GigaOM » ivanpah

BrightSource actually raising $130M for solar thermal

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 17:27:18 +0000

Last month solar thermal startup BrightSource announced it had raised a massive $80 million in equity. But in addition to that $80 million, the company is also looking to close on another $50 million according to a filing, which would bring this latest round to $130 million. That’s huge and would bring BrightSource’s total funding raised to date to $665 million.

As I previously pointed out, it’s pretty rare these days that a cleantech startup can close on such a large round — investors are far less willing to put big rounds into cleantech startups in 2012 (see GigaOM Pro’s Q3 wrap up). But some cleantech startup outliers — able to raise sizable rounds — are still out there.

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BrightSource develops solar thermal plants and its design uses fields of large mirrors to concentrate sun light onto the top of large towers. The tower has a boiler at the top that heats liquid, which in turn runs steam turbines and produces electricity. BrightSource is building a solar farm called Ivanpah near Las Vegas on 3,600 acres, and currently has 2,100 workers installing about one mirror a minute onto poles in the desert ground.

BrightSource’s investors include power company Alstom and venture firm VantagePoint Capital Partners, and additional investors included DFJ, CalSTRS, DBL Investors, Goldman Sachs, Chevron Technology Ventures and BP Ventures.

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Behind the scenes video of the pioneering solar farm Ivanpah

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 19:42:15 +0000

The massive solar thermal farm Ivanpah, in the Mojave desert, is half way through completed, and on a recent trip to the site, we grabbed a dozen or so video clips. Check out our lil’ hand-shot movie, which shows off scenes from the top of tower 1, inside the mirror assembly buidings, and driving amongst the mirror-filled fields.

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A mirror a minute: the Ivanpah solar farm kicks into high gear

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 07:00:50 +0000

About 45 minutes south of Las Vegas on Interstate 15 — past miles of sprawling desert, a few aging casinos, and the Nevada, California border — sits an engineering and technology marvel that is months from offering a very real solution to helping fight climate change. This is Ivanpah, one of the largest solar thermal farms in the world, which when switched on in 2013, will use 170,000 mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto three massive towers to produce solar electricity.

A crane installing a mirror into place at Ivanpah

On a visit on Monday, BrightSource — the solar tech company behind the plant — construction giant Bechtel, and the largest owner of the project, NRG Energy, welcomed a group of reporters onto the site to check out just how close Ivanpah is to producing electricity. The solar team says the construction on the entire 3,600 acre site is about half way complete, and the site has now moved into a peak construction phase with 2,100 workers installing about one mirror a minute onto poles in the desert ground.

That’s 3,000 mirrors — called heliostats — installed per week for the past three weeks, says Jim Ivany, President of Renewables for Bechtel. There’s already 40,000 of the planned 55,000 mirrors installed around the first tower of Ivanpah — called Ivanpah 1 — which will sell its power to utility PG&E. Ivanpah 3 will also sell power to PG&E, while Ivanpah 2 will supply Southern California Edison.

Our group had the lucky opportunity of getting to ride up to the ninth floor of the 450 foot tower 1, and being able to step out onto the viewing platform, which was basically just a sturdy metal grating. Solar fans that fear heights need not apply. From the skies the heliostats look like metallic chiclets and the workers like Doozers walking amongst them. Miles of desert, and beyond that mountains, stretch out around the mirror fields.

NRG CEO David Crane at the top of tower 1

All three of the 450-foot towers at Ivanpah are now built, and two out of the three towers already house the massive boilers at their tops that will be the point where all of the sunlight from the heliostats is focused. These boilers will shine bright — like light bulbs — when turned on, and the intense heat from the sun’s rays will turn water into steam, that will in turn run turbines and create electricity.

Just a year ago

The site is almost unrecognizable from the first time I visited it, about a year ago. Back then only part of the first tower was built and there were no mirrors installed across the fields. The first tower took many months to resurrect, and the two other ones followed just weeks behind, due to the learning curve of finishing the first one. Before construction, the site suffered from delays for years due to regulations and environmental concerns from the desert tortoises.

But now that construction is in full force, it’s like they’re making up for lost time. Bechtel’s Ivany says at one point he was worried at the pace of such break neck construction, as he was concerned that transporting tens of thousands of mirrors across dusty roads throughout the site would be difficult to do efficiently. But the team eventually figured it out, says Ivany.

The construction effort is unusual to say the least. The site has boasted three heavy lift cranes that can lift 90 tons of materials. Ivany says there’s only 22 of these cranes in existence in the world.

Sea of heliostats at Ivanpah 1

The assembly buildings — which look like tan circus tents rising up in the desert — have been built to deliver around 300 assembled mirrors per 10-hour shift. The team consulted with some auto execs in Detroit to get the assembly line process down to the efficiency of a large automated auto plant. When all of the mirrors are assembled and installed, the assembly buildings are designed to be packed up and removed from the site.

One of the most important things to remember is that six months ago the workers that are building the towers, and installing and assembling the mirrors didn’t have all that much experience constructing a solar thermal farm of this kind. No one has, really. BrightSource built a much smaller scale site in Coalinga that provided solar-generated steam to Chevron for enhanced oil recovery and BrightSource also built another plant in Israel. But this one has newer, next-gen technology.

The tower and boiler at Ivanpah 1

Ivanpah is the first of its kind at this scale, and represents a new wave of solar power that is being built in the California deserts. The entire site will deliver 392 MW of power, which is on par with a medium sized fossil fuel power plant. Energy storage and natural gas turbine technology will help the solar farm deliver closer to baseload power (meaning it could run more like a 24/7 coal plant) with greater power reliability than a solar panel farm.

To be sure, Ivanpah wasn’t cheap. It’s costing billions of dollars to build, and includes a big chunk of the funds coming via a loan guarantee from the U.S. government. NRG Energy CEO David Crane, in his closing remarks after the day long tour, made sure to thank the support of the federal government.

If you don’t believe that the U.S. needs to de-carbonize its electricity supply, then Ivanpah might seem like an extravagance. But California certainly believes in investing in carbon-free energy, and thanks to its renewable portfolio standard has encouraged PG&E and SCE to buy the power from the site.

Here’s two dozen photos of my latest visit to Ivanpah:

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BrightSource’s Ivanpah solar project is a quarter completed

Ucilia Wang — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:54:26 +0000

Aerial view of Chevron, BrightSource solar oil plant

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. BrightSource spokesperson Keely Wachs tells us that the Ivanpah project is still on schedule to be completed in 2013.

Completing Ivanpah is crucial for BrightSource’s survival because the company has yet to demonstrate that it’s able to develop and deliver a large-scale project — doing so will help it line up more money and more customers. The company has raised $2.2 billion in equity and debt to finance Ivanpah’s construction.

The 392MW project has generated a lot of controversy because of its impact on the desert tortoise. In fact, the discovery of a higher-than-expected number of tortoises on the project site (located in California’s Mojave Desert) prompted BrightSource to halt construction on parts of the project last year. Work resumed in June.

The company posted $159.1 million in revenue and $111 million in net losses for 2011 in its Friday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In contrast, BrightSource posted $71.6 million in net losses on $13.5 million in revenues for 2010.

The Oakland, Calif., company is one of a handful of developers building solar power plants in the U.S. using concentrating solar thermal technology, which uses mirrors to direct sunlight to heat water in a boiler and use the steam to run a turbine-generator to produce power. BrightSource’s power-plant designs place the boiler atop a tower.

The company started building Ivanpah in October 2010 and plans eventually to deliver 377MW from Ivanpah to Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison. The two utilities are big customers for BrightSource, which has inked 13 power sales agreements, totaling 2.4 GW, with them.

BrightSource re-negotiated five contracts with Edison last year and submitted the modified contracts to the California Public Utilities Commission last November. The two companies changed the terms for three of the contracts, mainly to reflect the addition of energy storage, which BrightSource says will enable it to deliver the same amount of power with one less power plant.

Either BrightSource or Edison can cancel the contracts if the commission doesn’t approve them, BrightSource said in its filing. The company is now seeking regulatory approval for two other projects in California.

Because BrightSource’s technology can produce very hot steam, it can have other uses besides electricity generation; for example, the company completed a project for Chevron last year for oil recovery. Chevron sends the steam to loosen oil that is stuck in rock fissures, making it easier to siphon out. The project provided BrightSource with an opportunity to demonstrate its technology for industrial operations, but cost a lot more than the company initially expected.

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The fate of 9 giant solar farms in Cali

Ucilia Wang — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 02:00:56 +0000

It was about 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. So, where are they now?

We know one of them just received the final regulatory hurdle yesterday despite its high cost. The California Public Utilities Commission approved a power sales contract between Abengoa Solar and Pacific Gas & Electric because it didn’t want to stand in the way of a project that already had gotten all other state and federal permits and a $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee.

A lot has changed for many other projects in just one year, and it underscores the difficulties of developing large-scale solar farms. All nine projects proposed to use the sun’s heat to produce steam or hydrogen gas to run equipment that produce electricity. The technology is commonly called solar thermal and is different from the use solar panels (photovoltaic technology).

Project	Developer	Power Generation	Status
Ivanpah Solar	BrightSource Energy	392 MW	Under construction. BrightSource secured a $1.6 billion fed loan guarantee.
Calico Solar	K Road Power	663.5 MW	Under commission view again. K Road, the new owner, wants to use solar panels for bulk of the project.
Blythe Solar	Solar Millennium/SolarHybrid	1000 MW	Solar Millennium is in the process of selling Blythe to Solarhybrid, which will use solar panels instead.
Palen Solar	Solar Millennium/SolarHybrid	500 MW	Same story as above.
Imperial Valley Solar	AES Solar Power	709 MW	Energy Commission revoked permit at AES’s request. AES wants to use solar panels.
Beacon Solar	NextEra Energy Resources	250 MW	NextEra also wants to use solar panels but has yet to file paper to declare its intention.
Genesis Solar	NextEra Energy Resources	250 MW	Under construction. NextEra secured a partial fed guarantee for a $ 852 million loan.
Rice Solar	SolarReserve	150 MW	Construction scheduled to start in 2Q 2012.
Mojave Solar	Abengoa Solar	280 MW	Under construction. Abengoa secured a $1.2 billion fed loan guarantee.

Photo courtesy of BrightSource Energy

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5 bets the DOE made that are better than Solyndra

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:00:11 +0000

It’s been almost five weeks since the news came to light that solar panel maker Solyndra was going to crash and take with it 1,100 jobs and $527 million in taxpayer funds. But the story still remains on top of the minds of investors, the media, House Republicans and concerned taxpayers, and it is overshadowing some of the early successes of other green companies that also won government support.

Here’s my top five list of companies and projects that the DOE also backed with loan guarantees or loans and that are showing some early signs of success. Yes, some of these projects still have some risk, but they have met some milestones.

1. Tesla’s Model S factory. This week I got a chance to ride in one of electric car maker Tesla’s beta versions of its second electric car, the Model S. The Model S is one of the first cars in the world to be designed from the ground up as an electric car (in contrast to the more common method of using the body of an internal combustion car as an electric car). It’s a seven-seater sedan, and it has one of the roomiest interiors I’ve seen for an EV. The DOE gave Tesla $465 million in low-interest loans out of the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program to build the factory, and Tesla says it already has 6,000 reservations for the Model S. Yes, Tesla will have to pay back that loan by selling Model S vehicles and its tech licensing projects (it has a $100 million deal with Toyota), but it seems to be on track to deliver the Model S in mid-2012.

2. BrightSource’s Ivanpah solar farm. Solar thermal company BrightSource is one of the first companies in the world to start building a massive solar power tower farm. BrightSource’s Ivanpah is now under construction on 3,600 acres of land in the desert near Las Vegas. I visited the farm in August, the same week that Solyndra announced its bankruptcy, and the company is making progress on the first of three sections of the 392 MW farm.

Ivanpah will be built with a $1.6 billion loan, guaranteed by the DOE and funded by the Federal Financing Bank. The farm could still be delayed and there could be other hurdles, but the company has overcome the milestones of being fully financed, and with utility customers. Private investors in the project include NRG Energy, Bechtel and Google, and funders of BrightSource include VantagePoint Capital, Alstom, Morgan Stanley, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Chevron Technology Ventures.

3. Shepherds Wind Flat. What looks to be the world’s largest wind farm, the 845 MW Shepherds Flat project, went under construction in Oregon in April 2011, and it is expected to start up in 2012. It will use 338 wind turbines from GE and will stretch across 30 square miles. It will cost $2 billion to build. Southern California Edison, a utility, has entered into a contract to buy the wind power. Japanese giant ITOCHU Corporation, Tyr Energy and a subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation, Sumitomo Corporation of America, along with Google, are putting around $500 million into the farm. Most importantly, the project received a partial loan guarantee for $1.3 billion. With matured wind turbine tech, deep-pocketed private investors and utility customers, there’s little risk in this project.

4. Abengoa’s solar projects. Spanish engineering giant Abengoa Solar received $1.2 billion and $1.45 billion loan guarantees for solar projects using traditional and lower-risk solar thermal trough technology. Abengoa also has utilities that will have commitments to buy up the solar power from the farms. Abengoa is a multinational conglomerate that won’t likely crash and burn, swallowing loans and jobs.

5. The big automakers. OK, maybe not better in this case, but safer, though not likely to lead to innovations. The DOE, remember, gave Nissan and Ford the bulk of the ATVM program loans so far, including $5.9 billion for Ford Motor Company and $1.45 billion for Nissan North America. Word on the street is that Chrysler has been in the process of getting another big chunk. This support will lead to jobs but maybe not produce all that greener cars or cleaner energy.

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The Googlization of solar

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:00:45 +0000

Walking through BrightSource’s solar project in a desert in Israel, you can hear the persistent sound of tiny chirps emanating from the more than 1,600 mirrors sticking out of the ground. The chirps aren’t coming from critters that have moved into the solar farm, but the noises are emanating from the gearboxes on the bases of those hundreds of mirrors, which are re-shifting very slightly every few seconds. Using sophisticated software, BrightSource uses real-time data about the location of the sun, the wind speed, the dust levels, and other info to constantly tweak the mirrors to ensure the solar generation from the site is as efficient as possible.

BrightSource Senior Director of Corporate Communications Keely Wachs regaled the chirping story to me recently while I was on a tour of another BrightSource solar project in California. Call the trend the Googlization of solar, or the way that software, big data, and wireless networks will help remake the modern energy infrastructure.

Evidence of BrightSource’s use of software and IT to design and build its flagship solar project, Ivanpah, in California, was very evident during my tour last month, too. Workers doing surveyor work on the Ivanpah site showed me how they use Trimble GPS navigation devices to collect data about soil, location and depth, and to make sure that important construction points — from transmission connections, to the bases of steel beams that will hold up 400-foot central boilers — are built in the necessary positions. When the three 400-foot tall central boilers are built at Ivanpah in the midst of the thousands of mirrors on the site, software will make sure the mirrors are positioned in such a way as to evenly spread the heat from the sun’s rays across the towers’ receivers.

BrightSource isn’t the only so-called solar thermal company — tech that uses the sun’s heat to generate electricity, instead of solar panels — to rely heavily on software. eSolar, a BrightSource competitor, designs its small mirrors and licenses software to manage those mirrors using its own brand of algorithms. eSolar’s engineers have put up videos on YouTube of some of the more novel things its software can get the mirrors to do, like spell out Happy Birthday for a company exec.

Clean power software

Bechtel exec Terry Copeland explains the layout of Ivanpah

Getting clean power from these types of massive utility-scale solar farms to the residences and businesses that will use them, will require another set of IT that makes the power grid a lot smarter. As David Crane, CEO and president of NRG Energy and Eric Dresselhuys, EVP and CMO of Silver Spring Networks, explained at our Green:Net 2011 event earlier this year, the future of the power grid will rely on using the digital intelligence of the smart grid to incorporate a growing amount of clean energy. Utilities will need smarter distribution and transmission systems to make sure their power grids can handle an influx of variable clean power (electricity that only flows when the sun shines).

It’s been fashionable lately for venture capitalists and young startups to focus more on solar software and services, rather than on starting new businesses in solar manufacturing. The bankruptcy of three solar manufacturing companies (Solyndra, SpectraWatt and Evergreen Solar) in recent weeks points to the value in the software and services approach over manufacturing. The encroachment of huge conglomerates, combined with the rapid growth of the Chinese solar companies in recent years, has made solar a commodity and new solar manufacturing an unsustainable business.

Then there’s the ability of software and the web to create the ecosystem around the solar buyer and the installer. Clean Power Finance, a solar software and financing startup, recently raised $25 million from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufiled & Byers, Claremont Creek Ventures, Clean Pacific Ventures, Sand Hill Angels and angel investor and co-founder Gary Kremen. Clean Power Finance says its software was used by 40 percent of U.S. residential solar systems in 2010.

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DOE offers almost $2B for solar thermal projects

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 04:01:18 +0000

The Department of Energy has been getting the remainder of its loan guarantees out the door at record speed to beat the program’s sunset on Sept. 30 of this year. Here are the latest two (and perhaps two of the last few winners): On Tuesday, the DOE announced almost $2 billion in conditional commitments for loan guarantees for two solar thermal projects, which use mirrors to produce heat to generate electricity in contrast to solar panels that convert light into electricity.

The first project is a 250 MW solar farm to be built by Abengoa Solar, the solar arm of the Spanish engineering giant, in San Bernadino County, Calif. The DOE is offering the so-called Mojave Solar Project a $1.2 billion conditional commitment for a loan guarantee. The second project is another 250 MW solar farm, to be built by NextEra Energy in Riverside County, Calif. called the Genesis Solar Project. The DOE is offering a conditional commitment for a $681.6 million loan guarantee for that project.

Abengoa and NextEra say their solar thermal projects will provide 1,630 construction jobs, and close to 120 jobs when the solar projects are up and running. Loan guarantees are assurances that the government will pay back a loan if a company defaults on it, and often goes along with loans from the Federal Financing Bank. The guarantees also enable companies to get loans with better rates than without the guarantee, particularly for risky, early stage technology.

Last month, the DOE’s loan guarantee program chief Jonathan Silver said his staff had narrowed down a list of projects that were still eligible for loan guarantees and also notified applicants whose projects weren’t good enough or far enough along in the process to be in the running for the loan guarantees. The loan guarantee program came to life as part of the 2009 stimulus package that aimed to boost job creation and clean power generation.

Solar projects have been a major recipient of DOE loan guarantees. Earlier this month, the DOE awarded a loan guarantee to solar developer Fotowatio Renewable Ventures to build a 20 MW solar photovoltaic project near Las Vegas; Abengoa already received a $1.45 billion loan guarantee for its solar thermal Solana project in Arizona; and BrightSource Energy received a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for its inaugural Ivanpah project in California. The DOE also announced a $737 million conditional loan guarantee for a 110 MW solar power plant by SolarReserve last month, and awarded its first loan guarantee to thin-film solar maker Solyndra. (see the complete list of awardees and solar awardees here).

Image courtesy of Abengoa, and pictures Abengoa’s Spanish solar tower power plant.

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BrightSource passes tortoise hurdle to continue solar project

Ucilia Wang — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:40:03 +0000

On Friday solar company 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.

The BLM issued a “notice to proceed” after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service completed a new biological opinion to take into account the more-than-expected number of desert tortoises that have been found around the project site since BrightSource began construction last October. The previous biological opinion anticipated finding around 40 adult tortoises for the duration of the multiyear project, the BLM’s spokeswoman, Erin Curtis, told me in April. But BrightSource, which hires dozens of biologists to monitor the site, had found 39 tortoises by April 15. BrightSource then stopped work for phases 2 and 3 of the 392 MW solar project in the Mojave Desert.

The project is one of nearly a dozen solar power plants in Calif., Ariz. and other southwestern states that received an expedited review process by the BLM. President Obama has made renewable energy development a priority for creating jobs and producing electricity from cleaner sources. Many of the solar power projects in the southwestern states have gotten loans or loan guarantees from the federal government. BrightSource has gotten a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for the $2.2 billion project. The government promises to pay back the loan, which comes from Treasury’s Federal Financing Bank, if BrightSource can’t.

Ivanpah is BrightSource’s first solar farm, and it has gotten investments from NRG Energy and Google, which put up $168 million.

The project remains on schedule despite the work suspension, BrightSource said in a statement on Friday. Any significant delay of the project would have been bad news, not just because it would hamper the company’s ability to deliver electricity on time to utilities Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison. It also could negatively affect BrightSource’s plan to raise money by going public. The company filed for a $250 million initial public offering in April.

The new biological opinion tells BrightSource what it needs to do to protect certain species of plants and animals. The company is responsible for tagging, quarantining and testing captured tortoises for diseases and other health issues before placing them elsewhere to protect them from construction activities. Federal biologists previously underestimated the number of tortoises, possibly because they conducted the survey mostly during the drought year of 2007, when the tortoise population was smaller than usual, Curtis said.

The BLM biologists issued a survey in April that looked at the potential number of adult and young tortoises not only on the project site but also in an area next to the boundaries. The survey said there will likely be anywhere from 86 to 162 adults found within the project site. The Fish and Wildlife Service then used the new data to draft the new biological opinion.

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BrightSource vs the environmentalists

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 20:22:11 +0000

Solar company BrightSource says it employs between 60 and 100 biologists at any one time to make sure the animals and plants in the Mojave desert surrounding its inaugural 392 MW solar thermal plant, Ivanpah, are unharmed. Biologists slowly comb the area, dig deep burrows for desert tortoises, and tag animals with radio chips, according to a just released video from BrightSource (see below).

The video is likely a response to a group of environmentalists, who haven’t been quiet in their reaction to the company building the massive solar plant, which uses mirrors to concentrate the suns rays across six square miles, in an area that an estimated 140 desert tortoises call home. Just last month, about a dozen protestors reportedly picketed outside of BrightSource’s Oakland, Calif. headquarters.

BrightSource was also forced to temporarily halt working on phases 2 and 3 of Ivanpah after finding more desert tortoises on the project site than previously anticipated. BrightSource noted the suspension in an S-1 filing in April, and the company is planning to raise $250 million in an IPO. Phase 1 of Ivanpah is already under construction. BrightSource began building the project in earnest last October and expects to complete it by 2013.

Project delays typically cost money, and BrightSource will likely need to spend more money to accommodate the tortoises. BrightSource has a $66.5 million reserve that can cover budget overruns, but after that amount, BrightSource needs to foot the bill for going over budget. The company still expects to complete Ivanpah in 2013, a spokesman wrote us in an email late last month.

Update: Keely Wachs, BrightSource’s spokesman says: “Ivanpah is proving that we can do both: build our nation’s clean energy infrastructure and protect wildlife. The project is setting the bar when it comes to desert tortoise care.”

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