BrightSource Energy Plans 400 MW Solar Thermal Plant

BrightSource Energy, Inc., a utility scale solar thermal company, announced last week that it has filed an Application For Construction (AFC) with the California Energy Commission (CEC) for development of a 400 megawatt (MW) solar power plant site. This is the first AFC to be filed in California since 1989 for the construction of solar thermal power plants.

The BrightSource technical team previously developed the solar trough technology used in nine solar thermal plants built in Southern California between 1984 and 1990.

BrightSource plans to build three separate solar plants on a site in California known as Ivanpah, about five miles southwest of Primm, Nevada. The site is located on federally owned land administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

BrightSource has applied to the BLM for a right-of-way grant to use the land for its solar power complex, which will consist of two 100 MW solar power plants and one 200 MW solar power plant. The plants will utilize Distributed Power Tower (DPT) solar field technology developed by Luz II, a wholly owned subsidiary of BrightSource Energy.

“BrightSource is in negotiations with California utilities for the purchase of the electricity that these solar power plants will generate,” noted John Woolard, CEO of BrightSource Energy.

The BrightSource technical team previously developed the solar trough technology used in nine solar thermal plants built in Southern California between 1984 and 1990. The company's Luz Distributed Power Tower technology consists of mirrors called heliostats, which reflect the sun's light to a central tower to heat water and run a steam turbine to create electricity.

Oh God, this technology is back again. I remember one of these going Bankrupt in the mid 90s. It used a molten salt core that remained liquified by the solar.It never made a dollor for the investors, just the lawyers, banks, and management team, that held on to control and got an equity stake in the new corporation which later went bust.

I think you are confused about the solar technology that Bright Source is planning to use. The bankruptcy you refer to was Luz I, the company that built 9 parabolic trough plants in the Mojave during the 1980s. It failed when energy prices plunged in the early 1990s and government incentives for renewable energy development were withdrawn.

Bright Source and its subsidiary Luz II, while featuring many of the same people, has a new technology, a smaller version of the power tower technology that was also developed in the Mojave in the 1990s (Solar One) but was not commercialized in the US. Solar One was, at least partly, a victim of reduced research funding by DOE. The design has been successfully implemented in Spain, drawing on the lessons learned by Solar One in the US.

The Bright Source minitower version uses smaller mirrors that are easier to manufacture, transport and set up and thus should reduce the initial cost. It's future is expected to be Bright, to coin a phrase.