Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [69]
The game was over for Luz but not for the Solar Electric Generating Stations. They proved indestructible. For a quarter of a century, they have produced power reliably. Learning in the field has brought operating expenses down. The plants make money. Many solar thermal engineers have trained out in the fields of the Mojave.76
With his company busted, Arnold Goldman hunkered down in Jerusalem. The tremendous success of SEGS was one of those stories that floated around the renewable energy world, as apocryphal as a real project can be. Luz claimed that their next generation of larger plants was going to be cost competitive with natural gas generation. Looking back at the beginning of the green-tech boom of the early twenty-first century, it’s impossible not to wonder, “How did everyone let that happen? And what would have happened if it hadn’t?”
After Luz, solar thermal deployment nearly ground to a halt for more than a decade. The cheap energy of the 1990s kept interest in the technology low. Then, in 2004 Goldman started to get excited again. Oil prices began to climb again, and this time it looked to be more because of the tremendous demand coming online in Asia, not because of geopolitical problems in the Middle East. It seemed like the rise in energy prices could be permanent, or at least that was a pretty good thesis for investors to work from. At the same time, some form of global climate agreement seemed like a pretty good bet to drive the desire for low-carbon energy sources.
Goldman started to contact the old Luz gang, asking if they wanted to give the solar business a go again. The answer was almost always yes. Luz II was born. In 2006 Luz II changed its name to BrightSource Energy and picked up venture backing of $160 million over three rounds of financing between October 2006 and May 2008. (For the full BrightSource story, see the very last chapter in this book.) In 2009 the company signed the two huge solar deals in the world for a combined 2,610 megawatts of capacity. One of them is with Southern California Edison, the utility that donated the land on which the very first Luz plant was built.77
It’s as if Goldman planned it all. Luz has acquired the other definitions ascribed to the Hebrew word by the mystics: indestructible. It is the seed of a solar resurrection.
chapter 15
How to Burn a Biological Library
THE PLAYA LAKES west of the desert near where New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Arizona come together are some of the strangest biological environments in America. Small depressions in the prairies, with areas usually less than thirty acres, the lakes pop into and out of existence depending on the rain.1 Year after year, the playa lakes cycle from dry to wet and back again. Inside these lakes, there reside vast populations of microorganisms that through the inexorable logic of natural selection have somehow adapted to an environment in which water, the key ingredient for all life, comes and goes with the capriciousness of a wandering thunderstorm.
In the early 1980s these microorganisms were what sent Jeff Johansen careening all over the ranches and farmland of parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, and Oklahoma in his trusty Renault, armed only with some intuition about where these ephemeral lakes might be and a game willingness to hop barefoot into the water to secure samples of the organisms unique to that little puddle on the prairie.2
Every time he came across one of the round, briny lakes, he could be looking at a hidden black gold mine. It was possible that any lake could hold one of the most valuable organisms that a man could find. Inside some invisibly small