Sep 11 2009

The Green Seen

Posted by: Leonard Anderson

Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:

Engineering and construction giant Bechtel Corp. is moving into the solar energy business, joining with BrightSource Energy to build a 440-megawatt project to supply electricity to PG&E and Southern California Edison. Bechtel Enterprises will take an equity stake in the Ivanpah Solar Electricity Generating System and handle engineering, procurement and construction. The project is expected to get underway in 2010.

Search engine giant Google plans to develop a mirror technology to lower the cost of building solar thermal power plants. The company aims to cut the cost of making heliostats, the fields of mirrors that track the sun, by a least a factor of two, "ideally a factor of three or four," says Bill Weihl, green energy czar at Google. The company also is working on running gas turbines on solar energy rather than natural gas to reduce the cost of electricity.

The first "Global Cleantech 100" list of private clean technology companies "regarded as having the potential and likelihood to achieve high growth and high market impact" arrived this week, with the U.S. topping the list with 55, followed by the U.K. with 13 and Germany 10. The list was organized by San Francisco-based Cleantech Group LLC and Britain's Guardian newspaper and represented "the collective opinion of hundreds of leading experts from cleantech innovation and venture capital companies." Northern California companies included BrightSource Energy, Imara Corp. Silver Springs Networks, Serious Materials and Tesla Motors.

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