Woolard: BrightSource's power tower design cut solar thermal costs by ~40%
John Woolard · Why concentrated solar couldn’t compete · Nov 13, 2024 · at 5:46
Former BrightSource Energy CEO John Woolard explains how shifting from parabolic trough collectors to high-temperature power towers reduced concentrated solar power costs.
0:00 / 0:03exact quote · 3.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“It reduced, it was about a 40% cost reduction from the design alone.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from John Woolard
Woolard: California regulators tried to halt Ivanpah over a tarp's color
“We happened to have a brown cover to that temporary, 18 month manufacturing facility, and the CEC, California Energy Commission tried to stop all construction, which basically would have killed the project, because the color of the tarp was not the right color…”
Woolard: Developing flat-cost tech against rapidly cheapening competitors is unwinnable
“If you're asked to develop something that's price is flat to increasing, when your competitor's price is decreasing every day, you're asked to do something you can't win at.”
Woolard: BrightSource leadership concluded CSP was no longer competitive in 2012
“That's when we basically said, we can no longer win game. We are no longer competitive. And that was a different message. We'd said, well, maybe you could, and you could sell in different attributes. But at that point, we said, this is no longer a competitive …”
Woolard: Offshore wind at 15 cents is not economic against small nuclear
“To me, some of those might indicate that something like, I'll pick on offshore wind at You know, 15 cents and up is not economic compared to reliable power at a number lower than that.”
Woolard: BrightSource cut costs to $3.90/W while PV fell to $2.50/W
“Well, so the engineering team was working really diligently and really hard to do whatever they could on costs, and our costs were going from, say, five dollars a watt to four dollars and 30 cents a watt and maybe down to about three 90 a watt. Meanwhile, at t…”