Solar Millennium geht Pleite, Solarhybrid die das US SolarThermie Geschäft von Solar Millennium übernommen hatten geht in die Insolvenz und ganz nebenbei gibts nen IPO eines Solar Thermie Unternehmen in den USA ! Die bekommen mal schnelle 200 Mio $ frisches Kapital und Solarhybrid ist keine 1.5 Mio € ! Entweder ist Solarhybrid eine gewaltige Chance oder alles ist nur noch verrückt. http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2012/03/22/...se-182-5-million/ BrightSource Sets IPO Share Price, Seeks To Raise $182.5 million California solar power plant builder BrightSource Energy on Wednesday set an offering price target of $21 to $23 a share for its initial public offering that now seeks to raise $182.5 million. The startup backed by Google, French energy giant Alstom, NRG Energy, Silicon Valley venture capitalists and other investors will trade on the Nasdaq as BRSE. The company is building a $2.2 billion, 377-megawatt solar thermal power station in California’s Mojave Desert 45 miles southwest of Las Vegas. The Ivanpah project is the first big solar thermal power plant to break ground in 20 years and BrightSource has signed contracts with utilities to sell a total of 2,400 megawatts of electricity in the years ahead. BrightSource initially filed for a $250 million IPO on Earth Day last year. In the amended S-1 filed Wednesday for a $182.5 million offering, the company said it would make up the difference with private placements of $65 million with Alstom and $10 million with energy developer Caithness Development. With competitors such as Stirling Energy Systems and Solar Millennium disappearing into bankruptcy, BrightSource’s IPO’s will be a test of investors appetite for solar thermal power developers as the renewable energy shakeout continues. Unlike photovoltaic power plants, which deploy fields of solar panels that directly convert sunlight into electricity, BrightSource’s “power tower” technology uses huge arrays of mirrors called heliostats to focus the sun on a water-filled boiler that sits atop a 459-foot tower. The resulting steam drives a standard electricity-generating turbine. As of February, Ivanpah was 25% complete, according to BrightSource. The company has acknowledged that its fortunes turn on successfully building the project – which has faced opposition from some environmentalists for its impact on the desert tortoise – on time and budget. While BrightSource has operated a 6-megawatt demonstration project since 2008 in Israel, where it conducts research and development, building a power plant on the scale of Ivanpah is exponentially more complex. Ivanpah, for instance, will deploy 170,000 heliostats, each one of which will have to be washed every two weeks to keep them clean of dust that can interfere with electricity production. “Mirrors will be washed by a dedicated crew using specialized mobile equipment,” BrightSource said in the filing. “We are still designing and testing the specialized equipment to be used in this process. If the mirror washing equipment and process are not effective, actual operating costs may be substantially higher than forecasted or total electrical production may fall short of estimates.” BrightSource also said that it has redesigned the pylons on which the heliostats are mounted since construction began in October 2010. That’s because a severe storm last November resulted in movement of pylons installed at a small solar facility the company had previously built for Chevron in Coalinga, Calif. “We are completing modifications to prevent any future pylon movement at Coalinga and are deploying redesigned pylons in much of the Ivanpah project and modifying some plant operating guidelines to reduce the risk of a similar occurrence in the future and enable the heliostats to operate at higher wind loads,” BrightSource stated. |