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By Root 816 0

“builds a sound product line from both a business and ethical perspective, designed to convert incident sunlight into a convenient-to-use form for home, commercial and industrial customers.”28 It was to form the cornerstone of the community, employing its residents and providing its power. As the 1980s opened, the company began to dominate Goldman’s thinking. Luz didn’t have to be a city. He himself had described it as “not so much a city as a thought or phenomenon.” Luz the place was abandoned, but Luz grew. In the early ’90s, the company made such a large percentage of the solar electricity in the world that it effectively was the entire solar industry.

“THE TECHNOLOGY THAT WILL SAVE HUMANITY”

It is not every day that a successful energy company grows out of a vision to unite the scientific observations of space and time with the Torah and human behavior. But that’s how Luz started. Goldman did some of the initial business planning out of his garage and then hooked up with a French-Israeli financier, Patrick Francois. They set up a small office in San Francisco and started looking into how they were going to finance their projects.

At first, their plan was to provide heat, not electricity, for textile mills. They figured they could simply guarantee that the cost of their power would be 10 percent less than the natural gas power the companies already used.29 After forming a U.S. corporation and Israeli subsidiary, they went looking for investors who might back the plan. It was an unusual company to say the least. If the investors asked solar experts about what the American-Israeli was planning, they would have found Luz’s plans far-fetched: No one had ever built a solar thermal plant like the one they proposed.

Goldman, however, had earned some trust from the previous investors in his software company, so some of them came aboard. His pitch was also particularly attractive to American investors who wanted to help grow the Israeli economy. After all, the Middle Eastern country had plenty of sun but no oil. His argument didn’t focus on the cost of the technology but instead the local benefits it could provide to Israel as a homegrown manufacturing concern.

It was a good time to be making such arguments. The energy crises of the 1970s reset the world’s expectations of its energy supply, as the geopolitical shocks to the system exposed the world as dependent on fossil fuels. In the United States, millions reconsidered the lives they had built on assumptions of never-ending, always-on oil. The effects were even more acute in Israel. Solar based–energy self-sufficiency seemed like a great idea to big-picture investors and the Israeli government.30

With the only tangible evidence of his business a model that could fit in a suitcase, Goldman struggled to find traditional venture capital investment. Eventually, he decided to go to individuals for help. Many people interested in helping Israel hadn’t thought to invest in the company’s industries; instead, they supported the country through philanthropy. Luz, in its way, helped change that. We don’t have a technology to show you today, he told potential investors, but give us some cash and come by our headquarters in six months. They’d show a prototype then. Led by Newton Becker, a philanthropist and prominent member of the Los Angeles Jewish community, they bought it.31

Then, all he needed to do was get a headquarters and build a prototype—in six months. Luckily, Francois, who been dispatched to Israel to find technical talent, had come across a brilliant young engineer named Israel Kroizer, who had studied heat transfer in solar systems at Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology. Kroizer plunged into the work. He’s now the chief operating officer of BrightSource, but at the time, he was just a kid who wore shorts and sandals and read stacks of books on energy systems. With a tiny team, they worked around the clock to build a prototype on the roof of their new office in the allotted time.

Luckily, they weren’t building from nothing. Frank Shuman, a successful