By year’s end, regulators are expected to approve a host of solar energy projects in California that could eventually produce as much electricity as several nuclear plants. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, John Woolard, the CEO of the company that has begun construction on the world’s largest solar-thermal project, discusses the promise — and challenges — of this green energy boom.

Today, 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. He sat down with Yale Environment 360 contributor Todd Woody at BrightSource’s Oakland, Calif., headquarters to talk about the future of Big Solar and the challenges the industry faces — from a woefully inadequate electricity grid to the imperative of minimizing water use — as multibillion-dollar projects finally begin to become a reality.

Yale Environment 360: Are we witnessing the birth of a major new solar industry in the United States?

John Woolard: I hope. The number I always go back to is that we have done 74,000 permits for oil and gas in the last 20 years and we finally have five or six for solar. That’s a good step forward. The agencies are learning how to permit, they’re learning how to move forward. It’s great for the industry and we can finally get some size and consequence.

e360: As the photovoltaic industry increasingly becomes dominated by overseas companies in China and elsewhere, does the sheer scale of these solar thermal projects in the U.S. give the country the opportunity to become the technological and market leader?

Woolard: Oh, yeah. Solar thermal is very different from [photovoltaic technology]. The power has different characteristics and is more reliable. They’re almost apples and oranges. Solar thermal has got very interesting attributes and characteristics that make it unique.

We don’t have a quantity and energy problem; It’s a collection and distribution problem.”

In the U.S. we’re lucky. The southwestern U.S. has high desert, which means it’s closer to the sun, less atmosphere to go through. It’s the best solar resource anywhere, outside the Atacama Desert in Chile or a few places. Harnessing that resource effectively is the most important thing. So we don’t have a quantity and energy problem; it’s a collection and distribution problem.

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: Will California be an early proving ground to see which technologies deliver on their promises?

Woolard: It takes a lot to get a project built. You’ve got to have a technology that has been proven. It has to work within cost parameters that are acceptable, you have to have a power purchase agreement [with a utility], where given the costs your price is acceptable. Then you can bring investment in, and then you need the basics of transmission and permitting.

There are very few [companies] that have all that together right now. We’re fortunate, we’ve done it before, and we’ve put together that whole basket.

e360: But until they’re built and the switch is flipped and the electricity is generated, in some ways we won’t know if they live up to their promise, right?

Woolard: Projects have to get through a gauntlet of de-risking. It’s not like everybody that starts gets through that gauntlet. Given the conservative nature of the project finance community, I don’t see things moving forward that haven’t been very, very de-risked, where you know the cost, you know the price, you know the output. You know all of that before you start. You don’t take chances with a billion dollars.

e360: Ivanpah is not only the first solar power plant to break ground but it also holds the distinction as being the one that took the longest to be licensed. What were the key lessons you learned from the three-year state licensing process?

Woolard: One was start early. You can’t ever assume you’re going to get through these processes quickly. Early engagement with all the constituents is really key. Everyone from local communities, the labor community, the environmental community. All those stakeholders have a role in shaping the project and the project changes over time. It modifies, you learn. We reduced the footprint of the project. In the original application, it was 7,000 acres, then it went down to 4,000 acres. We reduced it further to 3,500 acres.

Start early. You can’t ever assume you’re going to get through these [review] processes quickly.”

Originally, there were seven towers and we reduced that to three. We’re taking rare plants and we’re trimming vegetation, so whereas other people come in and bulldoze things, we’re actually taking vegetation and leaving it in place, which helps the soil and runoff and keeps the ecosystem as intact as you can.

We’re putting [mirrors] in and planting them every 20 or 30 feet. That’s just a post. We’re not doing concrete. We’re actually taking areas where you have rare plants and cordoning them off. We have a rare-plant nursery.

e360: When it comes to these projects, the new buzz phrase from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on down is “smart from the start.” What did BrightSource do that was smart from the start on Ivanpah, and what were the big things you would have done differently in retrospect?

Woolard: I’d say the smartest was that we worked with the BLM [the Bureau of Land Management] and a lot of the environmental constituents to think about the siting as early on as possible. Where you don’t locate is as important as where you do locate. Doing early surveys to make sure there are no endangered species, whether they are animals or plants. You’re always going to have something.

One of the things we did well was pick a site close to a highway, which had two transmission lines across it, had natural gas, was near a casino. We picked an area that was as relatively benign as you can get.

e360: Still, there are some groups still opposed to the project as they consider it to have an unacceptable impact on the threatened desert tortoise.

Woolard: Yes, I think some groups would rather have it somewhere else if they could. I think also most of the groups realize we’re all on the same side of the fight. In the end, we’re working on climate change issues. If plants don’t get [built] here and California can’t meet its 33 percent or 20 percent [renewable energy mandates], you can’t start building plants in India and China and other places.

e360: It seems that one thing BrightSource did that avoided a lot of controversy was the water issue. You chose to use “dry” cooling, which uses substantially less water than “wet” cooling.

Woolard: Best decision we ever made as a company. We were the only one that did it early. The fact that we’re doing it has forced others to do it. If you use 2,000 or 3,000 acre-feet of water [the equivalent of nearly 1 billion gallons] in the desert on an annual basis, that’s obscene.

Where you don’t locate is as important as where you do locate.”

We’re providing power for 150,000 homes, and we’re using water for 300 homes. That’s as water-efficient as anything you can do. Fossil plants still use wet cooling and everybody ought to know that. That needs to change. It ought to be a level playing field. It shouldn’t just be renewables that do this. Energy and water are so inextricably linked.

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.

e360: Is there enough existing transmission for your projects you have contracts for?

Woolard: No. Within the system, it takes seven to 10 years to advance and build transmission. So we started planning in 2006 for transmission in 2013 and 2014 and 2015. Our next sites, and sites after that, we know how we’re going to do things. But the system itself — you shouldn’t have to do what we have to do. You’re adding a lot of cost and inefficiency through this whole system.

e360: Utilities are increasingly interested in energy storage to offset the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Is energy storage something BrightSource is looking at?

Woolard: We’ve been looking at it. In fact, if storage was super cheap you would see it in coal plants. You would be time-shifting power all over the place [storing electricity when demand is low and release at times of peak demand.]

If you look at where storage is being used, it’s in areas where they pay a lot for power — like Spain. Storage is not an engineering question at all. It’s a question of economics. We can integrate storage whenever it’s economically smart. It’s not necessarily economically smart yet, but it will be over time.

Todd Woody, who conducted this interview for Yale Environment 360, is an environmental and technology journalist based in California who writes for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Grist and other publications.

photo: jurvetson

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On August 4, Oakland-based BrightSource Energy Inc. got the thumbs up from the California Energy Commission to develop the Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating System (ISEGS), the world’s largest solar energy project.

The project has been fraught with difficulties since inception. In late 2009, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) tried to block solar power projects in the Mojave Desert because it was critical habitat for a number of species, including the desert tortoise.

For a while, it looked like the tortoise was in the lead, and BrightSource might have to shelve its plans. Then BrightSource found a compromise position, scaling back plans from 400 MW to the 392 MW plan on the drawing board today.

And last week, Oct. 19, California state biologists and contract workers started rounding up all the tortoises they could find, planning to keep the reptiles in pens with artificial burrows before relocating them to desert areas not likely to see construction of any kind.

Environmentalists fear that some tortoises may be missed, and later inadvertently killed by power plant construction. Other tortoises may not be able to adapt to their new home, making them more vulnerable to predators, dehydration and disease.

It’s clearly not a good time to be a tortoise, even an endangered one, and only time will tell if the payoff – massive amounts of clean, renewable energy – was worth the price. Let us know what you think.

About the BrightSource Ivanpah Project

Slated for 3,600 acres of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California, the project was formulated as a 400-megawatt (MW, gross power) solar thermal power plant.

Solar thermal power uses mirrors to reflect sunlight onto a central tower, where the intense heat warms water or molten salt up to 1474 degrees Fahrenheit, at which temperature the fluid can be used to generate electricity via steam turbines in what is known as the “Rankine cycle.”

The electricity generated would be purchased by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PGE) and Southern California Edison Co. (SCE), to fulfill a state renewable energy mandate that specifies 20 percent (of electricity from renewables) by the end of this year, and 33 percent by 2020.

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BrightSource Energy, Inc., developer of utility-scale solar thermal power plants, has raised an additional $150 million in its most recent equity financing. The Series D round brings BrightSource’s total equity financing to more than $300 million and positions the company for significant growth.

New investors including Alstom and the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) joined existing investors in this round, led by VantagePoint Venture Partners, Morgan Stanley and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

The additional financing will be used to support BrightSource’s 2,610 megawatts in contracts with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) and Southern California Edison to build 14 solar power plants in the US southwest by 2016. The funds will also be used by BrightSource to further its international expansion plans.

“A Series D capital raise of this magnitude reflects the market’s confidence in our world-class team and the important role of our Luz Power Tower technology in meeting the growing global demand for cost-effective and reliable solar power,” said John Woolard, Chief Executive Officer of BrightSource. “By adding new strategic investors to our current blue chip investor base, we strengthen our ability to make solar thermal energy a significant part of the world’s energy mix.”

As part of the financing, global power-generation leader Alstom has committed to invest up to $55 million. This investment in BrightSource represents Alstom’s entry into the solar market and underscores BrightSource’s leading position in this industry.

Philippe Joubert, Alstom Power President, said, “BrightSource Energy’s market-leading solar-tower thermal-power technology complements Alstom’s strong portfolio of renewable energy solutions, building on our strength in hydro, geothermal, wind, tidal power, biomass and waste-to-energy solutions. Following this investment, both companies intend to enter into an industrial relationship, which will enhance BrightSource’s leading position in this industry.”

In February 2010, BrightSource received a conditional commitment from the U.S. Department of Energy for $1.37 billion in loan guarantees to support the financing of BrightSource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System project – the first of its US-based power projects. Once constructed, Ivanpah will be the world’s largest solar energy project, nearly doubling the amount of solar thermal electricity produced in the US today. The project will also create more than 1,000 local jobs at the peak of construction and generate $250 million in construction wages. The power plant will be constructed by Bechtel, the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor for the Ivanpah project. BrightSource expects to commence construction later this year.

“The BrightSource team continues to execute at the highest levels and set the bar for the utility-scale solar industry,” said Alan Salzman, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Partner of VantagePoint Venture Partners. “With BrightSource’s proven ability to hit commercial and technological milestones, we see no limit to the company’s potential in transforming global power markets.”

BrightSource is the parent of Jerusalem, Israel-based BrightSource Industries Israel (BSII), formerly called Luz II. BSII performs R&D, production and project engineering for its California-based parent company.

In June 2008, BrightSource launched the Negev Solar Energy Development Center, a demonstration plant producing the world’s highest temperature steam from solar, at the Rotem Industrial Park near Dimona, Israel.

photo: BrightSource

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Few places are as well suited for large-scale solar projects as California’s Mojave Desert. But as mainstream environmental organizations push plans to turn the desert into a center for renewable energy, some green groups — concerned about spoiling this iconic Western landscape — are standing up to oppose them.

Twenty years ago when an epic clash over the logging of ancient redwood forests roiled California, the battle lines were clear-cut.

On one side stood a Texas corporate raider who acquired the Pacific Lumber Co. in a junk bond-fueled takeover and began felling vast swaths of primeval redwoods to pay off the debt. On the other side was Earth First! and other grass-roots greens who staged a campaign of civil disobedience to disrupt the logging. And while mainstream environmental groups may have looked askance at such tactics, they supported the cause in the courts, suing to stop the clear-cutting of ancient trees.

Today, another monumental environmental fight is unfolding in California over plans to build dozens of multi billion-dollar solar power plants in the Mojave Desert that could power millions of homes. But in this battle everyone is wearing green — from the solar developers seeking to generate carbon-free electricity, to feuding factions of environmentalists split over developing the desert.

For some, the desert is untouchable; for others, it’s a resource to be tapped.

The Mojave has become a metaphor for an existential crisis in the environmental movement as it tries to balance the development of renewable energy with its traditional mission to protect ecosystems. In recent years, the movement’s focus on wildlife, habitat preservation, and pollution has been eclipsed by the climate change imperative. National groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Sierra Club have joined with the more forward-looking members of the Fortune 500 to push cap-and-trade legislation and other climate-change initiatives and to promote alternative energy.

These disparate interests also have worked together to identify suitable areas to build large-scale solar farms. Over the past few years, Goldman Sachs, utility giants Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and FLP Group, and a slew of Silicon Valley-backed startups have filed applications to build solar power plants on hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land in California’s Mojave Desert and across the desert Southwest.

Now comes the backlash.

In December, this coalition found itself outflanked by a small Southern California group called the Wildlands Conservancy that persuaded U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to introduce legislation banning renewable energy development on more than a million acres of the Mojave — including the land on which PG&E and others had set their sights. While hundreds of thousands of acres remain in the Mojave for potential solar farms, the area targeted by the Feinstein legislation had been particularly valued by developers for its proximity to transmission lines and the huge Southern California market.

Elsewhere in California’s deserts, solar power plant projects have become bogged down as grassroots advocates challenge their impact on water resources, desert tortoises, and other rare animals and plants that inhabit a fragile arid ecosystem. For some, the desert is iconic and untouchable; for others it’s a vast resource to be tapped.

When Feinstein, a California Democrat, first indicated she favored walling off a large swath of the desert from renewable energy development, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger growled, “If we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, I don’t know where the hell we can put it.”

I trekked into the desert to see for myself. A few days before Feinstein introduced her bill last December to create two new national monuments in the Mojave, I met David Myers, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy, in Barstow and we set out for what he hopes will become the Mojave Trails National Monument.

You may never have heard of Myers, but the ardent conservationist has emerged as renewable energy power broker thanks to his connections to Feinstein and David Gelbaum, a press-shy Southern California financer turned philanthropist who bankrolls the Wildlands Conservancy. (So secretive is Gelbaum that a confidentiality agreement bars Myers from acknowledging his existence as a donor. Federal records show, though, that Gelbaum sits on Wildlands’ board.)

A decade ago, Gelbaum — who has given $100 million to the Sierra Club, according to a 2004 Los Angeles Times story — contributed tens of millions of dollars for the Wildlands Conservancy’s acquisition of a half-million acres of former railroad holdings owned by the Catellus Development Corp. The Catellus lands form a checkerboard of 640-acre parcels across the Mojave. Feinstein, who sponsored the 1994 legislation that created Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks and the Mojave National Preserve, pushed for federal matching funds to complete the purchase of the land, which was then donated to the government for preservation.

‘You couldn’t put a project in a worse area from a landscape connectivity point of view.’

But after President George W. Bush opened up the desert Southwest to renewable energy development in 2005, a solar land rush ensued, as developers proposed building some two dozen solar power plants and wind farms on federal lands that include the donated Catellus property. Myers then contacted Feinstein about preserving the lands by putting them into a vast new national monument.

“Al Gore called these lands out here some of the most pristine and scenic desert lands in the world,” says Myers as we cruise down Route 66 in his Subaru. He pulls over and we walk across the road to take in the sweep of the Sleeping Beauty mountain range that rises from a broad valley where BrightSource Energy and other solar developments had proposed building massive solar power plants.

“You have this incredible landscape of these bighorn sheep corridors back and forth across the valley,” says Myers. “You couldn’t put a project in a worse area from a landscape connectivity point of view… It’s a philosophic non-sequitur that you can destroy hundreds of thousands of acres to save the Earth from global warming.”

The vistas and wildlife in this stretch of the Mojave are indeed spectacular, if not totally pristine — power lines march across the desert floor and some ranges are scarred by mining operations.

Establishment environmentalists tend to dismiss Myers as a “purist” who is unwilling to consider solar development in the desert.

“I don’t think many in the environmental community share the extreme views of people like David Myers — I think he’s an outlier,” says John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies in Sacramento, which is involved in a state-federal effort to identify desert areas suitable for solar development.

The soft-spoken Myers is no Earth Firster. He says he supports solar development in other parts of the Mojave but prefers power plants be built on degraded farmland, or better yet, through a massive expansion of rooftop solar arrays. The Feinstein legislation includes provisions designed to speed up the licensing of renewable energy projects on federal land elsewhere in the desert and provides incentives to developers who build on former farmland.

“We don’t have to choose between having renewable energy development or complying with the Endangered Species Act,” says Johanna Wald, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco who is also participating in the solar planning process. “We can have them both, and certainly the California experience is that we have the resources to do both.”

Still, Myers has thrown a monkey wrench in plans to tap about 10,000 megawatts of electricity in this area before its environmental value could be formally evaluated, as is being done elsewhere in the Southwest. While the monument legislation’s success is by no means assured, most of the solar developers — including BrightSource Energy, Goldman Sachs, and Tessera Solar—had abandoned their projects before the bill was formally introduced in late December. No one, it seemed, wanted to take on Feinstein, who first raised concerns about the projects last spring.

“Senator Feinstein’s proposal created a fair amount of uncertainty and we wanted to collaborate with the senator and make sure we were investing our time and effort in the area with potential to go forward,” Sean Gallagher, Tessera’s vice president for regulatory affairs, told me in December after the company canceled its plans for a massive 12,000-acre solar farm, whose peak output would have equaled that of a nuclear power plant.

PG&E, FPL, and Iberdrola Renewables, the Spanish renewable energy giant, say they are either cautiously proceeding or re-evaluating their Mojave projects in light of the legislation. Most developers have staked multiple land claims elsewhere in the Southwest. (That, of course, doesn’t mean they’re happy about the situation. “Iberdrola Renewables believes the environmental community is taking away one of the few places in the U.S. suitable for utility-scale solar development,” Jan Johnson, a company spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail.)

So we return to the governator’s question: Where can you put a solar power plant?

That question was being debated last month in Sacramento at California Energy Commission hearings on the state’s first new solar power plant to undergo licensing in two decades.

In August 2007, BrightSource Energy, an Oakland, Calif.-based startup, filed an application to build a 400-megawatt solar power plant in the Ivanpah Valley — an area outside the Feinstein monument area — just over the Nevada border in Southern California.

BrightSource — which is backed by Google, Morgan Stanley, and a clutch of oil companies — has signed contracts to deliver 2,600 megawatts of electricity to California utilities, which is needed to secure 24,000 megawatts of renewable energy by 2020 to meet state mandates. John Woolard, BrightSource Energy’s chief executive, alluded to the difficulty in finding suitable desert land for solar power plants. “Frankly, it says a lot that Ivanpah’s the only site that we think we’re able to build on right now inside of California,” he said.

For one project, the state ruled desert tortoises must be removed and new habitat purchased.

The surrounding desert landscape would not inspire Edward Abbey. Interstate 15, which connects Los Angeles to Las Vegas, slices through the area. A few miles from the BrightSource site, Buffalo Bill’s and Whiskey Pete’s — two hulking casinos connected by a monorail — rise from the desert like an apparition from a Mad Max movie. Adjacent to the solar site sits a 22-acre golf course that consumes a half-billion gallons of water a year. To the west are two mines and a pipeline that carries mining waste to an evaporation pond.

After an extensive two-and-a-half-year environmental review, the energy commission concluded in late 2009 that the BrightSource project “would have major impacts to the biological resources of the Ivanpah Valley, substantially affecting many sensitive plant and wildlife species and eliminating a broad expanse of relatively undisturbed Mojave Desert habitat.”

The project would sit on 4,000 acres of habitat, home to 25 desert tortoises, as well as rare plants like the Mojave milkweed. The tortoises must be removed and suitable replacement habitat purchased for them, the energy commission said.

While the Sierra Club’s national organization has supported desert solar power plants, a local chapter has challenged the Ivanpah project, joining Defenders of Wildlife and other environmental groups in urging that the project be reconfigured and moved closer to the highway to lessen the impact on the tortoise.

Even if BrightSource abandons Ivanpah, the industrialization of the desert will proceed apace. According to the California Energy Commission, some of the projects on the drawing board for the surrounding area include a 500-megawatt natural gas power plant and an airport on the Nevada side of the border, as well as seven other massive solar power plants to be built within miles of the BrightSource site.

The party line among greens of all hues is that we can have it all — renewable energy production and protection of wildlands. That may well be true, but there will have to be some hard choices made about just what kind — and how much — development we want in the desert.

Author Todd Woody is a veteran environmental and technology journalist based in California who writes for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Grist and other publications. He previously was a senior editor at Fortune magazine, the assistant managing editor of Business 2.0 magazine and the business editor of the San Jose Mercury News.

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360

photos: Worklife Siemens, Bill Wight, Bright Source

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Earlier in the week, Jonathan Axelrad, Co-Chair of this past weekend’s Jewish Response to the Energy Challenge (J-REC) conference held in San Francisco and broadcasted through out the United States and Israel, was asked if a “Jewish response to energy” wasn’t as superfluous as the Korean response to hurricanes.

As one of the few, if not only, gentiles I began the morning a bit skeptical, though after a day of thought provoking lectures and panels, I feel it was not another superfluous conference, and the concept of a concerted Jewish response could indeed be the seed of a terrifically successful piece of the large puzzle that will be the energy (and consumption) solution of the future. The core ideas behind why I agreed with the many bright panelists and moderators for why there should be a particularly Jewish response is because of the interdisciplinary and international nature of the energy challenge, the acute water and related energy challenge within Israel, and the Jewish concept of tikkun olam (loosely translated from Hebrew: the pursuit of things that avoid social chaos).

Early in my professional and social career I learned the benefit of quickly establishing a common ground with the person in front of me or on the other end of a phone call or email. By maintaining strong social and religious ties despite the global Jewish diaspora there is an opportunity to work with like minded people around the globe. Beyond international collaboration, this bodes well for the development of technologies and projects that require experts from a variety of professions – from law, to finance, to engineering, to politics. Like all business relationships, sharing common ground accelerates closing a deal.

It is no great secret that Israel does not share the petroleum reserves of its often weary if not hostile neighbors; it does however suffer from a similar water paucity – the desalinization of which is currently prohibitively energy intensive for all but the most energy rich of nations. Its abundance of sun, its relative isolation, its relatively concentrated population and its pursuit of water make Israel an ideal consumer of clean technologies in every form; from efficiency, to recycling, to desalinization, to energy generation. Despite a drive to innovation borne by necessity and a potentially high willingness to pay for services, due to its relatively small market, Israeli companies need to develop markets elsewhere to achieve economies of scale to bring down costs and amortize expensive R&D. What better way to access global markets than through existing social ties?

And lastly, on Sunday I was introduced to tikkun olam – a beautiful social concept variously translated on the internet as “repairing the world” or “perfecting the world.”  I appreciate how the concept was highlighted as a core belief, though in no means is it unique to Judaism. All the World’s leading monotheistic religions have a similar concept, and from my cursory understanding Hindu’s and Buddhists and countless other spiritual paths teach of the importance of striving to live in harmony with their surroundings.  As this week’s Economist makes note, religious leaders from various faiths have already come together to do what politicians have thus far struggled to do – and that is come together and provide guidance to their constituencies. Muslim leaders allegedly extolled their followers to seek less carbon intensive means for performing their pilgrimage to Mecca and Daoists were implored to use fewer sticks of incense.

We should all look at the energy and environmental challenges under our own lens, I don’t think the question should be “should the Jewish community have its own response” but rather, “what is my community, religious or otherwise, doing to capitalize on our skillsets, existing networks and values to respond to what is clearly one of the worlds biggest challenges.”

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BrightSource announced a huge deal today (and last month they announced an even bigger one for 1,300 MW with Southern California Edison) but before jumping up and down too much, lets take a wait and see approach to how this will unfold.

Remember, BrightSource is led by a man that I quote often for having said “this is an industry of billions and decades, not millions and years.” While it is enormous, and it is great news for solar, let us not forget how just over a week ago Optisolar sold its pipeline of deals to FirstSolar.

That said, BrightSource has a strong debt partner in Morgan Stanley and VC backing with very deep pockets (are any financial partners really that strong though?).

You can read their latest press release here.

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Yesterday, First Solar announced it had reduced its manufacturing cost for solar modules in the fourth quarter to 98 cents per watt – that is big news because the company won the race to produce under the $1 per watt price barrier.  This news didn’t come as a surprise to many, and perhaps we can get Brad to write a note about the true significance of the announcement.

Other big news was PG&E’s proposal for 500 MW of solar PV – half of which PG&E would develop on its own.  This is worth noting because traditionally Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) in California, like PG&E, have had to rely on Independent Power Producers (IPPs) since the deregulation of the State’s energy market in the 1990’s. 

This deregulation set the stage for the manipulation and shenanigans that led to the California energy crisis of 2000 and 2001.  By colluding, IPPs and energy traders (like Enron) gamed the system announcing they were pulling their plants off line for “maintenance” and charging the IOUs exorbitant rates that could not be passed along to the end consumers (because of price caps set by the Public Utility Commission to protect us) – in that fiasco’s wake PG&E declared bankruptcy and others were bailed out by the government.

Sorry for the history lesson, but it serves as good background for understanding why PG&E is making this move.  In an effort to meet Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), the company has some huge outstanding contracts with SunPower, Optisolar and BrightSource, among others. Unfortunately, with the credit crisis delaying some of these projects, it is anybody’s guess when the projects behind these Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) are actually going to come on line.

PG&E’s proposal could be seen as encroaching on IPP’s territory, and it will surely receive some resistance – but PG&E cleverly tossed IPPs a bone with the second 250 MWs.  PG&E’s proposal asks for a streamlined regulatory process for independently owned (as in non-PG&E owned) projects under agreement with PG&E.

The proposal allows for PG&E to have their cake, eat it and provide Northern Californians with a healthy dose of renewables mixed in with their natural gas.  With it, PG&E will be able to take advantage of:

1) a huge balance sheet to finance its own deals

2) the chance to invest capital (it charges rate payers on a complicated schedule based on invested capital)

2) depressed module prices (more solar power for your buck)

3) the new ITC rules (allowing utilities to benefit from the tax credits)

All of this means PG&E stands to make some bucks, but the proposal will also allow IPPs to develop projects more quickly, meaning that PG&E might be able to actually reach its RPS mandates – and that would be a truly big win for renewables in California.

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