prove sufficiently efficient and reliable to overcome the disadvantage of having to raise so much capital. If so, Ivanpah will be the ground on which it makes its case.

GreenTech Media has a report on a 38 MW solar thermal power plant planned for the Greek islands (going against recent trends suggesting solar PV is now cheaper than solar thermal power) - BrightSource Plans 38-Megawatt Plant for Crete.

BrightSource Energy will build a 38-megawatt solar thermal plant on the island of Crete in conjunction with Nur-Moh, a developer. Nur Energie, a power provider, has licensed BrightSource's technology and is one of the two European backers of Nur-Moh.

It's a bit of good news for a company that has had to deal with some headaches lately. BrightSource last year obtained approval from the federal government and state of California to build a 370-megawatt plant in Ivanpah, California. It even got a loan guarantee and obtained $300 million more for NRG.

Unfortunately, it has taken quite a while for the project to get off the ground. In the meantime, the cost of power plants built with solar panels have come down rapidly. Solar panel plants now likely cost less per megawatt than solar thermal plants, a reversal from the situation just a few years ago. BrightSource argues that the solar thermal plants are still economical, and can provide baseline-quality power more effectively than parks made from PV panels. Nonetheless, others argue that even the efficient solar thermal players like BrightSource will struggle in the coming years. (See our recent report on the subject here.)

Solar panel power plants can also be scaled up and down in size fairly easily, which can make permitting earlier. Competitor Stirling Energy Systems, which tried to build solar thermal plants but with a much different technology, recently combusted.

BrightSource, by contrast, has had to fend off several objections and lawsuits from environmentalists, like a recent one from the Western Watersheds Project.

The small size of the Crete project -- about one-tenth of the size of Ivanpah -- possibly indicates that BrightSource might be looking at ways to build smaller solar parks.

The Crete project will take advantage of air cooling to convert steam back into water. (In the power plant, mirrors focus solar heat on a water tank. The resulting steam is used to turn a turbine, but then it turns back into water to begin the process over). This will reduce water consumption by 95 percent.

Todd Woody has an interview at Yale Environment 360 with the CEO of solar thermal power company Brightsource - In California’s Mojave Desert, Solar-Thermal Projects Take Off.

This week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and other dignitaries gathered in the Mojave Desert to officially break ground on BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, the first large-scale solar thermal power plant to be built in the United States in nearly two decades.

BrightSource is one of a half-dozen big solar farms, with a combined electricity-generating capacity of 2,829 megawatts, licensed by the California Energy Commission over the past two months. By year’s end, California and federal regulators expect to approve additional projects that will produce a total of 4,143 megawatts. At peak output, that’s the equivalent of several nuclear power plants and more than seven times the solar capacity installed in the United States last year.

The approval of the projects comes after years of environmental review and controversies over the installations’ impact on water, wildlife, and fragile desert landscapes. The power plants licensed so far will cover some 39 square miles of desert land with a variety of new and old solar thermal technologies. Unlike rooftop photovoltaic panels that directly convert sunlight into electricity, solar thermal uses the sun to heat liquids to create steam that drives electricity-generating industrial turbines.

BrightSource’s 370-megawatt Ivanpah project, located just over the California border, 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas, is the world’s largest solar-thermal power plant project currently under construction. The company, led by CEO John Woolard, received a $1.37 billion loan guarantee from the United States Department of Energy to build the project, which will deploy 347,000 large mirrors that will surround three towers on 3,500 acres of federal land. The mirrors will focus the sun on a water-filled boiler that sits atop the tower to create high-temperature, high-pressure steam.

Woolard, 45, came to BrightSource as chief executive in 2004 after co-founding Silicon Energy, an energy efficiency software company, and stints at California utility PG&E, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and VantagePoint Venture Partners, a leading Silicon Valley green tech venture capital firm. ...

e360: BrightSource’s Ivanpah project is not only the first large-scale solar thermal project to break ground, it is the first to deploy a new power tower technology. Why is that significant?

Woolard: Our team was part of building older trough plants and you learn a lot. If you take a power tower, you get higher temperatures and pressures. That gives you higher thermo-to-electrical conversion efficiency. Think of that as more efficiency, less waste, lower cost. Because of that, you need fewer mirrors, less solar field, and you have a more efficient design.

The other gets down to how you actually build on the land. If you take the older trough designs or anything with a lot of mirrors, [it] would degrade the land. It’s more damaging from a soil and runoff perspective.

The big [problem] is water. What is the world going to look like over the next 20, 30, 40 years? Water in the desert is going to become a much more challenging proposition. So we’ve gotten water usage down to a minimum — the lowest of anybody in the world, basically. ...

e360: While regulators have tried to put big solar projects on the fast track, power line projects to connect solar power plants to the grid remain in the slow lane. How big an obstacle will transmission constraints be for the projects already approved, as well as those in the pipeline?

Woolard: For our projects, we have what’s called LGIA — large generator interconnection agreements — that give us transmission to deliver the power into the California grid. For future projects, you get your LGIAs “x” months in advance of your financial close, so we’re working now on what the transmission is for which sites.

It’s about how you move around and adjust, given everything from appropriate environmental concerns to transmission. We can move within the existing [transmission] system, but the existing system is broken and dysfunctional. In the last decade we’ve done 12,000 miles of interstate natural gas pipelines and 668 miles of interstate [electricity] transmission.

A national renewable energy standard [requiring a percentage of electricity to come from green sources] is hollow without the transmission. It’s like engaging in interstate commerce without the highways and rails. To me transmission is the enabler of a free market. It should be the most bipartisan, universally accepted effort we make as a country because it enables people to compete, it enables prices to go down.

TechPulse has a look at some of the operating parameters predicted for the proposed BrightSource solar thermal power plant at Ivanpah in California - Is Ivanpah The World’s Most Efficient Solar Plant?.

BrightSource Energy’s planned Ivanpah plant will be one of the world’s largest solar farms and possibly its most efficient.

When the solar-thermal plant is built on the edge of the Mojave National Preserve (construction is expected to start this year), it will operate at 18 percent efficiency and earn a capacity factor of 30 percent.

This performance should make the 392-MW facility more efficient than plants with crystalline-silicon panels, thin-film cells or rival thermal technologies using parabolic mirrors, according to analysts.

The plant is to be laid out on three nearby tracts covering 3,500 acres of desert and should run at full capacity 10 to 11 hours a day. The company says a back-up natural gas system will aid performance during its long hours of operation, easing power fluctuations on cloudy days. This consistency of power should put electricity costs on par with natural-gas plants, something photovoltaic plants will take another two years to achieve, some analysts say.

While comparing plants is complex and imperfect, the newly available figures from BrightSource make the exercise a useful chore. Sun intensity, atmospheric moisture levels and power transmission costs of course differ plant location to plant location.

But determining who holds the industry’s bragging rights – as well as who deserves project investment dollars – is a task utilities attempt everyday, despite the difficulties.

In an interview, BrightSource Product Manager Andy Taylor described Ivanpah’s efficiency as a sunlight-to-electricity calculation based on two years of testing the company’s Luz Power Tower 550 in Israel’s Negev Desert. At the top of the towers, boilers absorb sunlight reflected from 7-square-meter ground-mounted mirrors and heat water to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature in the industry. The super-heated steam drives turbines.

The company says a back-up natural gas system permits the long operating hours and the ability to run most of the day at full capacity. The gas is used to warm boilers in the morning and augment solar power on cloudy days to keep output high.

“We’re pretty much a sun-up-to-sun-down resource,” Taylor says.

BrightSource, which has so far raised more than $300 million in financing, expects the plant’s efficiency to rise as the company moves beyond its first-generation technology. Higher-efficiency turbines are already in the market, and additional mirrors, or heliostats, can be deployed. Water temperatures also will rise to above 1,100 degrees.

In contrast to Ivanpah’s 18 percent efficiency, the efficiency of utility-scale crystalline silicon and thin-film plants is likely less than 12 percent. Solar-thermal plants with parabolic mirrors also have difficulties keeping up. Ivanpah’s higher boiler temperatures give it an advantage, and dual-axis tracking can more accurately follow the sun through the seasons. The average efficiency of other solar thermal plants is 13 to 15 percent, says Cara Libby, project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute.

That doesn’t mean Ivanpah won’t have competition, One crystalline-silicon vendor, SunPower, with industry leading 18 percent efficient solar cells, could give BrightSource a run for its money, says Travis Bradford, president of the public-policy think tank, Prometheus Institute. A SunPower farm with a single axis tracking could have an efficiency of 15 percent, maybe slightly higher depending on the location, he says.

Broader competition will come with falling solar-panels prices, unless a stronger Chinese currency slows the trend. Panel prices tumbled about 40 percent last year and, while they are more stable this year, they continue to decline more rapidly than solar thermal efficiency is improving.

BrightSource responds that plant efficiency is only one measure of performance, and not necessarily the best. Capacity factor, a calculation of a farm’s ability to deliver full power over time, may be more important, the company says.

Ivanpah’s capacity factor (including the use of natural gas) should be 30 percent, Taylor claims. A wind farm in an ideal location (think Tehachapi) can have a factor of 40 percent. Photovoltaic plants generally are lower. A Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center study estimates a PV plant in Arizona should be closer to 20 percent.

The US Department of Energy granted a US$1.37 billion loan guarantee to Brightsource Energy last week which could help clear the way for over 15 gigawatts of solar thermal power projects in California. Brightsource built a pilot plant in Israel to prove their technology and has tested it over the past 18 months. Their flagship Ivanpah project in California got a big boost when construction giant Bechtel agreed to build the plant.

Solar thermal (often referred to as CSP) is a way of harnessing the largest source of energy available to us, so in this post I'll have a look at the upswing in interest in the technology in recent years and look at some of the approaches being pursued to make it economically competitive with coal fired power generation.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/

One-time Australian solar thermal company Ausra was the leader in terms of publicity a couple of years ago when I last covered this topic, but the company seems to have slipped off the pace, failing to build a large scale facility and recently being purchased by French energy company Areva.

Interest continues to bubble away in solar thermal power in Australia, with energy policy advocacy group "Beyond Zero Emissions" launching their "T10" campaign to switch Australia to 100% renewable power in a decade, largely using solar thermal power, and the Desertec Asia proposal also featuring CSP heavily. At one point Prime Minster Kevin Rudd was promising to build the world's largest CSP plant here but that idea hasn't had any media airtime lately - and neither has Worley Parsons' proposal to build a large scale plant in north west WA. The most active plans to build a local CSP plant seem to be coming out of ERM Power, who are proposing gas / solar hybrid plants to be built in Queensland and/or NSW in conjunction with Siemens.

The company making the most waves from a technology point of view lately is Californian company eSolar, founded by IdeaLab's Bill Gross. eSolar has been in the news lately as a result of their partnership to construct turnkey CSP systems with German company Ferrostaal in Spain, the United Arab Emirates and South Africa. eSolar has also received attention for Chinese plans to build 2000 MW of combined solar/biomass facilities using their technology.

eSolar's Gross was recently interviewed for Yale Environment 360 and outlined his vision for improving the performance of solar thermal power generation, with some of his key points being :

* Use software to analyse and optimise performance of plants

The biggest lesson that we brought was — I don’t know if it was a lesson, but it was a philosophy — which is Internet-enable everything and put monitoring into everything.

So we have a microprocessor in every mirror and we have statistics second-by-second on the status, position, reliability, pointing accuracy — everything — of every single mirror. We structured ourselves almost like an Internet company from the beginning to have logs of everything — every revolution of the turbine, every control from the control room, every Web cam image captured — so we could do data mining and data analysis on everything.

We want the ability to make software upgrades and impact every power plant around the world. That’s probably one of the biggest differences between our technology and all other solar technology. If you [have] a big field of [photovoltaic] panels, those PV panels are there for 25 years. They’ll have that same performance, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.

We can make a software upgrade and every power plant in the world can suddenly put out 3 percent more power potentially. And we found already a number of software improvements that we can make even over the past six months, which significantly boosts performance of an already-constructed power plant. There’s new improvements we can make to the actual hardware, too, but even without changing the hardware there are software changes that can make more power, so we’re really excited about that.

* Don't build plants, get utilities (customers) to.

For renewable energy, about 80 percent, maybe 90 percent, of the cost is upfront and there’s no fuel costs and the only cost over the years is operation and maintenance, which is small. The biggest bottleneck is that these things cost big dollars, and you’re limited how fast you can grow by how much money you can raise to build plants.

Our particular strategy to deal with that is to not have us be the bottleneck for raising that money. Our customers raise that money. If we want to renewably power this planet, it’s going to take a lot of capital, and that capital has to be spent upfront.

* Avoid environmental conflicts and transmission line costs by building smaller plants on brownfield sites near cities.

We have a strategy at eSolar to never impact pristine land. And the way we address that is several-fold. First, we have a higher output per acre, so we take a smaller footprint. Second, we’re economical at a smaller size. We can be fully economical at our 46-megawatt size. Those two things combined let us use a small enough footprint that we can locate on private land closer to population centers.

So rather than needing 2,000 acres contiguous to make the economics work — which you almost only can find far away on pristine land or [federal] land — we can locate on only 200 acres very close to a city and we can buy previously disturbed farmland or other properties that’s already been developed so we’re not causing any disturbance to natural habitat. And that’s an important part of our philosophy. It gives us an economic advantage because we’re locating closer to transmission. That’s probably even a bigger factor.

It takes years and years to build the transmission out to the pristine lands. [But] the power plant, for example, in Lancaster [California], is across the street from a transmission line. We didn’t have to build miles and miles of transmission, which takes years and years to get people to approve.

* Leverage energy storage and volume of scale in manufacturing to reduce costs.

I feel we still need to get almost another factor of two in the reduction of energy costs to potentially compete with coal. We’re already close to competing with natural gas. It depends on the sunshine and the region. Another factor of two is going to require two things to make that happen: Approximately 25 percent of that can be gotten by adding [energy] storage, and 25 percent can be gotten by increasing efficiency and lowering costs by volume production.

We produced 500 mirrors two years ago, 24,000 last year, and this year we’ll produce a million. So we’re going to get a quantity break just by going to a million mirrors from 24,000.

And everything gets more efficient in the supply chains as you get up to those volumes. Anything that we buy in our lives that has dramatic cost reduction has seen a million — a million cars, or a million iPhones, or a million laptops. So far there’s only been thousands of heliostats. So finally this year we’ll cross the million number and that’s when we can get the price reduction to really be competitive with fossil fuels.

Google recently announced they have developed a prototype for a new mirror technology that could cut by half the cost of building a solar thermal plant, with both eSolar and BrightSource expressing interest in using the technology.

The NYT reports that the US Government is offering loan guarantees for a large scale solar thermal power project in California - U.S. Offers Solar Project a Crucial Loan Guarantee.

The United States Department of Energy offered a $1.37 billion loan guarantee on Monday to a California company planning to build a large-scale solar power plant in the Southern California desert, The New York Times’s Todd Woody reported.

The loan guarantee for BrightSource Energy of Oakland, Calif., is the largest the department has given for a solar power project. BrightSource’s planned project, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, is the first utility-scale solar power plant to undergo licensing in California in nearly two decades.

It would use solar thermal technology, in which mirrors concentrate sunlight to heat a fluid and generate steam. If built, it would be the largest of its kind.

“We’re not going to sit on the sidelines while other countries capture the jobs of the future — we’re committed to becoming the global leader in the clean energy economy,” Steven Chu, the energy secretary, said in a statement.

The loan guarantee is contingent on the Ivanpah project passing state and federal environmental reviews. ...

Executives at BrightSource, which is backed by Google, Morgan Stanley, Chevron and BP, have said the loan guarantee is crucial to obtaining financing to build the plant at a time when banks are reluctant to finance new technologies. The company will not disclose the total projected cost of the power plant.

The Ivanpah plant will deploy thousands of mirrors, called heliostats, that focus the sun on three towers that will each contain a boiler filled with water. The focused heat creates steam that drives a turbine to generate electricity. The plant, to be built by Bechtel, is expected to create 1,000 construction jobs.

BrightSource has signed contracts to deliver 2,600 megawatts of electricity to the utilities Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison.

The NYT also reports that Chevron is looking to build a CPV (Concentrating Solar Photovoltaic) system at a New Mexico mine site - Chevron Technology to Build N.M. Solar Plant .

Chevron Corp.'s emerging technologies unit will build the largest U.S. power plant that uses lenses to focus sunlight onto photovoltaic cells, company officials said yesterday

Chevron Technology Ventures will build the 1 megawatt concentrating photovoltaic power array on the tailing site of Chevron Mining Inc.'s molybdenum mine in Questa, N.M. The project will use lenses --- instead of mirrors, like those employed at solar thermal arrays --- to focus sunlight onto 175 photovoltaic panels. Germany's Concentrix Solar GmbH will provide the concentrating photovoltaic system. ...

The array will be the largest concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) installation in the United States and one of the largest in the world, Chevron Technology Ventures President Des King said. The technology is expected to work best in areas such as New Mexico's desert, which have high direct solar radiation.

The New York Times has a post on slow progress for BrightSource and their proposed solar thermal power project in Southern California - BrightSource Alters Solar Plant Plan to Address Concerns Over Desert Tortoise.

The developer of California’s first new solar power plant in 20 years has proposed revamping the project in an attempt to defuse concern over its effect on the imperiled desert tortoise.

“This reconfiguration is pretty minimal from what we’ve seen and it hasn’t really addressed the core issues on the impact on desert tortoise and rare plants,” said a representative of an environmental group said.

BrightSource Energy on Thursday plans to submit a new design to regulators that shrinks the size of the 4,000-acre Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating Station by 12 percent, reducing the number of desert tortoises that must be relocated and avoiding an area of rare plants.

The portion of the project that would most affect wildlife will be cut by 23 percent. The power plant’s electricity generation would fall from 440 megawatts to 392 megawatts.

Since BrightSource submitted an application to build a solar thermal power plant in August 2007, environmental groups have objected to its location in the Ivanpah Valley in the Southern California desert, saying it would eliminate tortoise habitat.

Surveys have found 25 desert tortoises on the site, which is about 45 miles south of Las Vegas.

Similar disputes have slowed some of the other dozen solar power plants now undergoing licensing in California, and the resolution of the Ivanpah issues could point the way to removing such obstacles.

“I want to make clear to everybody that this is an extremely important project,” Jeffrey Byron, a member of the California Energy Commission, said at a Jan. 11 hearing on the Ivanpah solar farm. “This represents the first of what we hope will be many renewable projects that will come before the energy commission.” ...

BrightSource, which is backed by Google, Morgan Stanley, Chevron and BP, has signed contracts to supply 2,600 megawatts of electricity to California utilities, which are struggling to meet a state mandate to obtain 33 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020.

Giles Parkinson at The Australian has a bit more on the purchase of Ausra by Areva - Solar technology heads offshore for sunnier future .

THIS is a tale of two emerging solar technologies. One that gauged the state of the local market and decided to try its luck overseas and has now been bought by the world's biggest nuclear energy group, and the other that elected to stay at home, seduced by a massive government subsidy, and has now been sold to a local company at a bargain basement price.

The fortunes of Ausra and Solar Systems have captivated those behind similar emerging technologies such as solar, geothermal and wave because they are confronted by the same dilemma: should they stay or should they go to greener pastures? The experience of these two companies and the current state of Australian policy suggests there is little incentive to stay.

It was an extraordinary coincidence that the sale of both companies -- leaders in their respective fields -- was announced within an hour of each other last Tuesday, and the contrasting fortunes could not have been more dramatic.

Ausra was sold to Areva and the solar thermal energy technology developed by UNSW researcher David Mills will now be used as the springboard for the French giant's ambitions to dominate the global solar thermal energy market in the same way it does nuclear. Solar Systems, the company that was at one time to build the world's largest solar energy utility, has been sold to the listed Silex Systems, which says it will invest around $10 million to see if it can resolve the issues around the concentrated solar photovoltaic technology and help it deliver on its former promise. ...

The truth remains, however, that despite the hugely abundant natural sources of renewable energy, and the undoubted brilliance of its researchers and engineers, Australia remains a lousy place to invest in and develop renewable energy.

There is no market-based mechanism or government incentive that supports a broad portfolio of technologies, and the government still limits itself to one-off subsidies to a chosen few, which means the focus goes on the construction of "trophy" projects rather than the development of technology.

Marine, solar and even geothermal groups are seriously considering packing their bags for more receptive regimes overseas. At least there, the thought might be, they can get access to finance and attract major developers.

TreeHugger reports that Brightsource's proposed solar thermal power plant for Ivanpah in California has been stymied by the inclusion of the site in a new National Park - California Solar-Thermal Power Project Bumped For New National Monument.

In 2008 we learned that - BrightSource [was] to Build 500 Megawatts of Solar-Thermal Power in Mojave Desert. By fall the proposed project had become a very visible symbol of a bright future for concentrated solar power (CSP) in California. ... Seems there has been a change of plans: but for good reason.

Renewable Energy World reports that PG&E has increased the size of its contracts for solar thermal power from Brightsource Energy to 1300 MW - PG&E and BrightSource Sign Contracts for Over 1,300 MW of Solar Thermal.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) announced yesterday that it has entered into a series of contracts with BrightSource Energy, Inc. for a record total of 1,310 megawatts (MW) of solar thermal power. These power purchase agreements, covering seven projects, supersede the agreements PG&E executed with BrightSource in April 2008 for up to 900 MW of solar thermal power.

The first of these solar power plants, sized at 110 MW and located in Ivanpah, California, is contracted to begin operation in 2012. BrightSource says it will build andl operatate each of its plants as quickly as permitting and infrastructure allow.

More at Next 100 - The Solar Boom in Perspective.

Yesterday's announcement of the record solar deal between PG&E and BrightSource Energy was a major endorsement of the future of clean, renewable solar power in California. But it's important to remember that word "future." Solar is coming on so fast, we sometimes forget how small it still is.

The latest statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) show solar contributing just 0.08 percent of all energy (electric, thermal and other) consumed in the United States in 2007.

For 2008, EIA estimates the total amount of solar electricity generation capacity at 1,200 megawatts (MW), compared to 25,000 MW for wind and just under 1,000,000 MW from all sources. In other words, solar represents just 0.12% of U.S. generation capacity.

Finally, the contribution of solar to actual power output--taking into account that solar facilities don't create power at night--was only 2 billion kilowatt hours (kWh), compared to 53 billion kWh for wind. Total retail electricity sales in the United States were about 3,800 billion kWh. By my calculation, solar represented only 0.05 percent of the total.
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So think of solar as a small acorn that's just sprouted. The Solar Electric Industries Association reports that the United States added 292 MW of solar photovoltaic capacity to the electric grid last year. That represents an 81 percent increase over the capacity added in 2007, an accelerating growth rate relative to previous years.

And there's lots more capacity in the pipeline. PG&E alone has contracts for more than 2,000 MW of solar power, nearly double the entire installed capacity of grid-connected solar in the United States today.

The trade journal PHOTON International reported in March that a staggering total of about 83,000 MW of new solar capacity is in "various stages of product development in North America . . . roughly equal to the current summer peak demand for electricity in California, Arizona and Nevada."

However, one of the unsettling facts the journal also noted was that the land requirements for all that capacity could be "nearly as large as the US state of Rhode Island."

You can bet that the future of the solar power industry will depend as much on its skill and wisdom in negotiating land-use agreements as it will on continuing to improve the price-performance of its technology.

Large scale solar thermal power is a subject dear to my heart, so I was glad to see this report from Wired that Brightsource have signed another deal for a huge new plant in California - Biggest Solar Deal Ever Announced — We're Talking Gigawatts.

The largest series of solar installations in history, more than 1,300 megawatts, is planned for the desert outside Los Angeles, according to a new deal between the utility Southern California Edison and solar power plant maker, BrightSource.

The momentous deal will deliver more electricity than even the largest nuclear plant [BG: this isn't true, though its getting up there], spread out among seven facilities, the first of which will start up in 2013. When fully operational, the companies say the facility will provide enough electricity to power 845,000 homes — more than exist in San Francisco — though estimates like that are notoriously squirrely.

The technology isn't the familiar photovoltaics — the direct conversion of sunlight into electricity — but solar thermal power, which concentrates the sun's rays to create steam in a boiler and spin a turbine.

"We do see solar as the large untapped resource, particularly in Southern California," said Stuart Hemphill, vice president of renewable energy and power at Southern California Edison. "It's barely tapped and we're eager to see it expand in our portfolio."

BrightSource is the reincarnation of Luz International, which built the only currently operating solar thermal facility during the 1980s in the Mojave Desert. After natural gas and energy prices plunged in 1985, that operation became unprofitable. The group's engineers and founders moved the business to Israel, where they continued to work on their technology.

The new deal breaks the company's own record for the largest ever solar deal. The new installations, when completed, will produce 3.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year. Previously, they'd cut a deal to deliver 900 megawatts of power to the Northern California utility, PG&E.

"Coupled with our earlier partnership with PG&E, this agreement proves that the energy industry recognizes the important role that solar thermal will play in the energy future," John Woolard, CEO of BrightSource, said in a press conference with reporters.

While Brightsource is a leader in the field, a variety of other companies compete in the solar thermal space. Google.org and other investors have backed eSolar's with $130 million funding. 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.

Earth2Tech has a report on progress on Brightsource's large CSP plant in California - Siemens to Build 123MW Solar Turbine Generator for BrightSource.

BrightSource Energy has contracted Siemens(s SIE) to build a 123-megawatt solar-powered turbine generator for its massive Mojave Desert solar-thermal projects, the Oakland, Calif.-based startup announced today. Having raised more than $160 million (including$115 million from Google.org, BP, and other big investors in Series C financing last May) and snagged a deal to sell California utility PG&E up to 900 megawatts of solar power, BrightSource apparently decided not to let delays in the state approval process slow it down.

Building a steam turbine generator — which converts hot steam into mechanical work — takes years. So while BrightSource plans to begin construction on its Ivanpah Solar Power Complex in 2009 if California regulators give the green light, the company does not expect the Siemens generator (the companies say it will be the largest of its kind ever built) to arrive until 2011 — mere months before the company plans to begin supplying electricity to utilities. That leaves very little room for error if the company is to meet its deadlines.

“It takes time and patience and a lot of planning ahead to make all of this work well,” John Woolard, BrightSource CEO and a partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners, the startup’s lead investor, told the San Francisco Business Times in August. That’s when the Bureau of Land Management ushered BrightSource to the front of the line for approval of applications to build utility-scale solar projects in the federally-managed desert. “Fortunately,” he said, “this is something we’re not bad at.”

Bloomberg has an article on the rush to build solar thermal power plants in California, with Google being joined by Chevron and Goldman Sachs in investing in Brightsource - Google, Chevron Build Mirrors in Desert to Beat Coal With Solar.

Along a dusty two-lane highway in California's Mojave Desert, 550,000 mirrors point skyward to make steam for electricity. Google Inc., Chevron Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are betting this energy will become cheaper than coal.

The 1,000-acre plant uses concentrated sunlight to generate power for as many as 112,500 homes in Southern California. Rising natural gas prices and emissions limits may make solar thermal the fastest-growing energy source in the next decade, say backers including Vinod Khosla, the founder of computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc.

Costs for the technology will fall below coal as soon as 2020, the U.S. government estimates. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. invested last year in the biggest solar plant built in a generation; Chevron and Google are funding research; and Goldman Sachs is seeking land to lease as demand outpaces wind turbines and geothermal. ...

Costs for solar thermal may fall as low as 3.5 cents a kilowatt hour by 2020, according to a report commissioned by the U.S. Energy Department. Meanwhile, coal expenses may rise. Congress is considering limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. The purchase of pollution permits may be required under a measure the Senate will begin debating next month.

`To Beat Coal'

Ausra's plants will produce electricity at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour starting in 2010, and the price will fall to 8 cents a few years later as it adopts systems with fewer parts that will be less costly when widely deployed, the company says. ``We are going to beat coal,'' says Bob Fishman, Ausra's chief executive officer. His company has a contract with PG&E Corp.'s Pacific Gas & Electric for a site in central California.

Chevron, Goldman Sachs, FPL, PG&E and other companies have filed more than 50 applications with the Bureau of Land Management to lease government-owned desert property for solar power systems. Chevron, which has invested in the solar thermal builder BrightSource Energy Inc. in Oakland, California, and Goldman, the biggest U.S. securities firm, declined to comment.

Google's philanthropic division put $10 million into eSolar, a start-up in Pasadena, California. Dan Reicher, a former Energy Department official who manages the unit's climate and energy initiatives, said there will be more such investments.

The Bloomberg article points to this report from the NREL last year to congress on the Potential impact of CSP for electricity generation (pdf), quoting a likely cost of CSP power of 5 cents per kilowatt by 2020.

Between 2000 and 2003, four reports were released on the potential for CSP. An assessment of the main issues raised by these reports leads to the following conclusions:

1. Further technology development and deployment could reduce the cost of CSP: The S&L study quantified the significant cost reductions that are possible with continued technology development and deployment. It concluded that there were three elements that could reduce the cost of CSP from approximately 12 cents/kWh today to about 5 cents/kWh by 2020: technology development (42 percent), building larger plants (37 percent), and volume production (21 percent). All four studies mentioned in this report are in agreement that the costs of CSP would fall with greater levels of deployment.

2. CSP requires policy incentives for initial deployment: All the reports emphasized that in the near-term, deployment of CSP depends on the establishment of policy incentives that offset the current higher cost of solar energy. The CSP industry provided a list of incentives it stated were necessary to initiate deployment. These were included in DOE’s 2002 report. Six southwestern States have now established renewable portfolio standards, and the Federal Government has created an investment tax credit that encourages the deployment of CSP. These policies have resulted in the establishment of CSP projects in California, Arizona, and Nevada that could result in 2,000 MW by 2010.

Development of CSP could provide energy, economic, environmental, and security benefits. The following factors could make CSP an attractive option for the Southwestern States if policymakers determine that these benefits outweigh the costs.

1. Energy: CSP could provide hundreds of gigawatts of clean power.

2. Economic: Analyses for California, Nevada, and New Mexico estimate that there could be significant benefits in job creation and additions to gross state product accruing from building and operating CSP plants. It is expensive to build a CSP plant and it requires a relatively large number of people to operate and maintain it. Counter balancing this, however, is the absence of a fuel cost. Much of the money that would otherwise be spent on monthly fuel costs, instead is spent on salaries. States and the Federal government have indicated their concern over the rising and volatile price of fossil fuels and their impact on the economy.

3. Environmental: CSP plants do not emit criteria pollutants or greenhouse gases, an issue of growing concern throughout the Federal and State governments. Thus, CSP could be an element of potential future policies related to climate change.

Bruce Sterling has a few comments on the Bloomberg report - as usual his interjections are marked ((())).

Along a dusty two-lane highway in California's Mojave Desert, 550,000 mirrors point skyward to make steam for electricity. Google Inc., (((dot-greens))) Chevron Corp. (((reforming petrocrats))) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (((East Coast finance establishment))) are betting this energy will become cheaper than coal.

(((Once people realize that coal plants are drowning major cities, coal plants are gonna get really, really expensive. Like, probably dangerous even to stand around. There must be any number of rich and evil people who own seaside mansions and could hire a global-guerrilla gang to blow up coal plants with truck bombs. You could probably leverage that activity in the markets and make a whole lot of money. Very "Shadow OPEC," except that the general population would cheer you on.)))

The 1,000-acre plant uses concentrated sunlight to generate power for as many as 112,500 homes in Southern California. Rising natural gas prices and emissions limits may make solar thermal the fastest-growing energy source in the next decade, say backers including Vinod Khosla, the founder of computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. (((Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is afraid of Vinod Khosla. Proof the guy is onto something useful.)))

Costs for the technology will fall below coal as soon as 2020, the U.S. government estimates. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. invested last year in the biggest solar plant built in a generation; Chevron and Google are funding research; and Goldman Sachs is seeking land to lease as demand outpaces wind turbines and geothermal.

``Solar thermal can provide a substantial amount of our power, more than 50 percent,'' says Khosla, who along with the Menlo Park, California, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led a $40 million investment in solar power producer Ausra Inc. ``This is an industrial-strength solution.''

VentureBeat has a post speculating that Google.org may invest in geothermal energy company Ormat. It makes you wonder how much attention GeoDynamics will get if their experimental HFR geothermal plant is successful.

Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, has taken a number of stakes in solar and wind startups over the past year, most recently joining a $115 million investment in solar thermal firm BrightSource Energy. It now seems to be focusing its attention on the bustling geothermal energy sector, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently expressing a strong interest in Ormat, a geothermal startup headquartered in Reno, Nevada.

During an interview with the Israeli newspaper, The Marker, Brin confirmed that his company was in discussions with Ormat to collaborate on several clean energy projects, calling the startup a “great company” and praising it for its potential to turn geothermal energy “into a big business.” Though he wouldn’t say whether Google was in talks to purchase any Israeli cleantech companies, he did say that the conditions were good for his firm to buy companies in 2009. He said there were a lot of interesting companies that worked in renewable energy and electric cars — perhaps a nod to Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place.

According to Haaretz, senior executives at Google have already met with their counterparts from Ormat twice, and Larry Page recently visited one of the company’s plants in Steamboat Hills, Nevada. Ormat chairman Lucien Bronicki said he and Google officials were pushing legislation in the U.S. advocating more R&D for advanced geothermal technology. Ormat announced in February that it would work with the DOE and several geothermal companies — GeothermEx and Pinnacle Technologies — to test Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) technology at its 11 megawatt Desert Peak facility. ...

In addition to making a series of high-profile investments in eSolar, BrightSource and Makani Power as part of its RE is cheaper than coal initiative, Google has also donated over $1 million in grants to support plug-in vehicle adoption. The foundation’s RechargeIT initiative recently gave $200,000 to CalCars.org. Page said Google.org’s goal is to produce 1 gigawatt of renewable energy capacity from wind, geothermal and solar thermal sources cheaper than coal, an objective he and Brin are optimistic will be met in years, rather than decades.

Google also invested in another solar thermal company recently, putting $115 million into BrightSource, which is building a 900MW plant to supply PG&E.

Today we are pleased to announce our participation in BrightSource Energy's $115 million venture financing with a $10 million equity investment as part of Google's RE is cheaper than coal initiative.

Solar thermal energy generation is one of the key emerging industries addressing the changing global climate and we are excited about both of our current investments in solar thermal technology -- BrightSource Energy and eSolar.

In addition to making investments in renewable energy startups, we plan to make grants to support the research and development of enabling technologies to help the solar thermal industry achieve larger scale and lower costs. We believe that by supporting researchers and entrepreneurs taking different, ambitious approaches and risks to generate clean energy, we can help to accelerate progress and increase the collective economic value of these new clean energy industries.

We are also looking for a Head of Renewable Energy to run our internal R&D effort, which is focused initially on solar thermal power, advanced wind technologies, and enhanced geothermal systems.