BrightSource Energy: The Realities of U.S. Energy Policy

BrightSource Energy is one of the more interesting and successful solar startups of the last few years, and we’ve covered them extensively at Greentech Media.  (They’re actually the revived Luz, a pioneering Israeli solar thermal company, but it was the recent VC funding and support that helped get them back on track.)

• The company is one of our top ten startups.

• We’ve covered BrightSource’s brilliant success in winning a huge PG&E contract.

• We’ve covered the company’s recent $115 million VC funding round.

• And here’s a link to news of BrightSource’s opening of a Solar Energy Development Center in Israel, an operational solar field that will lets the company test equipment and materials as well as construction and operating methods.

BrightSource is a solar thermal company that uses a heliostat field/power tower architecture (as opposed to a parabolic trough or Stirling engine design). Like any solar thermal technology driving a steam turbine they need direct uninterrupted sunshine preferably at altitude, access to water, and access to transmission lines.

Charles Ricker, BrightSource’s Senior VP spoke at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) last Wednesday night at an SVPVS event and provided some facts and figures about the firm:

• Their smaller heliostat mirrors made from flat, white glass, by virtue of their size, requires just a 6â€? diameter pipe driven into the ground as a mount, rather than lots of concrete and steel.

• They anticipate an uptime of about 350 days per year.

• Historically, mirror loss from the elements is less than 0.3 percent.

• It takes eight acres to produce 1MW.

• Concentration is 500 suns.

• They have about 30 FT employees in their Oakland, Calif. offices and about 80 FT employees at their Luz II subsidiary in Israel.

• Vantage Point Venture Partners “dramatically increased their ownership share in the recent C round.â€?

Mr. Ricker then went on to witheringly describe how the U.S.’s lack of a cohesive energy policy effectively defines our energy policy.

The Reality of the Current U.S. Energy Policy, According to Mr. Ricker

Every day:

• We buy 20 million barrels of oil

• We borrow $2 billion from competitive countries (e.g., China)

• We pay $2 billion to unfriendly countries (e.g., Russia)

• We consume everything we’ve bought

This results in our:

• Owing $2 billion we don’t know how to repay

• Incurring $10 million of additional recurring interest

Every year we borrow $750 billion to buy oil, which is:

• Equivalent to 1.5 times the U.S. military budget

• Equivalent to 1.5 times the annual cost of Social Security

• Equivalent to 2 times the annual cost of medicine

All the RNC chants of “Drill Baby Drill� won’t change that reality. We need more renewables online and we need a lot more companies like BrightSource.