Money & Politics | Daily Report

Oakland’s BrightSource Energy is a green tech startup backed by energy industry heavyweights and has a modest political operation of its own.

So far, the company has obtained an enormous $1.37 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy to build giant solar power plants in the Mojave desert.

But before the electricity can begin pulsing, BrightSource must stay on the right side of both an endangered desert tortoise – and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Desert tortoise

BrightSource hopes to generate huge amounts of solar energy on 3,500 acres of U.S. Bureau of Land Management land in San Bernardino County, five miles southwest of the desert town of Primm, Nev. The company, founded in 2004, is located in downtown Oakland. Key investors include Chevron and BP, along with Morgan Stanley, Google.org and several venture capital firms.

In 2008, Greentech Media listed BrightSource as one of the year’s top green technology startups. The firm already has signed contracts to sell electricity to PG&E and Southern California Edison.

In announcing the loan guarantees Monday, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu called the project “an investment in American jobs and the clean, renewable energy our country needs,” the LA Times reports. About 1,000 construction workers would be employed in building the project, the company says. San Francisco’s Bechtel Corp. is the builder.

Before obtaining the loan guarantees, BrightSource did some lobbying and made some political donations. In the past two years the company spent $160,000 lobbying Congress on energy issues and on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the source of its loan guarantee, federal records show. BrightSource CEO John Woolard gave $2,000 last summer to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and two other executives of the firm gave Reid an additional $3,000.

The company’s executives have also contributed $2,000 to two Democratic committees and $4,000 to President Obama. In 2007 and 2008, the company also gave $8,600 to a PAC controlled by then-state Senate leader Don Perata, D-Oakland, according to state records.

Although the government says it will fast-track the approval process for the Mojave project, BrightSource needs both federal and state regulatory agencies to sign off.

An early obstacle loomed in December, when Sen. Feinstein announced she hoped to establish national monuments on about one million acres of spectacular desert scenery in the Mojave that otherwise might be prime real estate for solar development. Her measure would preserve a 100-mile stretch of arid but gorgeous scenery between Ludlow and Needles that is home to bighorn sheep and tortoises as well.

In response, BrightSource scrapped plans for a solar energy development in the Sleeping Beauty Valley, centerpiece of Feinstein’s proposed Mojave Trails National Monument.

Another looming problem is the endangered desert tortoise. Wildlife biologists found 25 of the creatures while surveying the site. The company proposed spending $25 million – $1 million per critter, the San Bernardino Sun points out – to buy other tortoise habitat to replace what will be destroyed by the solar project.

But that may not work, because it takes a lot of desert to support a tortoise, and there’s only so much undeveloped land left, even in the Mojave.

As the Riverside Press Enterprise reported, San Bernardino County protested the tortoise remediation plan, saying it would have the effect of putting huge swaths of open land in the county off-limits for other development. Environmentalists also are expressing concern, however much they favor green energy. “It’s actually a good project,” an official with the Center for Biological Diversity told the LA Times. “It’s just located in the wrong place.”