News Coverage

"We didn't want to provide an energy solution that could not
meet the tremendous growth needed for clean energy."…

"We see that cost is the primary driver in the large-scale adoption of renewable generation…"

The company didn’t start out to develop a solar balloon concentrator, only to experiment with the lowest cost ways to effectively capture protons and make electricity.…

[Cool Earth Solar's CPV balloon is an Innovation in Renewable Energy finalist for 2009.] The awards recognize the most innovative technologies, projects and people within the renewable energy industries.…

As solar enthusiasts like to state—The amount of sunlight hitting the earth in one hour could power
the whole earth for an entire year. This has become a mantra at Cool Earth Solar.

…Cool Earth Solar has been chosen by AlwaysOn
as a GoingGreen Top 100 Winner. The chosen ones have excelled in key strategic areas in the global clean energy technology markets.…

The top ten ecosavvy company logos on this list all use different strategies with a compelling effect.…
[Cool Earth Solar's] logo has a 3-D logo image of the earth with a lower case ‘c’ and ‘e’ wrapped around it.…

…Rob Lamkin, Cool Earth's CEO…says, "[W]e
didn't set out to form a solar company." Instead
they asked, "knowing the size of the global energy problem, how do we do something to address that?"…

…It's a lightweight solution, to a heavyweight problem. Best of all, the lack of weight means the mounting hardware can be commensurately lean.

"We didn't set out to do something that looked clever or different. We set out to address the very large energy problem we have before us. We needed a solution that was much, much cheaper (than current cells) and could scale."

…“We obviously think Cool Earth Solar is going to be (one of the leaders in utility scale solar) because of our materials utilization—we use a lot less material than anyone else—and we have a huge advantage in terms of our costs,” Lamkin said.…

The CoolEarth Solar Balloon, which collects sun-
light, is on display at the California Clean Tech Open.

…other alumni startups included Cool Earth Solar,
the 2006 Renewables Prize runner-up, which closed a $22 million Series A financing round last year.…

…Last February, Cool Earth Solar raised $21 million
in its first round of funding. The money will be used to construct its first plant.…

…When all the sums are done, Mr Lamkin reckons his company will be able to sell electricity to California’s grid for 11 cents a kilowatt-hour, the state’s target price for renewable energy, while still turning a tidy profit.…

…"We have plenty of land [to build solar farms] in
the U.S. Land isn't the problem," Lamkin said. "We have plenty of Sun. Financing isn't really the problem. Government isn't the problem. It is a materials problem."…

…Lamkin was at Clean Tech Forum this week and
we spoke with him about how they came up with this seemingly odd idea. Turns out, its a big-picture model that we admire, and that other start-ups may want to consider before setting out on new projects.…

…One of the most innovative ideas comes from a start-up called Cool Earth Solar, which uses thin-film plastic lenses, blown up like a balloon, to cheaply concentrate the sun's rays.…

Utilities may soon be getting megawatts from solar balloon installations. Using small amounts of inexpensive materials…they could scale quickly and become a major energy source.…

…Cool Earth believes that solar panels on rooftops are great, but they can’t power industries or deliver enough electric power to many of the densely populated urban centers. This is why they are creating and building their own solar power plants …

…Cool Earth Solar circumvents traditional solar panels by producing balloons that harvest solar energy. This divergent technology puts the company at a potential advantage: Traditional rooftop solar panels don’t put out enough electric power for high-population urban areas.…

Solar is poised to become the major player in solving the energy crisis, once the solar industry brings down the costs for utility-scale power production. The stakes for solar—indeed, for all renewables that are competing in the utility-scale arena—are huge, as are the goals.…

Solar energy is the most promising source of clean, renewable energy. It is also one of the most misunderstood.…

Cool Earth Solar has explained how it will be able to sell electricity to California's grid for 11 cents a kilowatt-hour and "still turn a tidy profit".…

Solar cells are expensive, so it makes sense to use them efficiently. One way of doing so is to concen- trate sunlight onto them. That means a smaller area of cell can be used to convert a given amount of light into electricity.…

Forgive the folks in Livermore if they think someone is celebrating a birthday. A really big birthday. But the huge balloon-like objects that will be installed later this month not far from the national laboratory are in fact Cool Earth Solar's solution for capturing the sun's heat.…

Imagine a 1-megawatt solar power plant that has nothing to do with vast swaths of PV panels or mirrored troughs in a barren desert environment that require new transmission lines to population centers.…

…[T]he Bush administration was urging the world's scientists to explore the possibility of deploying giant space mirrors that would…reduce global warming.…One of the options under consideration, as it happened, involved "thousands of tiny, shiny balloons."…maybe I was just underestimating the power of shiny balloons.…

There are many new forms of alternative energy but maybe none as interesting as the Cool Earth Solar "Balloon." The concept behind this design is that they create an “inflatable plastic thin-film balloon (solar concentrator) that, upon inflation, focuses sunlight onto a photovoltaic cell held at its focal point.…

…By replacing expensive materials like steel with cheap-as-chips plastic and air, Cool Earth aims to dramatically lower the price of solar electricity. "We strongly believe it’s all about cost," says Lamkin, "not how clever the technology is or if it is 1% more efficient."…

When you think of solar panels as an energy solu-
tion, you associate them with a large, flat, dark
panels positioned on a surface such as an angled roof. Cool Earth Solar (CES) has a solution that is anything but your typical solar panel.…

Cool Earth Solar has one of those radical green-tech ideas that may actually make a real commercial impact. In the next two weeks, the company plans to start testing a prototype solar plant built around rows of reflective balloons hung on poles.…

…[A]n 8-foot shiny plastic balloon soaks up the abundant late September sun. Its shape reflects so much heat to its middle that you can’t leave your hand on it or you’ll burn. Insert a round plate covered with solar cells into the balloon and you may have the next idea in renewable power.…

There is no doubt that mankind stands at a pivotal point in our history in relation to our consumption of global resources and the resultant impact on the planet.…Now new approaches like Cool Earth’s collectors are becoming advanced enough to effectively tackle these problems…

…Traditional solar concentrators use expensive optical equipment to focus sunlight on a solar cell to increase the electricity produced. Tapping the power of air is the key to Cool Earth's solar balloon, which weighs 20 pounds and is made from $2 worth of thin-film plastic like that found in potato chip bags.…

…The company says its solution has two main advantages. First, its CPV technology addresses the limited availability and cost fluctuations of solar cells. Second, the innovative use of reflective thin films to concentrate the sunlight reduces by an order of magnitude the amount of material and the weight.…

The whole design is geared toward using a minimum of materials with a relatively small environmental footprint.…Inherent in the design is the ability to install solar plants in terrain unsuitable to conventional solar plants. A 30–megawatt plant requires roughly 200 acres, or about 20% less land than conventional solar.…

Solar startup Cool Earth Solar is building a small prototype solar plant near its Livermore headquarters.…Cool Earth is also planning to build a 1.5-megawatt plant near Tracy to prove it can scale its technology, followed by a 10-megawatt solar power plant in the Central Valley. "Our development process and construction process is measured in months, not years."…

…"Initially, we’ll be be doing projects in California and the Southwest, but we do want to expand overseas, Lamkin said. "To address the global energy problem, we’ve got to scale bigtime worldwide."…Keep watching Cool Earth Solar—I have a feeling that this company will become a household name in the near future.

…CEO Rob Lamkin…said the plant, near the company's offices in Livermore, Calif., will consist of
a row of slightly different concentrators to try out the designs and prove out the technology. All together, the plant might have the capacity to generate "maybe a fifth of a megawatt or something" and will be a couple of acres large…

In the seemingly never-ending quest to find alternative energy sources, the wackiest of our nation's scientific minds can hit on some of the most simple and brilliant ideas. This time, it's giant balloons that collect the sun's rays.…

…A few years back, a group of West Coast engin-
eers were puzzling over a practical way to tackle the problem, looking for a hydrocarbon-free, clean, and renewable energy system that required no major technical breakthroughs and could be put to work in the next few years. The result: the start-up Cool Earth Solar…

Cool Earth Solar would like to do things a little differently than other solar energy companies—it plans on using balloons to harness power from the sun.…

…Cool Earth Solar, based in Livermore, California addresses the need for “a lot of collecting surface”, claiming the ability to cheaply harvest solar energy not in terms of kilowatts or megawatts, but gigawatts of power…

…Unique mylar balloon-based concentrator system received $21 million in funding in early 2008 from an unnamed PE investor.…

…in greentech and renewable energy markets, VCs are tearing it up. Cool Earth Solar uses balloons to focus sunlight—it’s a longshot but VCs are bankrolling it.

…That's the problems that CoolEarth is trying to solve with its inflatable solar collectors. The balloons themselves are said to be 400 times cheaper than a concentrator of the same size made of polished aluminum…

…Cool Earth Solar hopes by 2010 to cut the cost of the electricity it produces to 29 cents per watt making solar farming a highly attractive option…

…Another example is Cool Earth Solar, a startup based in Livermore, Calif. that hews to the “cheaper is better” model, using inexpensive reflective balloons to concentrate light on cells. It plans to suspend its balloons on cable-bound arrays 12-14 feet above active farmland, letting sunlight strike both the solar cells and crops beneath…

…Apart from the great name, this company is taking a potentially disruptive approach to solar electricity. Never mind expensive plants out in the desert. Why not just float reflective balloons in open fields?…

…But it was Eric Cummings and his solar balloon that wowed the crowd. Cummings, founder of Cool Earth Solar in Livermore, told about the late nights and a shoestring budget that led to his second-place finish in the first Clean Tech Open, in 2006…

…The Series A capital, provided by an undisclosed private equity investor, will be used for hiring staff, purchasing equipment and getting the first two projects online…

…If solar power is expensive in part because the materials come dearly, then use cheaper materials. That’s the design principle behind thin film solar cells, and now also behind a form of concentrated solar using plastic balloons, designed by a firm called Cool Earth Solar…

…Cool Earth Solar has taken a radical approach to building a solar-power plant using a technique called concentrated solar photovoltaics, in which light is magnified onto solar cells to maximize electricity output…

…We've seen plenty of mirror concentrators before, but this one is unique because it uses inflatable mirrors that are 400 times cheaper than polished aluminum mirrors…

…The closely-held firm has developed a technology that uses a string of balloons to concentrate and capture the sun's energy without occupying valuable real estate or using large amounts of silicon…

…The first utility scale power plants using CES technology are expected to begin construction in early 2008 with renewable solar electricity production slated for year end…

…Cool Earth Solar says its solar collectors, which are about two meters in diameter, will be cheaper than other concentrators because of the inexpensive plastic it will use to magnify light. Typically, concentrators use sophisticated lenses or polished aluminum…

…Cool Earth Solar, a Livermore, Calif. company that says it has developed a new solar concentration technology, has raised $750,000 in a seed round of financing…

…Cool Earth Solar said its inflatable mirrors are 400 times cheaper than traditional polished aluminum mirrors. Cummings said the technology will make solar power the energy future of small farms and rural-industrialized areas…

…Cool Earth Solar, based in Livermore, California, believes its technology could make solar farming economically competitive within three years by making solar cheaper than coal and allowing farmers to become net suppliers of electricity…