Bringing a bright idea to light

The BrightSource Energy company is preparing to build the world’s largest solar power station, in the Mojave Desert.

By HILARY LEILA KRIEGER
brightsource energy development center Negev_521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
brightsource energy development center Negev_521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
It used to be that the Israeli dream was to turn the desert green. Now the idea is to leave the desert exactly as it is and use it to make the world’s energy green.
This fall, Israeli R&D paved the way for the launch of a trail-blazing development. Using this advanced solar power technology, BrightSource Energy broke ground in the Ivanpah area of California’s Mojave Desert in October for what will be the largest solar power station in the world when it’s completed in 2013.
“This is extremely important because we know what’s going on with global warming and we know what’s going on with pollution,” declared California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at the groundbreaking, standing in front of two giant reflective mirrors propped up amid tracts of sandy brown desert that are the foundation of the energy project he said would begin to ease those crises.
“There are some people that look out at the desert and see miles and miles of emptiness,” he said. “I see miles and miles of a gold mine, a gold mine of great, great opportunities. And this is one of the perfect examples, and there will be more to come.”
US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar compared the mission to that laid out by John F. Kennedy when he pledged that within a decade America would put a man on the moon, a promise kept despite the naysayers.
“We will in fact make believers of skeptics, and we will in fact power our economy and the economy of [the world] going forward with the power of the sun,” Salazar told the company’s investors, engineers, partners and new employees who gathered at Ivanpah. “Thank you very much for your great example in helping us move forward with this visionary project.”
Before this project arrived in California, it started in the laboratories of Israel, under one man. Arnold Goldman was born in the US, made aliya in 1972 and has been consumed with solar energy ever since.
With his Israeli team, Goldman, now 67, founded Luz in the 1980s and developed the concept of setting up solar thermal power stations using parabolic trough technology, which focuses sunlight on a receiver to capture the rays’ intensity to generate sufficient energy.
Over seven years, Luz set up nine power stations in California, generating most of the world’s solar electricity at the time. But the economic success of the projects was greatly dependent on government tax incentives, particularly property tax breaks, given the large amount of space the operation covers to try to gather as much solar heat as possible.
When the government decided to withdraw the tax breaks in the early 1990s, Luz filed for bankruptcy. Goldman then reincarnated the company as Luz II, which was purchased by the California-based BrightSource in 2006. The renamed BrightSource Industries (Israel), located in Jerusalem, continues to lead the company’s research and development work.
During that time, Goldman developed a much more cost-effective technology for capturing sunlight, using massive numbers of large mirrors, or heliostats, spread over the desert to capture sunlight and angle toward the tip of a receiving tower. The concept is akin to the technique Archimedes supposedly used by positioning mirrors reflecting the sun to set fire to an invading Roman fleet.
While Goldman’s exploit hasn’t been proven to have been true, there’s no doubt Bright- Source’s power towers are much more efficient than the previous parabolic trough technology used by Luz and most other large-scale solar power companies. The Ivanpah project will produce 370 megawatts of electric power or, as Schwarzenegger put it, create enough power for 140,000 homes and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 400,000 tons a year – the equivalent of taking 75,000 cars off the road.
Currently, the world’s largest such solar station generates about 20 megawatts, according to Gershon Grossman, head of the Energy Engineering Research Center at the Israel Institute of Technology (the Technion).
“It’s a big difference,” he said of the new BrightSource project, which should double the amount of solar electricity produced worldwide. “Nobody’s done it on the scale that they want to do it in California.”
And indeed, California has been at the center of fostering and hosting solar power stations, not Israel.
Goldman, after decades spent in the field, described reaching a zenith in his career. “Today has been a most remarkable day for me. I have been involved in a journey for most of my lifetime leading to this milestone moment,” he told those assembled for the groundbreaking.
Grossman faults the Israeli government for not doing more, including providing the tax breaks and other financial measures necessary to make solar power economically competitive with other fuels.
“The surprising and disappointing thing is that this company could not build anything in Israel because in Israel these incentives were not in place,” said Grossman, who has worked in solar thermal research since the 1970s. “The government of Israel has not provided tax incentives nor the environment that would encourage these types of things, which is a shame.”
He added, though, that this attitude is starting to change. Recently, the Israeli government has been supporting a solar power site in Ashalim, and Goldman noted that Bright- Source has passed the pre-qualification to compete for that tender.
“They’re finally waking up,” Grossman said. “They’re finally doing something.”
GETTING SOLAR energy stations off the ground in the US has brought its own share of challenges. The decision to end the property tax exemption to Luz ended up dooming the business. Though the plants it set up continue to be run by a different American energy company, the model for long-term viability and expansion expired with the exemptions.
This time, BrightSource secured eight years of tax incentives, which it calculates will be enough to get the project securely established. It also received a $1.4 billion loan guarantee from the US Department of Energy. And it has the benefit of support from heavyweight politicians like Schwarzenegger and even US President Barack Obama.
“This month, in the Mojave Desert, a company called BrightSource plans to break ground on a revolutionary new type of solar power plant. It’s going to put about 1,000 people to work building a state-of-the-art facility,” Obama said during his weekly radio address before the October ceremony. “With projects like this one, and others across this country, we are staking our claim to continued leadership in the new global economy.”
Still, the financial calculus remains complex.
“It requires incentives. It still isn’t competitive with coal and gas at today’s prices,” said Grossman, who questioned what would happen without those incentives in place.
But CEO John Woolard said that the Ivanpah project would generate energy competitive with other types of energy produced at peak hours – when prices rise across the board and more production is needed.
He added that as start-up costs decrease and larger-scale projects create more efficiency, the price for solar power would drop. He acknowledged that government help is important but maintained that it’s needed partly to offset subsidies to other energy industries.
Woolard concluded his case by rhetorically asking whether “carbon matters.” Because if it does, solar energy beats fossil fuel hands down and, he asserted, other renewable energy sources.
“This is the lowest-cost renewable energy available,” he said.
Grossman agreed that the environmental benefits have to be reflected in the calculation, since some of the price of solar power can be offset by the cost of damage done by industries such as coal.
“There’s no argument that it’s a clean technology, cleaner than anything we use today,” he said. “The beauty of solar is that there’s no environmental damage.”
Sort of.
Somewhat ironically for a project lauded and subsidized for its environmental benefits, Ivanpah’s roll-out has been complicated by the need for environmental impact studies and allegations that it’s harming an important natural habitat.
Though few living beings inhabit the project’s 3,600 acres, some 30 of the rare desert tortoise have been found on the grounds, according to Mercy Vaughn, a biologist who is helping identify and move the reptiles and otherwise trying to minimize the environmental impact of the project.
The tortoises are considered “threatened,” a step less serious than endangered. Vaughn said she was surprised that so many of the 30-cm.- long brown-shelled tortoises, which burrow underground to survive the desert’s extreme temperatures, had been found in the area, and she expressed some concern about the effect of their relocation.
“Any habitat loss poses a threat, and this is habitat loss,” she said of the Ivanpah project.
Last year a draft California energy commission review, which noted the project’s benefits in reducing carbon emissions and providing jobs, found that the project would also 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.”
But a more recent US Fish and Wildlife Service review of the environmental dimensions of the project assessed that it does “not require activities that would adversely affect the primary, constituent elements of critical habitats for the desert tortoise.”
Vaughn, however, questioned the conditions under which the Fish and Wildlife Service report was written.
“It’s been pushed through so fast because we’re under such a time crunch to do this that the true impact has really not been [calculated].”
But BrightSource spokesman Keely Wachs rejected the notion that the process had been hasty.
“I don’t think it’s a fair criticism,” he said. “We’ve been going through a permitting process for three years. That’s not rushed.”
He also said that the number of tortoises found is not indicative of “rich desert tortoise habitat” and pointed to the great lengths to which the company has gone to move and reacclimate those tortoises found.
“There’s a lot of care,” he said, describing how biologists copy the design of the burrows the tortoises live in and even add familiar details like their own droppings so they’ll feel at home. “If you move them thoughtfully, you can move them successfully.”
Still, Wachs acknowledged that the power facility would alter the landscape.
“These projects are large. They take up a significant amount of land. They will have an impact. The question is not will they have an impact, but how do you reduce the impact?”
Woolard argued that whatever compromises are made, on balance they’re well worth it environmentally.
“This technology is the most land efficient of all the major renewable energy sources,” he said. “We’re very low-impact on the land.”
He described placing the heliostats on small beams that straddle the earth below. “We plant them,” he said. “It’s almost like planting a tree.”
Maybe. But it’s definitely greening the desert.