Google Invests $168M in BrightSource Energy’s Tower of Power

[Updated 4/12/09 00:30 am. See below.] Oakland, CA-based BrightSource Energy disclosed earlier this month that it has raised nearly $202 million in Series E funding from existing venture firms and some unnamed investors, and now Mountain View, CA-based Google has stepped into the light. Today Google reveals on its blog that it has invested $168 million “in an exciting new solar energy power plant being developed by BrightSource Energy in the Mojave Desert in California.”

[Updated to clarify Google’s investments in BrightSource] The item posted on the Google blog by Rick Needham, director of green business operations, says the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is designed to generate 392 megawatts of clean solar energy. Google spokesman Parag Chokshi told me late yesterday that Google’s $168-million investment was entirely for the Ivanpah project, and was not an equity investment in BrightSource.

So Google’s $168 million was not part of the $200 million round that BrightSource announced on April 1. But Chokshi says Google made a $10 million equity investment in Brightsource in 2007.

By coincidence, BrightSource today posted a photo on its website of the project under construction. The company began construction six months ago.

The design calls for erecting a field of mirrors, called heliostats, that concentrate the sun’s energy on a solar receiver at the top of a tower. The receiver, in turn, intensely heats a boiler so that steam spins a power-generating turbine.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.