Reprint from Dow Jones VentureWire

By Jonathan Shieber

2/19/2008 – On the heels of raising nearly $21 million of a targeted $26 million Series A round, concentrating photovoltaic technology developer, Cool Earth Solar is planning to raise up to $20 million in debt financing to develop new solar projects, Clean Technology Investor has learned.

"We have closed and received some money, approximately $21 million, and there could be subsequent closings up to another $5 million or so," said Cool Earth Solar Chief Executive Rob Lamkin, in an interview. He was referring to the private equity financing.

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, said Lamkin. "Right now, we're building a prototype plant in Livermore, Calif., then we'll move on to our pilot power plant and our first utility scale power plant in Northern California."

Lamkin plans to raise an additional $10 million to $20 million in debt financing within the next two months to secure the necessary funds for subsequent projects.

Cool Earth Solar has developed a concentrating photovoltaic technology that uses inflated mylar balloons laminated with a reflective surface at their base to concentrate the sun's rays on a photovoltaic cell.

Unlike larger concentrating solar technologies that rely on several complicated solar tracking mechanisms and mirrors, the simple structure that Cool Earth wants to deploy makes it a much more cost effective solution, said Lamkin.

"If you have a piece of equipment that has thousands of pounds of steel and glass and cement to make your energy," it's expensive, he said. "Each of our concentrators that produces 1 kilowatt are using less than 20 pounds of material."

The low-impact nature of the company's technology means that it can scale to almost any size, said Lamkin. Cool Earth projects can range from five or 10 megawatts to multiple tens of megawatts, he said.

The only constraint could be the company's land use and access to transmission lines. "A 10 megawatt plant would be 70 to 80 acres," said Lamkin. "The cost of land isn't a major concern for us," he said. "I would view it more as access to the grid."

Indeed for Cool Earth projects to work at scale, they need to be distributed across a broad swath of unused land, and those remote locations are not normally close to transmission systems.

Even that is not such a concern because of the sizes a Cool Earth project can reach, Lamkin said. "Because our projects can be sized down to a 5 megawatt or 10 megawatt size, it opens up many more opportunities for power plant locations," he said. "We don't need a 200 megawatt interconnect point with the utility."