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.”
HAWESVILLE, KY – May 10
Plant workers drive along an aluminum potline at Century Aluminum Company’s Hawesville plant in Hawesville, Ky. on Wednesday, May 10, 2017. (Photo by Luke Sharrett /For The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Aluminum
The Washington Post | The Washington Post | Getty Images
Sweeping tariffs on imported aluminum imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump are succeeding in reshaping global trade flows and inflating costs for American consumers, but are falling short of their primary goal: to revive domestic aluminum production.
Instead, rising costs, particularly skyrocketing electricity prices in the U.S. relative to global competitors, are leading to smelter closures rather than restarts.
The impact of aluminum tariffs at 25% is starkly visible in the physical aluminum market. While benchmark aluminum prices on the London Metal Exchange provide a global reference, the actual cost of acquiring the metal involves regional delivery premiums.
This premium now largely reflects the tariff cost itself.
In stark contrast, European premiums were noted by JPMorgan analysts as being over 30% lower year-to-date, creating a significant divergence driven directly by U.S. trade policy.
This cost will ultimately be borne by downstream users, according to Trond Olaf Christophersen, the chief financial officer of Norway-based Hydro, one of the world’s largest aluminum producers. The company was formerly known as Norsk Hydro.
“It’s very likely that this will end up as higher prices for U.S. consumers,” Christophersen told CNBC, noting the tariff cost is a “pass-through.” Shares of Hydro have collapsed by around 17% since tariffs were imposed.
The downstream impact of the tariffs is already being felt by Thule Group, a Hydro customer that makes cargo boxes fitted atop cars. The company said it’ll raise prices by about 10% even though it manufactures the majority of the goods sold in the U.S locally, as prices of raw materials, such as steel and aluminum, have shot up.
But while tariffs are effectively leading to prices rise in the U.S., they haven’t spurred a revival in domestic smelting, the energy-intensive process of producing primary aluminum.
The primary barrier remains the lack of access to competitively priced, long-term power, according to the industry.
“Energy costs are a significant factor in the overall production cost of a smelter,” said Ami Shivkar, principal analyst of aluminum markets at analytics firm Wood Mackenzie. “High energy costs plague the US aluminium industry, forcing cutbacks and closures.”
“Canadian, Norwegian, and Middle Eastern aluminium smelters typically secure long-term energy contracts or operate captive power generation facilities. US smelter capacity, however, largely relies on short-term power contracts, placing it at a disadvantage,” Shivkar added, noting that energy costs for U.S. aluminum smelters were about $550 per tonne compared to $290 per tonne for Canadian smelters.
Recent events involving major U.S. producers underscore this power vulnerability.
In March 2023, Alcoa Corp announced the permanent closure of its 279,000 metric ton Intalco smelter, which had been idle since 2020. Alcoa said that the facility “cannot be competitive for the long-term,” partly because it “lacks access to competitively priced power.”
Similarly, in June 2022, Century Aluminum, the largest U.S. primary aluminum producer, was forced to temporarily idle its massive Hawesville, Kentucky smelter – North America’s largest producer of military-grade aluminum – citing a “direct result of skyrocketing energy costs.”
Century stated the power cost required to run the facility had “more than tripled the historical average in a very short period,” necessitating a curtailment expected to last nine to twelve months until prices normalized.
The industry has also not had a respite as demand for electricity from non-industrial sources has risen in recent years.
Hydro’s Christophersen pointed to the artificial intelligence boom and the proliferation of data centers as new competitors for power. He suggested that new energy production capacity in the U.S., from nuclear, wind or solar, is being rapidly consumed by the tech sector.
“The tech sector, they have a much higher ability to pay than the aluminium industry,” he said, noting the high double-digit margins of the tech sector compared to the often low single-digit margins at aluminum producers. Hydro reported an 8.3% profit margin in the first quarter of 2025, an increase from the 3.5% it reported for the previous quarter, according to Factset data.
“Our view, and for us to build a smelter [in the U.S.], we would need cheap power. We don’t see the possibility in the current market to get that,” the CFO added. “The lack of competitive power is the reason why we don’t think that would be interesting for us.”
While failing to ignite domestic primary production, the tariffs are undeniably causing what Christophersen termed a “reshuffling of trade flows.”
When U.S. market access becomes more costly or restricted, metal flows to other destinations.
Christophersen described a brief period when exceptionally high U.S. tariffs on Canadian aluminum — 25% additional tariffs on top of the aluminum-specific tariffs — made exporting to Europe temporarily more attractive for Canadian producers. Consequently, more European metals would have made their way into the U.S. market to make up for the demand gap vacated by Canadian aluminum.
The price impact has even extended to domestic scrap metal prices, which have adjusted upwards in line with the tariff-inflated Midwest premium.
Hydro, also the world’s largest aluminum extruder, utilizes both domestic scrap and imported Canadian primary metal in its U.S. operations. The company makes products such as window frames and facades in the country through extrusion, which is the process of pushing aluminum through a die to create a specific shape.
“We are buying U.S. scrap [aluminium]. A local raw material. But still, the scrap prices now include, indirectly, the tariff cost,” Christophersen explained. “We pay the tariff cost in reality, because the scrap price adjusts to the Midwest premium.”
“We are paying the tariff cost, but we quickly pass it on, so it’s exactly the same [for us],” he added.
RBC Capital Markets analysts confirmed this pass-through mechanism for Hydro’s extrusions business, saying “typically higher LME prices and premiums will be passed onto the customer.”
This pass-through has occurred amid broader market headwinds, particularly downstream among Hydro’s customers.
RBC highlighted the “weak spot remains the extrusion divisions” in Hydro’s recent results and noted a guidance downgrade, reflecting sluggish demand in sectors like building and construction.
— CNBC’s Greg Kennedy contributed reporting.
Danish energy giant Ørsted has canceled plans for the Hornsea 4 offshore wind farm, dealing a major blow to the UK’s renewable energy ambitions.
Hornsea 4, at a massive 2.4 gigawatts (GW), would have become one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world, generating enough clean electricity to power over 1 million UK homes. But Ørsted announced that it’s abandoning the project “in its current form.”
“The adverse macroeconomic developments, continued supply chain challenges, and increased execution, market, and operational risks have eroded the value creation,” said Rasmus Errboe, group president and CEO of Ørsted.
Reuters reported that Ørsted’s cancellation of Hornsea 4 would result in a projected loss of up to 5.5 billion Danish crowns ($837.85 million) in breakaway fees and asset write-downs. The company’s market value has declined by 80% since its peak in 2021.
The cancellation highlights significant challenges currently facing offshore wind development in Europe, particularly in the UK. The combination of higher material costs, inflation, and global financial instability has made large-scale renewable projects increasingly difficult to finance and complete.
Ørsted’s decision is a significant setback to the UK’s energy transition goals. The UK currently has around 15 GW of offshore wind, and Hornsea 4’s size would have provided almost 7% of the additional capacity needed for the UK’s 50 GW by 2030 target, according to The Times. Losing this immense project off the Yorkshire coast could hamper the UK’s pace of reducing dependency on fossil fuels, especially amid volatile global energy markets.
The UK government reiterated its commitment to renewable energy, promising to work closely with industry leaders to overcome financial and logistical hurdles. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told reporters in Norway that the UK is “still committed to working with Orsted to seek to make Hornsea 4 happen by 2030.”
Ørsted says it remains committed to its other UK-based projects, including the Hornsea 3 wind farm, which is expected to generate around 2.9 GW once completed at the end of 2027. Despite the challenges, the company emphasized its ongoing commitment to the British renewable market, pointing to the critical need for policy support and economic stability to ensure future developments.
Yet, the cancellation of Hornsea 4 demonstrates that even flagship renewable projects are vulnerable in the face of economic pressures and global uncertainties, which have been heightened under the Trump administration in the US.
Read more: The world’s single-largest wind farm gets the green light
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The Tesla Roadster appears to be quietly disappearing after years of delay. is it ever going to be made?
I may have jinxed it with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which suggests any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with “no.”
The prototype for the next-generation Tesla Roadster was first unveiled in 2017, and it was supposed to come into production in 2020, but it has been delayed every year since then.
It was supposed to get 620 miles (1,000 km) of range and accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds.
It has become a sort of running joke, and there are doubts that it will ever come to market despite Tesla’s promise of dozens of free new Roadsters to Tesla owners who participated in its referral program years ago.
Tesla uses the promise of free Roadsters to help generate billions of dollars worth of sales, which Tesla owners delivered, but the automaker never delivered on its part of the agreement.
Furthermore, many people placed deposits ranging from $50,000 to $250,000 to reserve the vehicle, which was supposed to hit the market 5 years ago.
The official timelines from Tesla are pretty useless at this point since they haven’t stuck to any of them, but the latest official one dates back to July 2024 when CEO Elon Musk said this:
“With respect to Roadster, we’ve completed most of the engineering. And I think there’s still some upgrades we want to make to it, but we expect to be in production with Roadster next year. It will be something special.”
He said that Tesla had completed “most of the engineering”, but he initially said the engineering would be done in 2021 and that was already 3 years after the prototype was unveiled and a year after it was supposed to be in production:
Musk commented on the Roadster again in October 2024, but he didn’t reiterate the 2025 timeline. Instead, he called the new Roadster “the cherry on the icing on the cake.”
Tesla’s leadership has been virtually silent about the new Roadster since. Two Tesla executives even had to be reminded about the Roadster by Jay Leno after they “forgot” about it when listing upcoming new Tesla vehicles with tri-motor powertrain.
There was one small update about the Roadster in Tesla’s financial results last month.
The automaker has a table of all its vehicle production, and the Roadster was updated from “in development” to “design development” in the table:
It’s not clear if that’s progress or Tesla is just rephrasing it. Either way, it is not “construction”, which makes it unlikely that the Roadster is going into production this year.
If ever…
Electrek’s Take
It looks like Tesla owes about 80 Tesla Roadsters for free to Tesla owners who referred purchases, and it owes significant discounts on hundreds of units.
It’s hard for me to believe that Tesla is not delivering the new Roadster because the vehicle program would start about $100 million in the red, but at this point, I have no idea. It very well might be the reason.
However, I think it’s more likely that Tesla is just terrible at bringing multiple vehicle programs to market simultaneously. Case in point: it launched a single new vehicle in the last five years.
At this point, I think it’s more likely that the Roadster will never happen. It will join other Tesla products like the Cybertruck Range Extender.
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