Innovation remains a defining feature of Bechtel’s work and, when properly coupled with discipline and compliance where innovation is not applicable, drives one of our most-treasured values—excellence. Whether we are inventing solutions to everyday challenges on projects or helping customers develop and bring new technologies to market, we draw upon the know-how of talented and innovative colleagues, including recognized industry experts and top scientists at the U.S. government laboratories we manage, as well as experts elsewhere in industry.

Developing new and cleaner alternative energy sources presents exciting opportunities for our customers and colleagues. At the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Facility in California’s Mojave Desert, we are helping BrightSource Energy, Inc., deploy its cutting-edge, environmentally friendly LPT solar thermal technology at a vast generating complex on government-managed land. As EPC contractor, we are installing more than 170,000 solar heliostats to meet precise specifications. The heliostats’ software guided mirrors will track the sun’s movement in two dimensions and reflect solar energy onto tower-mounted boilers, each weighing 2,200 tons (1,996 metric tons) and standing 459 feet (140 meters) above-ground. Ivanpah features a dry-cooling technology that reduces water use by more than 90 percent over competing technologies, an important step toward sustainable solar development in desert regions.

The three-phase Ivanpah project is our biggest step yet into renewable energy, but it is hardly our first. Bechtel’s technical leadership in modern renewable power projects dates back to the first large-scale commercial solar thermal project, SEGS I, built in Southern California in 1984. Bechtel was also a leader at the Solar Two Project in the 1990s, which demonstrated the viability of thermal storage at the scale needed for utility application, as well as the solar power tower concept and the heliostat technology on which Ivanpah is based.