Test of Google-funded eSolar Goes Well

eSolar, a new kind of solar energy company founded by idealab and partially funded by Google, will announce today that it did a test run of its power system, and it all worked.

This is a potential breakthrough in the quest to use solar energy to replace electricity made by burning fossil fuels. As eSolar Chairman Bill Gross explained it to me, eSolar is using computing power to guide and position a field of inexpensive mirrors to concentrate sunlight to make steam -- which then drives a turbine to make electricity. Current solar power plants use gigantic, expensive mirrors to collect sunlight, and that drives up the cost of solar-made power so that it is more expensive than most other ways to make electricity.

The test last week "confirmed that the product worked," Gross told me. "We produced our first steam. Now we're racing to build out the rest of the power plant by the end of the year. Then we'll race to build as many as we can next year."

The company has landed $130 million in financing (just $10 million from Google). Building the first plant will cost "well under the capital we've raised," Gross said -- which will make an eSolar plant a fraction of the cost of traditional solar plants.

eSolar believes that by the end of the year, it can make solar electricity cheaper than electricity made with natural gas. The goal is to make solar cheaper than coal-made electricity. "The only way to solve the world's (global warming) problem is to beat coal with renewable energy," Gross said. "Ten years ago that was impossible. It will take us to the end of the decade to do it."

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