Today, President Obama visited Solyndra, Inc. in Fremont California – a solar panel manufacturer that is building a new facility (and creating new jobs) thanks to funding from the Recovery Act. So far, construction of the new facility has created over 3,000 construction-related jobs and the new factory could create up to 1,000 long-term new jobs. And this is just one of countless stories that together account for the up to 2.8 million jobs the Recovery Act is responsible for by the CBO’s count.
Tag:
financing
BrightSource Energy, Inc., developer of utility-scale solar thermal power plants, has raised an additional $150 million in its most recent equity financing. The Series D round brings BrightSource’s total equity financing to more than $300 million and positions the company for significant growth.
New investors including Alstom and the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) joined existing investors in this round, led by VantagePoint Venture Partners, Morgan Stanley and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
The additional financing will be used to support BrightSource’s 2,610 megawatts in contracts with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) and Southern California Edison to build 14 solar power plants in the US southwest by 2016. The funds will also be used by BrightSource to further its international expansion plans.
Israeli fuel cell start-up EnStorage Ltd. has raised $15 million in a Series B financing round.
U.S. private equity fund Warburg Pincus led the round, and was joined by all of EnStorage’s current investors, including Greylock Partners, Canaan Partners, Siemens TTB, and Wellington Partners, according to a report in “Globes“.
EnStorage was founded in 2007 by VP R&D Dr. Arnon Blum, Chief Scientific Officer Prof. Emanuel Peled of Tel Aviv University, Chairman Nachman Shelef, and former CEO Eran Yarkoni.
MP2 Capital is a San Francisco firm that develops, finances and invests in distributed generation and small-scale utility solar projects throughout North America, selling the electricity produced by its projects to commercial, government and utility customers under power purchase agreements and feed-in tariffs.
Its latest project is a 445-kilowatt solar photovoltaic array in Winsted, Connecticut. MP2 Capital has entered into a power purchase agreement to sell all of the electricity generated to the Regional School District No. 7 for 20 years under a grant from the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund.
The system, which sits atop multiple rooftops of the school district, was built by groSolar and is composed of 1,937 photovoltaic panels from Canadian Solar. It is expected to produce approximately 492,000 kilowatt hours of clean solar electricity and save the school district $26,000 in energy costs during the first year of operation. Over the term of the agreement, the system is expected to produce approximately 9,380,000 kilowatt-hours to offset the school’s energy use.
Brad Bauer, co-founder and managing director of MP2 Capital, talked with CleanTechies about the project.
“2010 will be a day of reckoning for solar projects that have been announced,” said Mark McLanahan, CEO at Renewable Ventures, a Fotowatio company.
Five hundred bankers and solar executives speculated about the promise and pitfalls of implementing solar power projects at the 2010 Solar Power Finance & Investment Summit in San Diego last week.
Permitting the Biggest Challenge
Permit approval and securing financing dominated the two-and-a-half day meeting as the greatest obstacles to completing projects. A panel of venture capitalists agreed that in all cases, developing solar projects and technology consistently takes longer than expected.
According to Sven Strohband, partner with MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures, this is because “materials science is hard, but not as hard as biology: We are trying to do something truly new, and solar investments require a lot of capital to go to market.”
Since 2007, the French photovoltaic market has been booming, with close to 500 megawatts of installed capacity expected this year, up from a mere 40 megawatts three years ago.
Most of this growth first stemmed from residential installations that benefited from high feed-in-tariffs for producers and substantial tax rebates for households. Since last year larger installations have also been skyrocketing.
On September 14, the French government released a draft regulation detailing the upcoming changes regarding photovoltaic electricity feed-in-tariffs in France. This draft is pending approval from the Conseil Supérieur de l’Energie (Energy Supreme Council) until late September.
Do yourself a favor by visiting NPR.org and downloading the first hour of the last Science Friday. A really intelligent discussion of the future of nuclear energy in the US ranged from the waste storage issue to microreactor technology to financing.
Even the geekiest of Green Nerds probably needs some time away from green tech talk a few minutes a day, especially with all the slop that is bombarding us these days at checkout counters, in brand campaigns and on the nightly news. So, I know the last thing you want to do is head out for that morning run, pop in the ear buds and have a clean tech podcast as your accompaniment; but, the conversation here – which included an MIT Prof and former DOE Under Secretary (Moniz), a NRDC egghead (Cochran) and a scientist – is worth your time.
There are all kinds of tax credits and other green incentives in the new economic stimulus bill.
But nonprofits are being left out of the mix. Such organizations are usually ineligible for federal tax incentives for renewable energy projects, according to folks from the National Development Council.
The council, one of the oldest national nonprofit community and economic development organizations in the U.S., aims to change that. The group has secured $1.5 million for a solar installation project at the Gasser Foundation‘s base in Napa Valley, Calif.
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