Rod MacGregor, GlassPoint CEO: “Solar steam is already cheaper than fossil fuels in many industrial applications”
13 Octubre 2026
Could you introduce GlassPoint and tell us about your company's mission and core activities?
GlassPoint is an industrial heat platform focused on helping heavy industry transition away from fossil fuels. We finance, build, own, and operate clean steam facilities for heavy industry through a Build-Own-Operate model. This means customers can access clean solar heat without the upfront capital investment, exposure to fuel price volatility, or the operating risk of running the facility themselves.
Our mission is to make solar heat a commercially viable solution for industrial operators by delivering reliable, cost-competitive heat at the scale their operations require,.
GlassPoint has been a pioneer in the use of concentrated solar technology for industrial applications. Could you tell us more about your experience and the solutions you provide?
We have been operating concentrated solar steam technology in some of the harshest industrial environments in the world for close to a decade. Our flagship facility in Oman has been running since 2017 and remains the largest enclosed trough solar steam installation of its kind. That operating history matters more than any simulation or pilot data: it is real performance data across close to a decade, in a desert climate, feeding a live industrial process.
The solution itself is a full steam-as-a-service offering. We design, build, finance, and operate the plant, and in exchange the customer signs a long-term contract for steam delivered at a fixed, predictable price. In practical terms, that means no capital expenditure, no fuel price risk, and no additional operating burden placed on their team.
From your perspective, what are the main challenges and opportunities currently facing the concentrated solar power (CSP) sector?
I'd actually draw a distinction here: CSP typically refers to concentrated solar for power generation. What we do is CST, concentrated solar thermal, generating steam directly rather than electricity. That difference is exactly why I think the sector is at an inflection point, and I would put it this way: for a long time, industrial decarbonization was treated as a cost the business had to absorb, a green premium. That is changing, for three reasons working together: rising and volatile fossil fuel prices, tightening carbon regulation such as the EU's CBAM, and growing pressure around energy security. Taken together, those three factors are turning renewable industrial heat into an economic decision rather than a purely environmental one, and that is the biggest opportunity in front of CST today: the case no longer has to rest on decarbonization alone, it can lead with cost and reliability.
The main challenge sits on the other side of that same coin. Industrial operators run continuous, high-temperature processes, and they cannot take on technology risk to do it. That is where operating history becomes the deciding factor, and it is why the sector needs more long-duration, real-world data rather than pilot results. CST has a genuine advantage here, because a number of installations have now been running for years, not months.
There is a geographic opportunity as well. The regions with the highest direct normal irradiance, the Gulf, the US Southwest, Southern Europe, North Africa, are largely the same regions where energy-intensive heavy industry is concentrated. That overlap is where CST is most competitive today, and I expect deployment to accelerate there as more of these regions introduce carbon pricing or face their own energy security pressures.
How do you see the role of thermal energy storage in the future development of CSP and the broader energy transition?
Storage is what converts solar heat from an intermittent input into a firm, round-the-clock industrial utility, and the distinction matters. Without storage, you are offering a supplement to an existing fuel source. With it, you are offering a genuine replacement for a boiler running on gas or diesel continuously. We've been proving that distinction in practice at Miraah for years, our storage system carries the heat through the night, so the customer never has to fall back on fuel when the sun goes down. That is the line between a niche technology and an infrastructure asset that can be underwritten with confidence. As storage costs continue to come down and integration matures, I expect CST paired with storage to move from being the exception in industrial heat conversations to being the default expectation.
What value do you expect your company to gain from joining Protermosolar, and how do you see this collaboration contributing to the development of the sector?
Spain has a strong CSP heritage, and Protermosolar has done real work over some difficult years keeping the sector's technical credibility and policy voice intact. We see this membership working in two directions. Our operating experience, drawn largely from Gulf industrial applications, connects with the technical and policy community here in Europe. In turn, we can support the case for CSP as European industry faces its own cost and carbon pressures under the EU ETS and CBAM.So we expect to contribute as much as we learn: our field data adds to the association's credibility with policymakers, and Protermosolar's network is valuable to us as we look at what a presence in southern Europe could look like.
Looking ahead, what are GlassPoint's main priorities and areas of focus in the coming years?
Our main priority is supporting the industries the world genuinely cannot function without as they decarbonize. Industrial heat accounts for nearly a fifth of global energy demand, and it has gone largely overlooked while attention has concentrated on power and transport. We build solar steam plants that eliminate that emissions source at scale, today, not as something promised for later.
Alongside that, we want to correct an assumption that has outlived its accuracy: that solar steam costs more than fossil fuels. In many of the applications we serve, it is already cheaper, and that gap widens every time gas prices spike or supply is disrupted. It is also, in a number of these processes, a more direct route than electrification. Converting sunlight to electricity and then back to heat carries losses at every stage, panel efficiency, inverter losses, the conversion back to heat, whereas CST produces heat directly from sunlight in a single step. At industrial scale and temperature, that difference compounds into a real cost gap, not a marginal one.
That leads to the third priority: offering a genuine answer to the supply chain risk industrial operators are living with right now. A solar steam plant imports nothing, so there is nothing to cut off.
