Solar thermal company BrightSource is actually looking to raise $130 million, which is another $50 million over the amount it announced last month. The company makes solar thermal power plants which use mirrors and a boiler to produce electricity. Read more »
This is what it feels like inside Ivanpah, the world’s largest solar thermal farm under construction. We drive along the solar mirror fields, take an elevator to the top of one of the 450-foot towers, and peek inside the assembly building at. Read more »
From nine stories up the 450 foot tower at the Ivanpah solar thermal farm, the tens of thousands of mirrors look like metallic chiclets, and the workers like Doozers walking amongst them. The first of its kind solar site is in a full construction boom. Read more »
BrightSource Energy, which builds solar power plants and plans to do an IPO, has completed about a quarter, or 25 percent, of its first project, Ivanpah, which is on schedule to come online next year, the company said in a government filing on Friday. Read more »
It was roughly a year ago when the California Energy Commission approved nine solar farms all within a few months in order to make sure those projects could qualify for a federal program that subsidizes 30 percent of their costs. Where are they now? Read more »
It’s been over a month since the Solyndra news came out, but it’s still dominating. Because it just won’t go away, here’s my top five list of projects that the DOE also backed with loan guarantees and that are showing some early signs of success. Read more »
The Googlization of solar is here, and software, big data, wireless networks and IT will be a fundamental part of the future of modern energy infrastructure. Read more »
The DOE has been getting the remainder of its loan guarantees out the door at record speed in time to beat the program’s sunset on Sept. 30 of this year. On Tuesday the DOE announced almost $2 billion in loan guarantees for two solar thermal projects. Read more »
On Friday BrightSource Energy received approval from the Bureau of Land Management to restart the part of its Ivanpah Solar power plant project that was suspended in April of this year in order to reassess the project’s impact on desert tortoises. Read more »
Solar company BrightSource says it employs between 60 and 100 biologists at any time to make sure animals in the desert surrounding its inaugural solar plant Ivanpah are unharmed. A group of environmentalists have been protesting the plant, and part of the construction was temporarily halted. Read more »
A whole lot has changed since we rounded up the solar farms that are planned for the deserts of California and Arizona, from farms changing hands, to the DOE handing out loan guarantees. Here’s 7 of the solar farms that are being built in Southwestern deserts. Read more »
BrightSource Energy has upped its latest fundraising goal from $100 million last December to $125 million and plans to use the money for both the U.S. projects and international expansion, the company’s spokesman, Keely Wachs, told us Tuesday. Read more »
Here comes another lawsuit about a giant solar farm in California. Western Watershed Project has filed a lawsuit against the federal government over its approval of BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah project in the Mojave Desert. Read more »
Ivanpah is on! The massive 392-MW solar farm that is being built next to the Ivanpah Dry Lake, in San Bernardino County, Calif., is now officially under construction and will be the first of its kind to use BrightSource’s solar thermal concentrating gear. Read more »
Solar thermal player BrightSource has raised another $26 million of its previously raised round, and reportedly has moved closer to an IPO by hiring Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Will the solar thermal leader hit the public markets in 2011? Read more »
The federal Bureau of Land Management will be stamping its final approval on a series of giant solar energy projects in California over the next two months, marking 2010 as the year when the state allows its desert to bloom with mirrors to produce electricity. Read more »
August is turning out to be a critical month for concentrating solar thermal developers. The California Energy Commission issued recommendations for not one, but three projects over the past week, for a whopping total of 1.6 GW. uire Read more »
