Solar thermal technology uses mirrors to concentrated the sun’s rays to a liquid-filled collector point, which heats up and produces steam and powers a steam tubine, delivering electricity. Solar panels, on the other hand, convert sunlight directly into electricity.

This week utility PG&E and BrightSource agreed to mutually terminate agreements for PG&E to buy solar power from two 250 MW planned solar power plants, called Hidden Hills, located in Inyo County, near the Nevada border. The projects are estimated to cost a combined $2.6 billion, and the companies said the contract was terminated due to “challenges associated with the project schedule and uncertainty around the timing of transmission upgrades.”

BrightSource has been focused on adding energy storage technology to its projects, which would make its power plants more robust and be able to provide energy when the sun isn’t shining. BrightSource says its Hidden Hills site is a good candidate for a solar farm with the storage technology, but that such a change would require an amendment to the permit application and a reopening of the record to go over the new layout and plan. Suspending the current application saves time and expense, BrightSource spokesperson Keely Wachs tells me.

Back in January utility Southern California Edison and BrightSource also agreed to terminate a contract for a 200 MW solar plant for its Rio Mesa 2 project near Blythe, California. The California Public Utilities Commission had denied an adjacent contract next to Rio Mesa 2 due to cost concerns last year, and BrightSource suspended permitting for both Rio Mesa 1 and 2 earlier this year.

There’s three transmission lines at Ivanpah

BrightSource is completing its flagship solar thermal project called Ivanpah in the desert near Las Vegas this year. Wachs says that BrightSource is also currently focused on its Palen solar project in Riverside County, which has already been permitted by the California Energy Commission.

But still, the hurdles for BrightSource’s solar power plant contracts illustrate some of the inherent difficulties with trying to build massive solar plants, filled with mirrors and trackers and towers. Such large solar farms need transmission lines to shuttle the power to the cities that will use it, but transmission lines can be controversial, expensive and take a very long time to deploy.

Environmental reports can also take many months and a lot of money. Protests from environmentalists have derailed, and added significant costs, to solar thermal projects.

While solar thermal projects face such hurdles, solar panels continue to drop in price and are being deployed at a rapid pace. As GigaOM Pro research analyst explained this week: “3313 megawatts came online in the U.S. in 2012, a 76 percent increase over 2011 with GTM Research predicting that we’ll see continued growth up to 4300 megawatts this year.” And in particular utility-scale solar panel projects grew 134 percent last year and accounted for more than half of installed solar.

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The 7 MW pilot project is built by Fremont, Calif-based GlassPoint Solar, and will be crucial for the four-year-old GlassPoint to validate its concentrating solar thermal technology, says Rod MacGregor, CEO of GlassPoint Solar.

The company is building the project for Petroleum Development Oman, which is a joint venture between the government of Oman, Royal Dutch Shell, Total and Partex. On Tuesday GlassPoint plans to announce a $26 million round of investment from Shell, RockPort Capital, Nth Power and Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital.

The project is only the second for GlassPoint, which built a 300 KW system for Berry Petroleum in central California in early 2011. But the Middle East is where GlassPoint wants to be. It’s the mother lode of oil production and where natural gas, which has historically been used to produce steam for oil extraction, remains expensive. Natural gas in the U.S., on the other hand, is too cheap right now to make solar steam production an attractive option, MacGregor said.

GlassPoint set out to design equipment for producing steam that is then injected by high pressure into the ground to loosen and thin the sticky oil in rock fissures. The use of steam to recover more oil from the field isn’t a new concept, but using solar energy to produce steam is a more novel approach. Many companies that are developing similar solar thermal equipment for electricity generation also are targeting the oil recovery operation. BrightSource Energy, for example, built a 29 MW project at a Chevron oil field in California last year.

GlassPoint’s solar steam equipment uses steel mirrors to concentrate the sunlight onto water-containing steel pipes to produce steam. The set up is similar to the equipment used by much bigger rivals such as Abengoa Solar and Areva. What sets GlassPoint’s design apart is the glass structure that seals each row of mirrors and pipes and protects the equipment from strong wind, sand, dust and humidity. Those same conditions present challenges to any kind of solar steam or electricity generation equipment and require more frequent cleaning.

MacGregor compares his company’s equipment design to that of a greenhouse. Growers “try to get as much light into a greenhouse while protecting the plants from the environment. That’s similar to what we do,” he said.

In addition to the glass shield, GlassPoint’s technology is designed to use low-quality water that likely contains crud from the oil field.  In comparison, solar steam equipment from rivals typically requires very pure water to run, or else their pipes will be clogged by the crud, MacGregor said. Eliminating the need to treat water saves costs.

MacGregor declined to disclose the cost of building the Oman project, which can produce, on average, 50 tons of steam per day. The company contracts with factories to produce the various components for its solar steam equipment. MacGregor plans to use the new round of funding to hire more engineers and people to work on finances and government relations.

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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.

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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The California Public Utilities Commission voted 5-0 to approve two power purchase agreements between developer BrightSource Energy and Southern California Edison. The contracts will see power flowing from the yet-to-be-built Rio Mesa 1 and Sonoran West. At the same time, the commission rejected Edison’s request to approve three other contracts with BrightSource.

Edison actually sought approval for all five contracts, totaling 1,000 MW, back in 2009, when energy storage played no part. Then it re-negotiated the contracts with BrightSource in 2011 after BrightSource had modified those power plant proposals to reduce their environmental impact.  This time around, energy storage made its way into three of the contracts.

The decision was a compromise. The commissioners were set to vote on the five contracts back in August, but postponed it because they were wrestling with which of the five they should approve. The commission’s own staff recommended approving contracts for three projects that would include storage and denying two projects that wouldn’t have storage. With energy storage, a utility could bank electricity when demand is low and release the power when demand is high. It makes a solar power plant act more like a conventional fossil fuel power plant, which can produce power any time of the day.

So while using storage will add cost and increase the price of a contract, its benefits outweigh the expenses, the commissioners said, particularly since California requires its utilities to increase the amount of renewable electricity in their supplies until it reaches 33 percent by 2020. Under law, utilities need to provide power reliably to their customers regardless of the sources of their electricity.

But commissioners didn’t see their vote for the five contracts as quite so black and white. One issue was the contract pricing and the other one was a more philosophical deliberation about how to chart a path to cleaner and more affordable energy by 2020. Commission President Michael Peevey came up with a compromise plan and won the support of the four other commissioners.

The contracts for Rio Mesa 1 and Rio Mesa 2, totaling 400 MW, are way pricier than bids submitted to Edison while it was renegotiating with BrightSource, the commission noted in its proposed decision. But the commissioners didn’t want to say no to both contracts because BrightSource plans to use newer technology that it says will use land more efficiently and therefore reduce its projects’ environmental impact. The commissioners wanted to give BrightSource a chance to use the new technology, so during its Thursday vote, it approved the contract for Rio Mesa 2 but said no to Rio Mesa 1.

The commissioners also said no to two of the three projects, Siberia 1 and Siberia 2, that contain energy storage because those two are proposed for a location that would likely require an upgrade of the transmission lines there in order to deliver power from the two solar farms. That upgrade would be so expensive as to “render the projects infeasible,” the commission said. The remaining project with storage, Sonoran West, is priced competitively against competing bids, so the commission voted for it.

Allowing BrightSource to use the new technology and storage is important for the state to get cleaner and cheaper power in the future, the commissioners said. Commissioner Mike Florio, who usually cites high prices as the chief reason for voting against certain contracts – he cast the lone “no” vote for the solar power contract between Abengoa and Pacific Gas & Electric last year – said he supported Peevey’s compromise because it promises a clear progression toward lower-cost solar power.

“Here the path is directly visible.” Florio said during deliberation Thursday. “I normally don’t support ratepayers having to pay for technological risks, but we will have to take some risks like these.”

Winning those contracts is crucial for BrightSource to raise money for building those plants. Investors will more likely put up money if they know BrightSource already has found buyers for its projects. Incidentally, the company announced yesterday that it had raised an equity round of $80 million. The company is building its first solar power plant called Ivanpah, in California.

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But BrightSource has managed to scale up, its first inaugural solar thermal farm Ivanpah is getting close to completion, and it’s got a pipeline of projects waiting to be developed. Lead investors in the round included 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.

The boiler on the tower at Ivanpah

Alstom is a massive power company, and BrightSource says through the investment, the two will work on developing solar thermal projects in India and Australia, in addition to their planned partnerships in Africa. VantagePoint is a longtime cleantech investment firm led by Alan Salzman — Salzman said at an event earlier this year: “Embracing incumbents and finding the enlightened ones is essential (for startups) to scale.”

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

Here’s a video I took when I toured Ivanpah a few months ago:

When BrightSource decided to stop pursuing its IPO plans earlier this year, CEO John Woolard told me that because of the weak public markets, particularly for solar and greentech companies, BrightSource’s potential IPO transaction wasn’t necessarily at the terms that the company and its investors wanted. So, likely, raising more private equity enabled BrightSource to maintain a valuation that its investors and management more closely agreed with.

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The staff of California Public Utilities Commission is recommending a “no” vote for two power purchase agreements in which SCE will buy power from BrightSource’s yet-to-be-built Rio Mesa solar project. The staff said the two agreements are too expensive and noted that the power plants for the contracts won’t have ways to store electricity for later use. The three remaining power purchase agreements between the two companies involve other power plants that will have energy storage, which will give Edison more flexibility to manage supply and demand.

The commission was originally scheduled to vote on the five power purchase agreements today but opted to postpone the decision until next month. The postponement request came from commission president Michael Peevey, who often pushes and wins approval for controversial projects from his fellow commissioners by coming up with alternative proposals that contain compromises.

The commission staff said in the report that storage is a “unique attribute” that “decreases renewable integration risk and provides more value to ratepayers.” With energy storage, a utility could bank electricity when demand is low and release the power when demand is high. It makes a solar power plant act more like conventional fossil fuel power plants, which can produce power any time of the day. California utilities are under mandates to increase the amount of renewable energy they serve to their customers, and they are turning to solar and wind energy to meet the requirements.

Solar and wind farms only produce power when the sun is out or the wind is blowing, so they won’t be able to send electricity to the grid consistently in ways that fossil fuel power plants can. An electric grid runs smoothly when there is a balance of supply and demand, however, and that makes managing solar and wind energy a tricky business. The ability to bank solar or wind electricity will help solve this dilemma. In fact, the commission is considering whether to require utilities to pay for energy storage as more solar and wind energy flows into the grid.

The cost of adding energy storage doesn’t always make sense, especially in the case of using newer storage technologies, such as batteries. But it does for BrightSource, which announced last August that it would start designing storage into its power plants. The Oakland company then revealed last November that it would add energy storage in some of the power plants that would serve Edison’s customers. The announcement mentioned three contracts to sell power to Edison, the same contracts that are now under review by the commission.

Edison actually sought approval for all five contracts back in 2009, when energy storage played no part. Then it re-negotiated the contracts with BrightSource in 2011 after BrightSource had modified those power plant proposals to reduce their environmental impact.  This time around, energy storage made its way into three of the contracts.

The two contracts that won’t benefit from storage are part of the proposed Rio Mesa project, which is under review by California Energy Commission. BrightSource applied for Rio Mesa’s approval last October, and ideally it would have approved contracts to sell power from the project in hand once it gets the permits to build it. Lining up those contracts also will be important for convincing investors to finance the project.

BrightSource plans to use tanks of molten salt for storing the thermal energy produced by its fields of mirrors. The mirrors concentrate and direct sunlight to heat up a water-containing boiler atop of a tower. The steam from the heated water runs the turbine and generator to produce electricity. If the steam isn’t going to be used to generate electricity, then it will be piped to heat the molten salt, which is good at trapping heat. Power plant operators can then use the hot molten salt to produce steam for electricity generation whenever that is needed.

BrightSource isn’t alone in finding out the necessity of offering storage to attract utility customers. Areva Solar told me a few months ago that it had finally decided on using molten salt for storage for its power plants. Areva also uses mirrors to harness the sun’s heat to produce electricity, but the mirror and power plant design is quite different from BrightSource’s.

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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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The tower at the Chevron, BrightSource solar oil plant

When solar thermal company BrightSource Energy withdrew its IPO plans last month there was a collective groan from greentech and solar industry watchers. The company was the strongest out of the handful of greentech IPO hopefuls last month, and if BrightSource had gone public it would have made history as the first venture-backed solar thermal startup to go public and could have potentially paved the way for other greentech IPOs.

But in an interview on Tuesday, BrightSource CEO John Woolard tells me that because of the weak public markets, particularly for solar and greentech companies, BrightSource was looking at a market transaction that wasn’t necessarily at the terms that the company and its investors wanted. Instead of lowering its price range and raising less money — which other firms like solar inverter maker Enphase Energy have done recently — BrightSource simply decided to withdraw the IPO.

“In a strange way, I was very proud of the board and the investor base and it took about an hour to make the decision. Everybody said we like the company and we’ll continue to support the company,” said Woolard.

Chevron, BrightSource solar oil plant, the tower and the mirrors

BrightSource filed for the IPO about a year ago, but as soon as the company was about ready to go public, the markets imploded for about a six month period, said Woolard. Then in March BrightSource met with their bankers and they said as long as the markets are stable or up, the company should go ahead with the IPO. The first three days of the IPO roadshow were stable and up and things were looking fine, says Woolard, but then we hit what turned out to be the worst two weeks of the market of the last 6 months.

The analogy is, even if you’re Michael Phelps, if you’re swimming against a major current in the Bay of Fundy then it doesn’t matter. The macro forces can be too powerful, said Woolard.

BrightSource doesn’t necessarily need the money right now. The company already has its first solar thermal plant Ivanpah fully funded with project financing from

BrightSource CEO John Woolard

NRG Energy and Google, and the funds from the IPO would have gone toward things like continued research and development, project development (permitting work) and international expansion.

BrightSource will be doing a lot more project finance fund raising in the coming years. It has thirteen solar thermal power plants that it’s going to construct and build between now and late 2016 or early 2017, says Woolard. BrightSource builds large farms in the deserts that use mirrors to concentrate sun rays onto a central tower that captures the heat and runs a turbine and produces electricity.

Ivanpah is the company’s first commercial scale solar thermal farm, and Woolard says that the following farms will be much cheaper to build because through scale the costs will be able to come down dramatically.

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My destination is Chevron’s oldest oil field in California, located near the town of Coalinga, which has a population 18,000 and gets its name from having been a coal supply depot for trains that ran on coal-generated steam power. I’m visiting the oil field to check out a project that is demonstrating a way to use the sun’s energy to produce steam to increase oil production. Chevron pipes steam down the wells to pry loose oil that is stuck in rock fissures and this makes it easier to pump the oil back to the surface (see my photo slide below).

Where fossil fuels and solar power meet

BrightSource Energy, which counts Chevron as an investor, built the project and completed it last fall. The 29 MW project includes a field of 3,822 heliostats – each of which is made up of two, 10-foot by 7-foot mirrors – on 65 acres (the entire project takes up 100 acres). The mirrors track the sun’s movement to direct sunlight onto a series of panels containing water pipes at the top of a 327-foot tower.

The sun’s energy heats the water to generate steam that reaches 700 degrees Fahrenheit, says Ray Guidry, a construction supervisor from Chevron Technology Venture who shows me and other visitors around the solar mirrors and takes us up to the tower for a close look at the steam production system.  The steam goes to a heat exchanger near the bottom of the tower to transfer that heat to another water-containing pipe to generate the steam that then fans out across the oil field.

Cleantech proponents may not see oil production as an ideal use of solar energy. They probably would much prefer the world to cut its reliance on oil and other sources of fossil fuels. But Chevron isn’t running the solar steam project to earn good will from its critics. The company sees solar steam as a potentially good alternative for oil fields that don’t have ready access to natural gas because of their locations or geopolitics.

Certainly, if natural gas prices go up significantly, then a solar steam project also could become a cost-effective choice. For now, natural gas is cheap and Chevron actually produces most of the natural gas it needs for its Coalinga operation from the Coalinga oil field.

No solar for you

With rain in the morning in the San Francisco Bay Area and big pillows of clouds over Coalinga when I arrive, it becomes clear that the day isn’t ideal for seeing the solar field in action. The wind is kicking up and is set to really blow after dark, so most of the mirrors are in a rest position that places them parallel to the ground. The spot atop the tower that would normally shine brightly from being a receiver of the concentrated sunlight is dark.

“The rule of thumb is if you can’t see your own shadow, then you can’t” put the solar mirrors to work, Guidry says as we stand amid a forest of heliostats.

Guidry wants to show us the mirror washing equipment. Some of the mirrors already are perpendicular to the ground and ready for a mop down. Fine dust coasts the mirrors, requiring them to be cleaned. A big truck rolls toward us as it tackles each mirror with a big roller brush.

New technology

Chevron has only been operating the solar field for about seven months, so the company is in the early days of collecting field data to see if the technology will perform as promised. How often the mirrors should be cleaned is one of the questions that the field data will help answer – the current estimate is once a month.

So far, the field is producing 10 percent more steam than what the company expects based on its daily performance model, Guidry says. BrightSource took on the project knowing it would incur losses, but it accepted the contract to showcase its technology anyway because the project was to be its first installation in the United States. But the company ended up losing more money than it anticipated in 2008, when it thought the losses would amount to $10.5 million. The figure actually reached $67.3 million by the end of 2011, the company said in a regulatory filing. The value of the contract was $27.8 million.

BrightSource is now focusing on a bigger project that will generate solar electricity in the desert near Las Vegas that is a third completed. The company expects to finish the project in 2013. BrightSource more recently made headlines for withdrawing its IPO plan.

A bright view

An elevator ride to the top of the tower gives us a breathtaking view of the solar field and, beyond that, the vast scrubbed land dotted with pumpjacks, the rocking horse-like structures that pump oil out of each well. Regardless of whether the project will work out as planned over the coming decades, the gleaming solar mirror field and tower are impressive and worth a stop if you pass through the area. Its construction certainly has drawn many curious residents nearby.

“We did a lot to make sure they know this is not an Area 51 thing,” says Morgan Crinklaw, a Chevron spokesman who accompanies us on the tour. “People would drive out here, tailgate, drink beer and watch this.”

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