Stirling Power

About Stirling Power

In 1996, Stirling Energy Systems (SES) was founded in Scottsdale, Arizona, with a clear and ambitious playbook. The company acquired the rights to the "SunCatcher," a solar power technology using a large reflective dish to focus sunlight onto a Stirling engine, an external combustion engine invented back in 1816. The plan was to refine this technology, which had been in development for decades with partners like NASA and Boeing, for utility-scale power generation. The technology was promising. By concentrating solar energy to heat hydrogen gas and drive a piston, the SunCatcher system boasted impressive efficiency, converting about twice as much sunlight to electricity as typical photovoltaic panels of the era. This efficiency caught the eye of investors and utilities. In 2008, a significant turning point arrived when Irish-based renewable energy developer NTR acquired a majority stake in SES for $100 million. With fresh capital, SES was poised to fulfill contracts for massive solar farms in the California desert. However, the landscape of solar power was shifting dramatically. While SES was perfecting its complex mechanical systems, the cost of silicon photovoltaic (PV) panels began to plummet, driven largely by a global price war. Suddenly, the high-efficiency, high-cost SunCatchers struggled to compete with increasingly cheap PV technology. Project developers began switching their large-scale solar farms from SES's dish technology to photovoltaics. Faced with a rapidly changing market and collapsing demand, Stirling Energy Systems filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in September 2011, bringing its ambitious run to an end.