“We are producing the lowest cost solar electrons in the history of the world,” Bill Gross is telling me. “Nobody’s ever done it. Nobody’s close.”
Bill Gross is nothing if not an enthusiast, which makes him a great salesman for whatever it is he happens to be selling. A lifelong entrepreneur, a longtime evangelist for solar energy and the CEO of eSolar, a Google-funded startup that designs and develops concentrating solar power (CSP) projects at utility scale, Gross is one of the most interesting business people I’ve known. I met Bill in 2002, when I wrote a critical story about him for FORTUNE – investors in Idealab, his Internet incubator, were suing him after the dot-com bubble burst – and although he and his wife, Marcia Goodstein, were more than mildly irritated with me then, we’ve reconciled and I now count myself as an admirer of Bill’s. He’s always got a million things going on, some of them slightly nutty, but all of them interesting. He’s in the robot business with a company called Evolution Robotics and he’s the founder of Aptera, a very cool electric car company (in which Google has invested) that I wrote about last spring.
Today, Bill and eSolar are staging a grand opening for eSolar’s first plant, called the Sierra SunTower, located in the southern California desert near Lancaster. Below are a couple of photos, taken by Bill, from a helicopter ride over the plant on July 3. He sent them to me via Picasa, the photo sharing site now owned by Google, which he founded back in the 1990s. Like I said, he’s a serial enterpreneur. (Bill also invented the idea of paid search, but that’s another story.)
