Obama's Solar Plan
OAKLAND, CALIF.—When Jack Jenkins-Stark was offered the job of chief financial officer two years ago at BrightSource Energy, a newly formed solar power start-up based here, he hesitated. "I came at it with a very cynical view," says Jenkins-Stark, 58, who had spent more than 20 years at Pacific Gas & Electric, the northern California utility company, before settling into a comfortable job as CFO of Silicon Valley Bank.
There was no doubt, he thought, that BrightSource's technology was promising. Founded by the same technical team that built some of the earliest solar power facilities in the California desert in the 1980s, the company had plans to build a series of sprawling new solar power plants across Southern California. Instead of relying on photovoltaic panels to generate energy or using the sun's rays to heat oil-filled pipes, as the early solar power projects had done, BrightSource was testing a next-generation solar array with thousands of small mirrors installed in a circle around a central tower holding a water-filled boiler. The reflected sunlight heated the water into steam, which turned a turbine. Voilà, sun-powered, utility-scale electricity, all at a price, according to the company, comparable to burning fossil fuels.
It wasn't the technology that made Jenkins-Stark nervous. And it wasn't the looming recession, either, though the slowing economy and the disappearance of credit would soon put the nascent solar industry's very survival at risk. No, for Jenkins-Stark, the problem was political. "I'd seen this movie before," he says. "I've seen everybody up in arms about oil prices; I've seen everybody up in arms over security of supply." And he'd seen the early attempts at building solar power in the California desert falter when the crisis passed and renewables couldn't compete with the falling price of natural gas.
