When thinking about renewable energy, most people conjure visions of solar panels on rooftops or elegant white wind turbines, few imagine the humble greenhouse. And yet, a greenhouse with a twist is key to a groundbreaking solution in bringing net-zero to the tough-to-disrupt industrial heat sector.
Industrial heat is the world’s largest end-use of energy – responsible for more CO2 emissions than electricity and transport combined, and until now, it has fallen largely under the radar for renewable energy solutions.
We encounter materials made using thermal processing facilities in every aspect of daily life: industrial heat is used in commercial production ranging from pasteurizing milk to processing bauxite for aluminum production. These smokestack industries were established during the Industrial Revolution, with its dark mills and oppressive, clogging smog. In modern manufacturing, little has changed, with industrial heat still relying on fossil fuels, belching CO2 pollutants out into the atmosphere.
However, GlassPoint Founder & CEO Rod MacGregor, is disrupting the sector with solar energy on a scale never before seen. His simple but effective greenhouse solar thermal solution involves capturing and magnifying the sun’s heat in giant purpose-built greenhouses. Inside the greenhouses are large, curved mirrors that concentrate sunlight onto pipes, causing the water inside to heat until it reaches boiling point and generates steam.
This flow of steam is provided to industrial players as identical in temperature, pressure and quality to the steam they would have gotten from a fossil fuel boiler: “We provide industrial decarbonization using solar, at half the cost of traditional heat, using three times as much steam per square kilometer of land, enabling double the decarbonization,” says MacGregor.
Until now, the cost of decarbonizing industrial heat has prohibited its transition to net-zero: “Decarbonizing could multiply energy costs by 10 times, that’s a huge impediment,” says MacGregor, “and you wouldn’t decarbonize. If you look at the amount of emissions that come from a kilowatt hour of electricity, it’s about 400 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. Even in places with lots of renewables you still have coal, gas, and diesel plants in your network. Combine these two things: it costs 10 times as much, and you don’t decarbonize.
Tomas Sigurdsson, Former COO of Alcoa, adds that “electrification is simply a bad idea when it comes to creating sustainable heat. Switching to electricity raises costs as least 6x over existing systems, while actually increasing emissions. The industry needs a solution that is proven at scale, reduces costs and accelerates decarbonization—and that’s not easy to find. Industrial companies need a proven solution—any downtime can be lethal for business.”
GlassPoint, however, has been able to overcome these barriers by delivering solar-generated steam as a plug-and-play zero-carbon solution to industrial heat – and at a price point that saves money. Customers get solar-powered steam with zero carbon footprint and they don’t have to change the way they operate or investments already made in infrastructure.
Having recently concluded an $8 million Series A funding round, GlassPoint is poised to advance the development of the world’s most extensive solar thermal project in collaboration with Saudi Arabia’s national mining frontrunner, Ma’aden. This groundbreaking project surpasses anything seen thus far, with GlassPoint greenhouses spanning an impressive 6 kilometers in both length and width. The Ma’aden project is five times bigger than any other industrial solar-powered process heat facility.
And GlassPoint continues to quickly gather steam across the globe with an impressive project pipeline representing the removal of 4.4 million tons of CO2 per year – the equivalent of taking more than a million cars off the road. “Most of our projects have been inbound enquiries,” says MacGregor, “people contacting us saying, ‘I have this steam need, can you help me decarbonize?’
“Industrial heat is a huge market and we can’t target everything,” says MacGregor, “so we have to go segment by segment. Our initial target segment is metals and mining, especially the metals involved in the energy transition, things like copper, lithium, aluminium, where the energy input is very large during the mining and processing phase.”
GlassPoint now has 42 projects in its pipeline, representing about $12 billion of CapEx, the vast majority of which are in metals and mining: “In industrial heat, there’s everything from hydrogen production to automotive applications, making rubber for tires, soda ash, which is a precursor for glass – these industries are keen to decarbonize, which we’ll get to.”
«In recent years, we’ve seen a surge of net-zero commitments from every industry,” says Howar Talabany, Founding Partner of 300PPM. “Organizations around the world are now realizing they aren’t yet equipped to achieve rapidly approaching goals. GlassPoint stands out in a sea of innovators as a proven solution at scale to decarbonize the industrial process heat market – which represents more than a quarter of the global energy mix but is only 10% decarbonized. With a robust customer pipeline, an impressive executive team, and market-leading technology, GlassPoint is well positioned to help industrial companies accelerate decarbonization efforts to meet their ambitious net-zero commitments.»
Although the company now enjoys groundbreaking traction, MacGregor initially struggled to get it off the ground when he founded GlassPoint in 2009 from his living room, relying on friends, family and his own savings until institutional investors bought in: “Industrial heat was not the movement of the moment in 2009, we were very much going against it, so it was very difficult to get money in the early days to get the company going,” says MacGregor.
“We built the company up with no money to about $100 million in revenue, $400 million in enterprise value, 300 employees worldwide, with projects around the world.”
GlassPoint’s skyrocketing traction didn’t come without first overcoming some bumps in the road. The company hit bankruptcy during the pandemic, when new projects for oil and gas – GlassPoint’s only customers at the time – were put on hold and investors got cold feet.
The business model had relied on selling thermal greenhouse equipment; when a new solar thermal greenhouse had been built, ownership and maintenance would be handed to the customer. When new orders came to a halt when the pandemic hit in 2020, revenue dried up, and the company was forced into liquidation: “It should never have happened,” says MacGregor, “GlassPoint had orders, customers, and technology that worked, but it became insolvent.”
GlassPoint was brought back from the brink when the company’s initial investor, BlackRock, pumped funds back in to revive the business. Its post-pandemic reincarnation required rewriting the model, to fund and own the building of new solar thermal greenhouses, and sell steam as a pay-as-you use service. This creates stable, recurring revenue for the business, and reduced barriers to adoption for consumers.
From there, the company was free to soar: they’ve just unveiled a range of technological advances that drive a further 30% reduction in the cost of solar steam, as well as a new Unify storage system, which uses direct heat and ternary molten salts to provide around-the-clock steam for industry – eliminating the need for costly heat exchangers and reducing capital expenses. GlassPoint has also reimagined its solar enclosure to feature lighter materials which boost solar efficiency and notably reduce weight, materials, carbon intensity, shading and the levelized cost of energy.
GlassPoint is now the sole industrial solar thermal solution with a proven track record at a scale essential for addressing the substantial and overlooked $444 billion industrial heat market’s journey towards net-zero. It’s significantly improving the economics for adopting solar-powered heat at scale.
And recent EU legislation will likely act as a further catalyst towards industrial heat decarbonization: in October 2023, the EU initiated the first phase of the The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) policy, an import tax targeting carbon-intensive sectors including steel, cement, electricity and fertilizer. The legislation aims to keep Europe-produced resources, which are held to higher regulatory standards, competitive with the international market.
“I believe we’ll not only see far greater attention on heat in the coming years—but also we’ll see the first trillionaire emerge from that market,” says Sigurdsson. “With proven technology, a de-risked business model and continual innovations to keep driving down cost, I believe GlassPoint’s innovation will lead the way in decarbonizing industrial process heat. This will also play an important role attracting more players to this important market so we can scale urgent solutions faster.”
“We set out intentionally to help with climate change,” says MacGregor. “And the fact we’re able to do that and make a measurable difference – the Ma’aden project is going to reduce emissions by 600,000 tonnes a year – that says a lot. That’s a lot of carbon.
“It’s not every day you get to be a part of something that can make that kind of difference. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, going to work on that.”
