SEATTLE – Terabase Energy, a company looking to make massive solar farms economically viable, has received a co-sign from Bill Gates in the form of a cash infusion from Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a venture capital firm that focuses on climate change solutions.
The move marks what may be the next step in ratcheting up capacity and building towards utility-scale solar farms that can add terawatts worth of solar power to the grid.
The good news is that the cost of solar panels and other photovoltaic tech has massively declined over the last couple decades. But this means that the greatest barrier to building utility-scale solar farms will soon be fixed costs like land, labor, other construction materials, and permits — things that cheaper, more efficient solar panels are not going to fix.
“In recent years, the solar industry has been focused on technological improvements of solar panels and other hardware components while the means and methods of engineering and construction have been largely unchanged,” Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ Carmichael Roberts said in the statement.
But how the industry designs and builds solar farms needs to change if we are to build quickly and cheaply enough for utility-scale solar power to help us hit our climate goals, Roberts said.
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