Entreprenews you can use: eSolar

First deal inked for maker of modular, utility-scale solar thermal power plants

Posted by David Roberts at 7:17 AM on 10 Jun 2008

Read more about: solar thermal power | energy | renewable energy | greenish companies | business

In the transition to a clean, green economy, one milestone promises to be the most symbolically powerful. It's the one adopted as an official target by Google: renewable energy cheaper than coal, or RE<C. When it announced its campaign, Google also announced the recipients of its initial investments.

One was eSolar, a Pasadena, Calif.-based company spun off from business incubator Idealab. "Our view of what it takes to make solar power viable and a widespread technology," says Robert Rogan, eSolar's executive VP of corporate development, "is to be able to compete with fossil fuel energy prices in an unsubsidized way." Cheaper than coal per-kwh, without subsidies, by 2012: that's the aspiration.

How will they do it? The company has designed a new kind of utility-scale solar power plant. Solar thermal plants are huge arrays of mirrors that harness the sun's heat to drive steam turbines and create electricity. New solar thermal companies are thick on the ground in the California desert, but eSolar claims some distinct advantages.

eSolar's plants are designed to overcome some of the primary hurdles facing the solar sector, namely price, speed, and scalability. The core strategy is, as the company puts it, to replace "expensive steel, concrete, and brute force with inexpensive computing power and elegant algorithms." Rather than large, complex heliostats that must be precision-engineered on site by specialized laborers and equipment, they designed heliostats made of small, simple, prefabricated parts that can be cheaply shipped and quickly assembled, with minimal skilled labor. (Think Ikea.)

Because the heliostats are low to the ground, using lots of small, flat mirrors rather than a few large parabolic mirrors, they require far less steel and concrete to anchor them. Solar thermal heliostats can be up to 100 square meters, but eSolar's "are closer to a square meter," Rogan says. "They're really human-sized."

Efficiency is maximized by a computerized tracking system, with sensors and semiconductors doing the work bulk once did. (As Idealab's Bill Gross said at the Fortune conference, computing power is the one commodity that's getting cheaper.)

So eSolar boasts cheap capital and labor costs, but perhaps the most interesting angle is modularity. The plants are built in 33MW units that cover 160 acres each (1/4 of a square mile). This gives eSolar access to smaller, cheaper, more marginal sites, allowing them to fit plants near existing transmission rather than requiring new lines. "This is more distributed than your typical central station power plant," says Rogan. "Given any large load center, it's possible to build multiple modules at different interconnection points around that load center, as opposed to one single very large facility at one grid interconnected point." The company says it's already secured the rights to enough land to produce 1GW.

eSolar may be at the center of a hype storm, but it isn't pie in the sky. It announced $130 million in funding from Google and others earlier this year, and just last week it announced its first power purchase agreement (PPA), a deal with Southern California Edison for 245MW, coming online in 2011.

Solar thermal is almost certainly going to be a huge player in 21st century energy, and one or two of the companies springing up now will make the transition to serious multinational scale. Time will tell whether eSolar is an eToys (a previous Idealab venture) or an eBay, but if buzz and investor enthusiasm are any guide, the future looks pretty bright.

Leftovers:

Is eSolar looking into storage? "Our technology is capable of employing thermal storage," says Rogan. "We aren't discussing our specific storage plans at this time. We're open to all options." Could units smaller than 33MW conceivably be built using this technology? "Because we still need power plant equipment such as a turbine, at some point those economics become challenging, the smaller you get." Will eSolar be lobbying Calif. state gov't for better solar policy? "I couldn't speculate on that." Is there more to the Google partnership than funding? "Google made a corporate investment in eSolar." Will they buy some eSolar power? "I can't comment on anything else with regard to Google. They made a corporate investment ... You are asking the good questions." [eyebrow raise] A price on carbon isn't exactly a "subsidy" for solar power -- when you say you'll break even with coal without subsidies, are you assuming a carbon price? "Our goal is to be competitive without subsidies in the future." OK then. Are you shopping your technology around internationally? "We're considering projects all over the place." Do you plan on staying in the U.S. despite more favorable policy environment abroad? "We're definitely planning on building a lot of power projects in the U.S."

For story: Entreprenews you can use: eSolar
10 Comments | Post a Comment

Give it a few years

Very good. Give the engineers a few years to develop efficient energy storage media, and with time concentrated solar power may become competitive.

If storage is not developed swiftly enough, we need to phase out coal (as Hansen suggests) and replace it with biomass, which would function as the baseload and peakload for CSP.

by Jonas at 7:26 AM on 10 Jun 2008

That silly

Give the engineers a few years to develop efficient energy storage media

Uhm they've already made a very efficient storage media. It's the same one they've been using for 40 years.

Or is maintaining 99% of the stored heat not good enough for you?

http://greyfalcon.net/solarthermal

-David Ahlport

by GreyFlcn at 8:00 AM on 10 Jun 2008

Oh I see

Uhm they've already made a very efficient storage media. It's the same one they've been using for 40 years.
Oh, great, I had never heard of molten salts! So that problem is solved then!
When do we get to see a working example that functions on a commercial scale?

by Jonas at 8:34 AM on 10 Jun 2008

land

I sure hope that installations like concentrated solar, as necessary as they are, are landed in places like brownfields, etc, close to the markets they'll serve, and not willy nilly carving up the remainder of the open habitat the critters of the southwest and southern CA rely on.

Erik

The Orion Grassroots Network: supporting grassroots groups working for conservation, justice, & more

by Erik Hoffner at 9:05 AM on 10 Jun 2008

cheaper doesn't mean better

how many of these rapacious projects do we need to cheerlead before we realize that we cannot suck the millions of gallons of groundwater, and permanently destroy the millions of acres of fragile desert wilderness these ill-conceived handouts to Big Energy will cost?

these gigantic projects average 10,000 acres for very modest outputs. it's great that Google has a thermal system on their roof (which probably supplies only about 10% of their usage, since they are one of the biggest consumers in the state), but unless they restrict their "competition" to rooftop systems, and, as Erik says, brownfields, it's not gonna be a solution at all, just a new problem.

The solution has to be LOCAL, POINT OF USE renewables which use no water, need no new transmission and which do not kill off our wilderness. oh, and coincidentally, which are more reliable than giant, remote power plants (hellooo, 19th century), which will not require huge exercises of eminent domain, which will not further entrench the scary Big Energy Monopolies which have bought our government off, and which will not provide endless opportunities for market manipulation by unscrupulous pigs like Big Oil, Enron, etc.

Diverting all the money going into wilderness-killing energy projects back to responsible ratepayers who want to do the right thing is the critical step now. Tax breaks, subsidies, super-cheap financing and market-rate feed-in tariffs should have been in place for 30 years now. Instead, we get this crap that kills our planet to save utilities a buck.

more skilled LOCAL jobs, a free market in energy production for people like you and me,

the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.

by stopgreenpath at 10:19 AM on 10 Jun 2008

Put A Solar Panel...on Boardwalk!

Guys in Monopoly Tux and Tails cleaning the clocks of Sandal Clad Hippies:

DuPont eyes $1 billion in solar revenue by 2013
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/dupont-eyes-generat ...

The materials technology company said it'll ramp up production of its Solamet thick-film metallization paste for solar cells as it eyes the booming business of generating precious electricity from the sun.
"The photovoltaic industry is in the midst of a substantial surge globally, and demand for solar as a renewable energy source will continue to increase," said Timothy McCann, vice president and general manager in charge of DuPont Electronic Technologies.
Specifically, the company said it expects that the photovoltaic market will grow by more than 30% in each of the next several years, "driving demand for existing and new materials that are more cost effective."

by jabailo at 10:19 AM on 10 Jun 2008

dupont's footprint shrinking by a leap?

a lot of my hippiest friends would call that a win.

by hapa at 6:27 PM on 10 Jun 2008

Efficiency

When looking at storage efficiency, ability to retain heat is only a part of the story. Installation and operating costs are critical issues. A very cheap storage system that loses 50% of the energy may be more practical than a very expensive system that retains 99% of the energy.

Also, the conditions of storage are very important. The referenced molten salt system stores energy at a maximum of about 1000F. An efficient steam turbine may generate steam with salt at 600 to 700F and use some reheat energy at, say 400F salt. At the lower temperatures, the energy can't be used and the salt just sits there, waiting to get heated up again (and losing energy). Not a big efficiency deal but it means the system must be very large.

Another issue - the water usage issue is a red herring - for solar, nuclear, coal or any other steam cycle plants. The water isn't used, just heated up and, in areas with no available water, closed loop cooling can be used with a slight reduction in efficiency and cost increase.

by KenG at 9:40 PM on 10 Jun 2008

@keng

ooh! do you know about cooling!!!? can you talk a little about open, tower, and closed loop cooling, in terms of efficacy and input requirements for solar, geothermal, and fission? other than solar not really using towers.

and do you know anything about the costs involved.

i haven't been able to assemble good information on this. it's been frustrating. input dependency and effectiveness during heat waves being important.

by hapa at 10:39 PM on 10 Jun 2008

cooling the water

far from an expert, but it seems to me that if all you need to do is condense the steam for the next pass through the collector, a pipe buried six feet in the ground oughta do a pretty good job, even in the desert. all those prairie dogs don't emerge from their dens parboiled.

by gzuckier at 10:20 AM on 27 Jun 2008
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