Idealab founder Bill Gross started selling solar energy kits in 1973 at 15 years old. Now he’s leading solar tech company Heliogen
Idealab and Heliogen Founder Bill Gross speaks onstage during Vox Media’s 2022 Code Conference on September 08, 2022 in Beverly Hills, California.
Jerod Harris | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Bill Gross is best known for founding the technology incubator Idealab in 1996, after starting a handful of companies in software, education tech and online services spaces.
In the quarter-century since, Idealab has has started more than 150 companies and had more than 45 successful exits. Today, Gross devotes virtually all of his time to being the CEO of clean energy company Heliogen, which he launched out of Idealab in 2013, scoring Bill Gates as an early investor.
But Gross has always been a climate tech entrepreneur. He’s just had to wait for the world to catch up with him a bit.
He actually started a solar device company when he was in high school, long before he got into software, and the money he made helped him pay for college.
Gross grew up in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. When he was 15, in 1973, gas was rationed after OPEC imposed an oil embargo against the United States in order to punish the U.S. for providing support to Israel in the Arab-Israel war.
“You only could buy five dollars of gasoline per day. And I remember that my mother couldn’t buy enough gasoline to drive me to school,” Gross told CNBC in a video interview earlier in the fall.
So Gross had to ride his bike to high school. “As I’m riding both ways on the bicycle, I’m sitting here thinking, ‘It’s crazy that there’s somewhere else in the world that could decide to cut off your fuel supply, the thing that people need for their livelihood.’ I didn’t understand anything about climate change, or energy or anything. I just thought, ‘Someone else could do that?! That’s crazy.'”
This thought is still relevant now almost 50 years later, as Russia has cut off supplies of gas it is sending to Europe in response to the Ukraine war.
Gross went to the library after school to read about alternative renewable forms of energy such as solar energy and wind energy in the likes of Popular Science or Scientific American magazines. He got excited about the idea of renewable energy, had just taken trigonometry in school and used his newfound knowledge of both to make a couple of devices based on the idea of catching the sunlight and concentrating it.
Notes from when Bill Gross was a teenager developing the solar device that he went on to sell by mail in the 1970’s.
Photo courtesy Bill Gross
One device he made was a parabola-shaped solar concentrator that could be used to create a solar oven or solar cooker. The other was a Stirling engine, which converts heat energy into kinetic or mechanical energy.
“Because I was reading Popular Science magazine, I saw people used to take out little ads in the back,” Gross told CNBC. “And I had $400 of bar mitzvah money leftover, so I took out a small add in the back of Popular Science advertising ‘Kits and plans to make your own solar concentrator,’ and I started selling them!”
He would go on to sell 10,000 of these plans and kits starting at $4 apiece. Personal computers didn’t yet exist, so he typed the material on a typewriter and made the drawings himself by hand.
An advertisement that Bill Gross placed in the back of Popular Science magazine to advertise his solar devices company. The plans Gross sold were $4.00, but the ad says 25 cents to get a catalog, because he had a few different offerings.
Courtesy Bill Gross
He put what he made towards his college tuition. People from all over the country bought the kits and would send Gross a check or cash. It was his first foray into entrepreneurship, which was exciting, he said, and the experience served to change the trajectory of his life in other ways, too.
“I was really passionate about it back then. It really affected my life,” Gross told CNBC. “I wrote about that little business I started — it was called Solar Devices — on my application to college and it got me into CalTech. So it probably had a huge impact on my direction.”
For a long time, ‘nobody cared’
Gross studied mechanical engineering at CalTech while continuing to run the Solar Devices business during his first year, but then college got too demanding and he couldn’t keep up with running the business. Gross graduated from CalTech in 1981, right around the time IBM released its first mass-market personal computer.
Solar Devices order tracking from Bill Gross, circa 1970’s.
Photo courtesy Bill Gross
“I have these two seminal things that happen in my life: The Arab oil embargo and now the PC is invented basically on my day of graduation in 1981,” Gross told CNBC. “So I went down and bought an IBM PC. And I started learning how to program and I had a detour for 20 years doing software.”
Gross’ detour into software started in the early 1980’s when he wrote accounting software inside of Lotus 1-2-3 to help manage his business making and selling high-performance loudspeakers. He started selling that software for $695. Gross, his brother and two CalTech friends came up with a natural language interface to Lotus 1-2-3, which they showed off at a Las Vegas tech show in 1985. Lotus ended up acquiring the product (and the four of them) for $10 million.
Gross later founded an educational software company and sold it to Vivendi for $90 million, then started tech incubator Idealab at the dawn of the dot-com boom. In the early 2000s, he decided to begin to pivot back to climate tech, this time with some money in the bank.
Bill Gross graduating from college.
Photo courtesy Bill Gross.
He started doing research and development in the space, but there wasn’t enough demand for solar energy tech. “I was way too early. No one cared,” Gross told CNBC.
“I remember I was working on this when Al Gore came out with ‘Inconvenient Truth.’ Still, nobody cared. I remember working on this in 2008 during the recession, nobody cared. I remember in the early 2010, 2012, people started talking about it, but there was no Greta yet,” Gross said, referring to the climate activist Greta Thunberg, who started protesting a lack of climate change action in 2018. “There was no movement. And certainly there was no inflation Reduction Act, which is a game changer,” Gross said.
In 2010, Gross heard Bill Gates speak at a TED conference about needing to make energy and energy storage cheaper. After that talk, Gross approached Gates and shared his idea of using computational power to improve the efficiency of solar power. Gates ended up investing in Gross’s idea, seeing the potential to replace many industrial processes that require high heat and burn fossil fuels to get there.
In 2013, Gross launched Heliogen, which uses artificial intelligence to position a collection of mirrors located in a circle around a central tower to reflect the sunlight back with maximum impact.
One critical component of Heliogen’s approach is built-in energy storage. One limiting factor for solar energy is its intermittency, which means it only delivers power when the sun is shining. But Heliogen stores energy as heat in a thermos of rocks — something traditional solar panels cannot do without batteries, as they turn the sun’s rays immediately into electricity.
“We’re gathering the energy when the sun is out. But we’re delivering the energy continuously because the energy is coming out of the rock bed,” Gross told CNBC. “And basically we are recharging the rock bed, like you would recharge your battery. The difference is a battery expensive, and rock bed is cheap.”
In 2019, Heliogen announced it had successfully concentrated solar energy to temperatures over 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit.
A bird’s eye view of the concentrated solar technology Heliogen is working to build and commercialize. This is the demonstration project in Lancaster, Calif.
Photo courtesy Heliogen
“Heliogen is the culmination of my life’s work,” Gross told CNBC, because it uses both software and renewable energy expertise.
The company had its first prototype in 2015, “but then, still, nobody cared. Couldn’t get any customers,” Gross said. He did get a couple of customers, but, it was still “struggling, struggling, struggling.” By 2019, Heliogen had the first large-scale system built and this time, “the world went crazy,” Gross said. “We got so much press and publicity, and customers started calling us all over who wanted to replace fossil fuels with concentrated sunlight, and then Covid hit,” Gross said.
After a bit of a Covid slowdown, interest started picking up again as the urgency around decarbonizing mounted and as energy price volatility made companies rethink their energy supply strategies, Gross said. The company went public via SPAC in a deal that landed $188 million of gross cash proceeds to Heliogen and on Dec. 31, 2021, Heliogen started trading.
The company is not yet profitable, losing $108 million in the first nine months of the year, but that’s expected as the company scales, according to Gross.
“We projected we would run at a loss for the few years of operation as we drive down the cost with volume production and the renewable energy production learning curve,” Gross told CNBC.
Heliogen’s first commercial grade project is in the final stages of permitting and aims to break ground next year in Mojave, California. The concentrated solar field is funded with $50 million from Woodside Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Australian energy producer Woodside Petroleum, and $39 million from the U.S. Department of Energy.
This is the demonstration project in Lancaster, Calif. of the the concentrated solar technology Heliogen is working to build and commercialize.
Photo courtesy Heliogen
While Gross has been ahead of the curve for most of his climate career, he’s confident the industry is catching up with him now. As the urgency surrounding climate change has become more widely understood, corporate executives face pressure from stakeholders to clean up their corporate emissions.
“But then the final straw was price of fossil fuels went up like crazy. The price of fossil fuels after Russia invaded Ukraine is a game changer,” Gross told CNBC. “Now, it’s not just for CO2 emissions, now you can save money. Now, this is the ultimate thing, which is make the energy transition be about reducing your cost, not about increasing your cost.”
There’s no time to waste.
“When I was a teenager, there was 320 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Gross, who is now 64 years old. “And today, there are 420.”
Believe it or not, you can lease an EV for under $200 a month. New deals on models like the 2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 and Kia EV6 are hard to pass up this month.
Electric vehicles have been all over the news lately, with the Trump administration threatening to end federal incentives and introducing new tariffs that are expected to lead to higher prices.
On the positive side, new EV models are arriving, giving buyers more options and driving prices down. Many automakers reported record US electric car sales in the first three months of 2024.
GM remained the number two seller of EVs behind Tesla after sales doubled in Q1 2025. With the new Equinox, Blazer, and Silverado EVs rolling out, Chevy is now the fastest-growing EV brand in the US. Ford’s Mustang Mach-E is off to its best sales start since launching, with over 11,600 models sold in the first quarter.
With the 2025 models rolling out and about 15 new EVs arriving this year, many automakers are introducing steep discounts to move vehicles off the lot.
EVs for lease for under $200 a month in April
Although the decade-old Nissan LEAF remains one of the most affordable this April at just $149 per month, there are a few EVs under $200 right now that are worth taking a look at.
The new 2025 Hyundai IONIQ might be the best EV deal this month, with leases as low as $199. Hyundai is currently promoting a 24-month lease deal with $3,999 due at signing.
Hyundai upgraded the electric SUV with a bigger battery for more range (now up to 318 miles), a sleek new look inside and out, and it now comes with an NACS port so you can charge it at Tesla Superchargers.
The offer is for the IONIQ 5 SE RWD Standard Range, which has a driving range of up to 245 miles. For just $229 a month, you can snag the SE RWD model, which has a range of up to 318 miles and a more powerful (225 horsepower) electric motor. It’s also a 24-month lease with $3,999 due at signing.
To sweeten the deal, Hyundai is offering a free ChargePoint Home Flex Level 2 EV charger with the purchase or lease of any 2024 or 2025 IONIQ 5. If you already have one, you can opt for a $400 public charging credit.
After slashing lease prices this month, the 2025 Nissan Ariya is actually cheaper than the LEAF in some regions. In Southern California, the 2025 Nissan Ariya Evolve AWD is listed at just $129 per month. The AWD model has a range of up to 272 miles.
The deal is for 36 months, with $4,409 due at signing. In April, Nissan cut Ariya lease prices to around $239 in most other parts of the country.
Kia has a few EVs available to lease for under $200 a month in April. The 2025 Kia Niro EV Wind is listed at just $129 for 24 months, with $3,999 due at signing. Kia’s crossover SUV has EPA-estimated range of 253 miles.
The 2024 EV6 may be worth considering at just $179 for 24 months ($3,999 due at signing). In California, the EV6 Light Long Range RWD is only slightly more than the Niro Wind.
In most other parts of the country, you can still find the EV6 for under $200 a month. The Light Long Range RWD trim offers up to 310 miles of EPA-estimated range.
| Lease Price | Term (months) |
Amount Due at Signing | Driving Range | |
| 2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 SE RWD Standard Range | $199 | 24 | $3,999 | 245 miles |
| 2024 Kia EV6 Light Long Rang RWD | $179 | 24 | $3,999 | 310 miles |
| 2024 Kia Niro EV Wind | $129 | 24 | $3,999 | 253 miles |
| 2025 Nissan Ariya Evolve AWD | $129 | 36 | $4,409 | 272 miles |
| 2025 Nissan LEAF S FWD | $149 | 36 | $2,629 | 149 miles |
| 2024 Fiat 500 INSPI(RED) | $199 | 24 | $2,999 | 149 miles |
And don’t forget the 2024 Fiat 500e, which is now listed at just $199 for 24 months with $2,999 due at signing. The electric hatchback offers a range of up to 149 miles.
If you are looking to spend a little more, check out our list of EVs you can lease for under $300 a month.
Ready to snag the savings while they are still here? At under $200 a month, some of these EV lease deals are hard to pass up right now. Check out our links below to find deals in your area.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
![The US’s first solar panels over canals pilot is now online [video]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/04/Project-Nexus-solar-canal.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Project Nexus, the first solar panel canopies over irrigation canals in the US, is now online in California, and there are plans to expand the project to other areas.
Project Nexus is a $20 million pilot in central California’s Turlock Irrigation District launched in October 2022. The project team is exploring solar over canal design, deployment, and co-benefits using canal infrastructure and the electrical grid.
India already has solar panels over canals, but Project Nexus is the first of its kind in the US.
The Turlock Irrigation District was the first irrigation district formed in California in 1887. It provides irrigation water to 4,700 growers who farm around 150,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley.
Project Nexus will explore whether the solar panels reduce water evaporation as a result of midday shade and wind mitigation, create improvements to water quality through reduced vegetative growth, reduce canal maintenance as a result of reduced vegetative growth, and, of course, generate renewable electricity.
The California Department of Water Resources, utility company Turlock Irrigation District, Marin County, California-based water and energy project developer Solar AquaGrid, and The University of California, Merced, are partnering on the pilot. Project Nexus originated from a 2021 research project led by UC Merced alumna and project scientist Brandi McKuin.
Solar panels were installed at two sites over both wide- and narrow-span sections of Turlock Irrigation District canals in Stanislaus County, in various orientations. The sections range from 20 feet wide to 100 feet wide. University of California, Merced has positioned research equipment at both sites to collect baseline data so the researchers can decide where solar will work and where it won’t.
In February 2023, Project Nexus announced it would also deploy long-term iron flow battery storage in the form of two ESS 75kW turnkey “Energy Warehouse” batteries.
You can learn more about Project Nexus here:
Read more: In a US first, California will pilot solar-panel canopies over canals
If you live in an area that has frequent natural disaster events, and are interested in making your home more resilient to power outages, consider going solar and adding a battery storage system. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. They have hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisers to help you every step of the way. Get started here. –trusted affiliate link*
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports12 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway