It’s been nearly four years since concentrated solar power company Glasspoint emerged from bankruptcy and began anew, offering steam-as-a-service for industrial customers requiring high-temperature process heat. Now, backed by fresh capital, Glasspoint has an ambitious expansion plan, and is setting out to prove that solar thermal can undercut fossil fuels on pure economics.
Earlier this year the company raised a $20 million round to execute its 2.2-gigawatt pipeline of projects, which include a 1.45-GW project in Saudi Arabia, and a 750-megawatt project in California.
Glasspoint is among the rare energy companies not making an overt data center play at the moment. As CEO Rod MacGregor put it to Latitude Media, “we didn’t have an application, and it didn’t make economic sense to make one up.”
That’s not to say the company hasn’t been impacted by the artificial intelligence boom, however. The intense focus on AI’s energy needs made it harder than usual to raise money when Glasspoint set out to do so last year, MacGregor said.
“[AI] did suck all of the air out of the room if you were raising money for anything else,” MacGregor said. “It took longer to do that raise than I would’ve expected given the commercial traction we have.”
Ultimately Glasspoint opted for infrastructure and private equity funding over the venture capital approach. The primary investor for the company’s Series C is NIS, which manages Japanese institutional capital and is more comfortable with large-scale project risk than venture capital, MacGregor explained.
“We were able to dip into those other pools of capital that aren’t quite as obsessed with AI yet,” he added.
This new capital is funding Glasspoint’s ambitious expansion plans.
When it first emerged from bankruptcy, Glasspoint was largely focused on the Middle East — and particularly Saudi Arabia, where the government is supporting the $1.5 billion Maaden Solar I project, which will eventually produce 14,000 tons of steam per day for the state-owned mining company. Glasspoint is currently in the process of setting up local manufacturing to produce the mirrors and other components needed, and expects to break ground on a pilot version later this year. Full-scale construction of the 1.5 gigawatt-hour Maaden project will come after, MacGregor said, but there isn’t yet a set timeline.
Now the company is expanding both to Europe and the United States, which offer large industrial process heat markets. Europe has the added benefit of a favorable policy environment; Europe’s Emissions Trading System, and the way carbon revenues are recycled into clean energy projects there, makes the region particularly attractive, MacGregor said.
Geographical expansion isn’t the only change. In addition to Glasspoint’s core applications of metals and mining, including brine and bauxite processing, plus its legacy oil and gas customers, the company is “casting the net” for a third application: biofuels.
“Ethanol is one of the more interesting candidates, because the fuel it burns is expensive and there’s real value in lowering the carbon intensity,” MacGregor said, pointing to the combination of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard incentives and federal mandates to blend ethanol into transportation fuels. That said, the company hasn’t fully committed to that market yet.
Glasspoint’s US expansion
Glasspoint, founded in 2009 in California, initially operated as a tech provider, building projects for enhanced oil recovery and then handing over ownership and operation to their customer. The company was swept up in the implosion of the solar thermal industry in the 2010s, with projects falling through due to financing issues.
Shareholders moved to liquidate the company in 2020. At that point MacGregor, who was the founding CEO before stepping down in 2017, rebooted it, purchasing its name, assets, and patents.
At its peak, Glasspoint was valued at over $400 million, and had grown to more than 300 employees worldwide at the time of bankruptcy. Today, the company is still rebuilding, even as it sets its sights on global expansion. At the time of its latest raise, it had just 14 employees. Now though, with the Series C funding in-hand, Glasspoint is ramping up hiring, largely at its R&D center in Germany, but also for sales and execution roles to support its U.S. growth.
In California, Glasspoint has signed a 750-MW deal with Searles Valley Minerals to supply solar steam for mineral processing at a remote site in the state’s desert, replacing coal-fired boilers and helping retire California’s last two coal plants. Because the project sits on land owned by the customer and is far from population centers, it will avoid the kind of land acquisition and transmission battles that often slow large energy projects, MacGregor explained.
But instability in the domestic market is proving tricky to navigate, he acknowledged: “The thing that investors in renewable energy want the most is stability and predictability, and we don’t really have that in U.S. policy at the moment. It keeps changing, and so that has definitely disrupted the availability of finance”
At the tail end of the Biden administration, Glasspoint announced it had received a $167 million credit allocation for its California project, under the Qualifying Advanced Energy Project Credit, or 48C, created by the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRS made up to $10 billion worth of credits available to projects including clean energy manufacturing and recycling, critical minerals, and industrial decarbonization. By the time the second Trump administration took office, all $10 billion had been allocated.
Companies receiving the credit have four years to finish construction, or risk the credit being reallocated. Glasspoint, for its part, must finish the California project by January 2029.
The company has other public funding options as well. It could still claim the legacy energy investment tax credit that phased out at the end of 2024, or else the 48E clean electricity credit, which replaced it. Both of those credits would potentially be more valuable than the 48C, MacGregor said, but have their own complications. 48E, for example, which could be worth up to 50%, was caught up in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill’s overhaul of IRA tax credits last summer, meaning that Glasspoint would now have to start construction by July 4 of this year to claim that credit.
Which of these options Glasspoint ultimately pursues will depend on how generous each credit is at the time of final investment decision, MacGregor said, and whether the project can realistically meet each program’s start-construction and in-service deadlines.
It’s a decision the company doesn’t have to make in the immediate term, he added, but figuring out how to navigate building in the U.S. is a key priority. “We don’t have a problem of enough opportunity, we have a problem of execution,” he said. “We need to start building.”
