dispatchable-solar
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Steve Bisset
Steve Bisset is an Australian-born engineer and serial founder who has built two companies four decades apart in two different industries. In the 1970s he left an 18-month stint at Intel - where his first assignment was finding the first working 8080 chip in a tray of parts - to start Megatest out of his bedroom with $10,000 of vested stock and a housemate from Caltech. Megatest grew into a semiconductor test equipment company, survived the 1985 industry collapse that cut it from 450 people to about 200, listed on NASDAQ in 1993, and was acquired by Teradyne in 1995 for $245 million. In 2009 he co-founded Terrajoule, now Terrajoule Energy Inc. in Palo Alto, on a deliberately unfashionable premise: pair concentrated solar heat with pressurised hot-water storage and a reciprocating steam engine, a machine nobody had manufactured commercially since the 1950s. Terrajoule raised an $11.5 million Series A in 2013 led by New Enterprise Associates with Air Liquide, and Bisset continues to pursue low-cost dispatchable solar as an alternative to PV-plus-battery, with work extending into India.
Terrajoule Energy Inc
Terrajoule Energy is a Palo Alto cleantech company building modular, dispatchable solar power stations that deliver clean electricity around the clock without lithium-ion batteries. Its patented Dispatchable Solar Module (DSM) pairs prefabricated Linear Fresnel solar concentrators with a Steam Accumulator Energy Storage (SAES) system - storing energy as pressurized hot water in steel pressure vessels - and reciprocating steam piston engines to turn steam into electricity. The pitch is blunt: store energy in steel and water instead of rare metals, and undercut the cost of PV-plus-battery from day one. Founded by electrical engineer and serial hardware entrepreneur Stephen J. Bisset, Terrajoule raised an $11.5M Series A from NEA and Air Liquide's ALIAD, and was acquired by Environmental Clean Technologies Limited in December 2025.