Google Sinks $130 million into eSolar
Solar power plant company eSolar has announced that they have raised $130 million from Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, and other investors. Bill Gross, chairman of eSolar, made the announcement on April 19 in Pasadena but would not specify how much of the $130 million has come from Google in their latest financing round (Google invested $10 million last November). The bulk of the remaining financing has come from Idealab, of which Gross is also a founder, and Oak Investment Partners.
eSolar makes use of the sun's power to generate electricity. Not to be confused with photovoltaic (PV) cells that store the sun's energy, eSolar's plants are a myriad of mirrors that reflect the sunlight at a central water-filled boiler. The steam from the boiler in turns moves a turbine that generates the electricity. They are not the only company in the area to use this technology, but eSolar is unique in their use of a higher number of smaller mirrors. This allows them to build smaller plants. While others are setting up plants in the desert on thousands of acres and costing billions of dollars, eSolar's plants can fit in to a relatively small few hundred acres. Obviously, each plant will generate less energy by itself, but the ease of setting up the smaller plants more than offsets that difference.
The planned power plants will each generate 33 megawatts. But since they are so much smaller, they can bypass several regulatory hurdles saving up to two years in getting each plant up and running. New legislation requires Californian utility companies to generate at least 20% of their electricity from renewable sources and these two years will put them at a big advantage in helping the utilities reach this target. To date, eSolar has bought up enough land to generate one gigawatt of electricity - enough to power 750,000 homes.
Fitting with the Google goal of RE<C - renewable energy cheaper than coal - Bill Gross has said "We just completed tests at our test site this week and we will be able to produce electricity that is competitive with coal".
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