It’s finally happening. The Ivanpah Solar Power Plant, the behemoth of bureaucratic blundering and incinerated wildlife, is circling the drain. Once celebrated as a game-changer for renewable energy, it’s now being quietly escorted off the stage with a “nothing to see here, folks” attitude. After just 11 years of struggling to justify its own existence, Ivanpah is headed for closure. Good riddance.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — What was once the world’s largest solar power plant of its type appears headed for closure just 11 years after opening, under pressure from cheaper green energy sources. Meanwhile, environmentalists continue to blame the Mojave Desert plant for killing thousands of birds and tortoises.
https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-birds-tortoises-mojave-6d91c36a1ff608861d5620e715e1141c
The Big, Hot, Shiny Disaster
Ivanpah opened in 2014, with all the usual pomp and circumstance, hailed as a “breakthrough moment for clean energy.” It sprawled over five square miles of federal land in the Mojave Desert, a shiny testament to the boundless hubris of central planners who thought they could beat the free market with subsidies and a prayer.
The concept was dazzling—350,000 computer-controlled mirrors would reflect sunlight onto boilers atop three massive towers, creating steam to turn turbines. It was supposed to be a triumph of innovation. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about what happens when green energy dreams collide with reality.
Reality Strikes Back
The plant has faced problems from the very start. First, it never produced as much electricity as promised. The reason? The sun didn’t shine as much as expected. Yes, you read that correctly. Somehow, the geniuses behind this project failed to account for… clouds.
Another unexpected problem: not enough sun. Weather predictions for the area underestimated the amount of cloud cover that has blanketed Ivanpah since it went into service in 2013.
https://ca.audubon.org/news/ivanpah-fails-deliver-energy-promise
Then there was the minor issue of mass wildlife casualties. Conservationists tried to warn the bright-eyed eco-planners that plopping a giant death ray in the middle of the Mojave might not be the best idea. But they were dismissed—until reports started rolling in of birds bursting into flames mid-flight as they passed through the intense reflected sunlight. The phenomenon was dubbed “streamers” because, well, that’s what happens when a bird spontaneously combusts.
A new study by consultants hired by the Ivanpah Solar Facility in the Mojave Desert estimate that the plant killed somewhere between 2,500 and 6,700 birds in its first year. Their best guess is the actual number is around 3,500. The facility got a lot of attention from bird conservationists when observers reported seeing birds actually catch on fire in middair near the intense heat generated by the facility.
And let’s not forget the desert tortoises, another unintended casualty. Environmentalists initially fought the plant’s construction, arguing it would destroy pristine habitat. They were right. But instead of admitting defeat, the Sierra Club and others spun this disaster as a “learning experience” about how not all renewable energy projects are created equal.
The Inevitable Economic Collapse
Even if Ivanpah hadn’t been a wildlife crematorium, it still couldn’t make the numbers work. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which had agreed to buy power from Ivanpah, has decided to cut its losses. The utility company announced it will terminate its contracts with the plant, stating that keeping them would be a waste of money. In corporate-speak: “PG&E determined that ending the agreements at this time will save customers money”.
Southern California Edison, which buys the remaining power, is also looking for an escape route. When even California utilities, which have bent over backward to subsidize and mandate renewable energy, decide you’re a lost cause, you know the end is near.
What Now?
The plan is to start shutting down Ivanpah’s operations by 2026, though the original contracts were supposed to last until 2039. That means we get to clean up this mess a full 13 years earlier than expected. The owners, including NRG Energy, are now talking about possibly repurposing the site for photovoltaic solar panels instead. Because that technology, unlike Ivanpah’s glorified magnifying glass, kinda sorta works, sometimes… well better than Ivanpah at least, leading to this awesome quote:
NRG said in a statement that the project was successful, but unable to compete with rival photovoltaic solar technology — such as rooftop panels — which have much lower capital and operating costs.
https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-birds-tortoises-mojave-6d91c36a1ff608861d5620e715e1141c
But the question remains: Who’s going to pay for this transition? The same taxpayers who funded this failed experiment in the first place? That part hasn’t been answered, but if history is any guide, the bill will find its way to the public. Socal Edison is begging the Department of Energy to buy them out. The same DoE that wasted money funding this boondoggle in the first place.
Lessons from the Wreckage
Ivanpah is a shining (literally) example of what happens when ideology replaces sound economic and engineering principles. It was never about producing reliable, cost-effective energy. It was about making a grand, symbolic gesture in the fight against climate change. And as with most grand, symbolic gestures, reality eventually caught up.
So let’s all take a moment to bid farewell to Ivanpah, the multimillion-dollar death trap that killed birds, displaced tortoises, and wasted billions—all for an energy source that couldn’t even compete with rooftop solar.
Goodbye, Ivanpah. You won’t be missed.
H/T Clyde Spencer, doonman, Resouceguy, Yirgach
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Thanks, Charles. Might be a good time to remind people just how far in front of the news WUWT is … I wrote about this upcoming disaster in my post ten years ago, just after the Tonopah plant was built, and Anthony discussed the upcoming crash at that time as well.
Best to all,
w.
And I wrote about the only awesome night Ivanpah may have had!
Oh my – Ivanpah meets Margaret Hamilton
Thanks Ric, I had missed that. Wikipedia has a page for Margaret and mentions her role and the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Project. Perhaps the moon art is the best use of these things. That is also a fairly interesting software creation.
I wonder if any other folks and projects like that have been done.
There is one outside Upington in the Northern Cape province of South Africa.
Given what Ivanpah does to birds, this Margaret Hamilton might be more appropriate:
Mirrors meet smoke.
Sun meets clouds…
Clouds beat CO2.
That’s where “The Magic Happens”
It’s a shame it didn’t work out though, speaking as the engineer and geek that I am.
The higher efficiency of the solar heated turbine and the possibility of storing heat for night time generation all looked like plus’s but all shot down by maintenance…
But the plant was more likely designed by activist scientists and political scientists rather than engineering project managers, so disaster was all but assured.
In the engineered project business, we used to say “keep scientists and inventors off the jobsite”
Something sort of similar happened at San Onofre with the steam generator replacement fiasco.
San Onofre’s own quality assurance engineers were concerned that significant technical risk was associated with the steam generator redesign and replacement project.
The QA department’s position was that San Onofre’s own technical staff must keep exceptionally close tabs on how the redesign was being done by Mitsubishi’s engineers in order to prevent design mistakes from being made, and to control just how much technical risk was being accepted in the replacement steam generator design.
Southern California Edison’s senior management said no. SCE would leave it to Mitsubishi to do the design and fabrication work right, while under the most minimal of independent design process oversight.
The ultimate consequence of this SCE management decision was the failure of the steam generator replacement project and the permanent shutdown of the San Onofre power plant.
If I remember correctly, it lost enough heat at night that the recovery time the next day was so long that it spent much of the day recovering instead of producing steam. I think they retrofitted some gas burners to boost it. It was an inefficient gas fired power plant masquerading as solar.
That’s exactly the case, Fraizer. The cooldown was so severe at night that the plant needed two huge, gas-fired preheaters to function at all. The boneheads who designed this monstrosity forgot that deserts cool down sharply when the sun goes down. The burning of natural gas made Ivanpah one of the highest domestic sources of electricity per kWh in the state of California.
Perhaps those Immaculate Receptionist Green Billionaire groups like Bezos, Gates & Bloomberg et al will stand up for and purchase Ivanpah (and Tonopah) and sell the power to their much more local energy sink, Las Vegas
revenue cannot cover the maintenance costs.
They can afford it though
And they can use the loss to offset their tax burden
It would be good to know what those maintenance items were…so that history need not be repeated…
For a start, the annual gas cost was $3.36m.
Apparently, democrat claims that solar power is cheaper than gas fired power is incorrect as Capital Power bought two gas-fired power plants in the United States for $1.1 billion in a deal that is partly backed by Black Rock and made the Canadian utility the fifth-largest generator in North America in 2003. The acquisition included the 1,061 MW La Paloma combined-cycle plant in California, and the 1,092 MW Harquahala CCGT in Arizona.
Wow, 1B for 2GW!
They must have been preexisting, used plants with not-new level of life left, no? Or by bought did you mean ordered or finished building new plants.
I knew a gentleman who worked as an engineer on the original solar-molten salt project east of Barstow, Ca. That project was repurposed in 1999 into a Cherenkov telescope, after a “successful” test run of four years. The conversion to a telescope sounds like an interesting project that I may do a deeper dive into for fun and giggles.
Would converting the Ivanpah array to a telescope allow alarmists to overcome their rectal/cranial inversion enough to catch a brief glimpse of reality? Maybe it would be better to convert it into a focused solar array for battling low orbit satellites and the occasional Chinese “weather” ballon!
I drove by that project numerous times on I-40. It’s unbelievable that with all the years of testing they didn’t figure out its shortcomings. What a waste of money.
https://www.solaripedia.com/13/31/solar_one_and_two_(now_defunct).html
That project has morphed into the 20 MW (80 GWh/yr, 2,650 heliostats, 480 acre) Gemasolar CSP plant in Fuentes de Andalucía Spain online since May 2011.
Lotta subsidies at work here.
The other thermal solar plant in the area, Crescent Dunes Solar Energy in Tonopah, NV went bankrupt in 2020, see On Becoming Obsolete: How a High-Tech Solar Plant Found Its Way to Bankruptcy. Apparently it’s running again, but just to produce power at night when PV arrays can’t, see What happened with Crescent Dunes?
I used to drive past Crescent Dunes twice daily, when I was working on a lithium project in Silver Peak. What a pain in the backside, as you’re looking down the road, and the tower is as bright as the sun, so you’re effectively driving looking into the sun both ways.
Because of the dust in the air, you could see the cone of light, or when it was offline, they pointed the mirrors straight up producing a column of light. The nearest town Tonopah is a worker desert, there’s a huge shortage of working men. So much so, that there’s a man-camp outside of town that houses hundreds of guys for the week, and is all but deserted on the weekends. Dorms were something like $20 shared, and $40 solo per night, plus meals. I never stayed there, we had a monthly deal in an old brothel above a bar … which leads to fun adventures when living in a brothel above a bar in rural Nevada.
“Somehow, the geniuses behind this project failed to account for… clouds.”
They must have learned climate change from the IPCC.
“The owners, including NRG Energy, are now talking about possibly repurposing the site for photovoltaic solar panels”
Only geniuses can assume clouds which nixed Ivanpah, will not be a detrimental factor for solar collectors….
Mr. Seward: I don’t see how the clouds will interfere with the operation of collecting grants, subsidies, and no-repay loans.
It turned out that airplane contrails shielded enough sunlight that the power output was reduced
“…. under pressure from cheaper green energy sources.” Yet still not competitive with fossil fueled, hydro, or nuclear plants.
Several years ago in a midday flight going into Las Vegas, I could see that tower light (or else it was the Tonopah one) off in the distance. Geez, if it was that bright in the middle of the day, imagine how bright it would be at night!
. . . . . oh, wait ……
My guess is California will learn nothing from this predictable fiasco.
Aren’t the Chinese building a even bigger and ‘better’ one? Will we never learn…
A colossal (21 sq km!) solar array is being built in Abu Dhabi. https://www.adpv2.ae/
Sounds like one of those “successful operations” where the patient promptly croaked.
Solar can work well in space. Probably not as good as nuclear, but at least you can get 24/7 input. It might be marginally helpful in some locations as a backup source. I have nothing against solar in principle. I mean, I think it’s weird that solar has been pushed hard by people who are anti-nuclear even though solar comes from an unshielded nuclear fusion reactor, but whatever. Let it compete on the free market.
The Chicoms are planning on building a Solar Power Satellite in orbit somewhere around 2030.
That’s a lot of crap to clear up…. landfill? it’s all so eco!
There are no lessons learned. That’s what happens when there is no accountability nor consequences. Everyone who drew a paycheck or dividend or bond payment from these projects profited. Most knew they were boondoggles. As a captive of SCE there is nothing but less power and higher prices in my future. At least local demand will be down for a few years while my immediate neighbors rebuild from the Mountain Fire.
Third world countries are littered with skeletons of grandiose projects. We are getting there. I propose to name projects to honor major supporters, like “Gavin Newsom’s High Speed Train”.
Shouldn’t that be “Gavin Newsom’s High Speed Train to Nowhere”?
I think something like “Gavin Newsom’s Zero Speed Train to Nowhere” would be more appropriate.
Watch your horrible governor dance as he speculates on what could be done with the burned section of Altadena if he can kick out all the homeowners and get the property by eminent domain.
There’s a mountain on Mars that’s been named Altadena because of its resemblance to the town of Altadena in (I assume) shape. Since the fire I can see the resemblance. https://images.app.goo.gl/ZM45ge27dekXCaZdA
The company I work for was hired to manufacture 5 different parts of the housing component that holds and helps pivot the mirrors. That project kept our plant busy for 5 years. If i remember correctly, we manufactured 50,000 pcs each of the 5 different parts. We heard about the birds and turtles before the construction took place. The project was from the Obama era with all the “Solar” Government funded projects they were trying to disburse thru out the US. The original Ivanpah idea came from Israel apparently. Within a years completion, we were hearing it was not producing energy as planned. I’m shocked it’s taken this long to end it. A couple of us drove out to look at the project after it was up and running, looked pretty dystopian and so out of place.
Did some Ivanpah research. Main failures were two.
I would say that most of the West is generally dusty because vegetation is sparse and three seasons are occasionally windy. It will be a problem for PV if another Biden-like administration decides to dedicate BLM administered ground for solar PV.
Dust is also a problem for solar panels in outback Australia. One minesite put in a solar array in the actual minesite – 48 hours after turn on, the panels were so covered in minesite dust that the panels weren’t producing any power. And employing staff to regularly clean them in the ferocious heat didn’t work either.
And to do it right they’d need water to wash the mirrors – but water from where?
Oh, and these are the solar “high-paying union jobs” now ex-President Biden incessantly harped
about? Sad.
As Biden was leaving office he mandated no offshore leasing for oil/gas over a huge amount of
territory off the Atlantic coast.
Maybe Trump should do something similar: declare all Federal lands west of the Rockies off-limits to solar & wind – for environmental reasons of course! Gotta save those turtles! /sarc
[ To me, Presidents should not be able to do this. It should require a vote by Congress.]
And, Ivanpah is a playa with the surface composed of very fine particles, that if disturbed, are amenable to being lifted off the ground and easily kept in suspension. The day I spent there I was wearing a long Australian duster over a down coat and scarf over my mouth and nose.
That’s only the beginning. All that dust means very rapid destruction of the mirrors from reflection and refraction effects.In a few years, all solar installations are worthless scrap for those reasons alone.
More good news. I see this as an opportunity. Ivanpah should be offered up as a demonstration project to prove how solar projects can be safely, environmentally and economically dismantled and recycled. Second it should be offered as a demonstration to prove once and for all how much superior solar or wind are to fossil fuel and nuclear. The winning bidder will construct, operate and maintain their choice of renewable with no subsidies, no tax preference, no environmental preferences, no strike price, no CfD and a reasonable estimation of how much power we can count on each year.
Gee why didn’t it work 24/7? With all the energy coming back to earth from CO2 why didn’t the CO2 power it like the sun?
Oh, energy from the sun can do work and IR from CO2 can’t.
The peak of the energy from the sun is green light, and while the IR has a long tail, it is generally low.
Years ago, a gang of Spanish fraudsters figured out how to produce solar power at night. They simply shone electric arc lights on their PV panels. The grift was in the huge price difference between electricity purchased from the grid and the huge bonus provided by supplying the grid with solar generation.
“under pressure from cheaper green energy sources”
There is no such thing as “cheaper green energy sources”.
I love how they just ignore the fact that after 11 years of trying, Ivanpah never managed to produce commercial amounts of power.
wind and the sun don’t cost anything….
It is the infrastructure needed to collect, transmit, and maintain a usable, stable electricity supply on the grid, that makes them so darn expensive…
.. as well as them being very environmentally damaging at every stage of their existence.
If every news outlet declares the lie to be true, it becomes a lie that the sheeple believe to be true
That’s true for a lot of people.
Imagine the outcry if even one migratory bird became a ‘streamer’ in a gas flare.
Ivanpah was truly a shame, alright, since it wasted over 3 $billion. Super-critical thermal generators reach over 62% efficiency today for coal and gas. The efficiency of Ivanpah was predicted to be 18% and with a capacity factor of 30% (Is Ivanpah the World’s Most Efficient Solar Plant? | Greentech Media, 2010). The capacity factor was 22% in 2018, for example.. Ivanpah was touted to be better than PV, but CSP was not better than PV, as poor as PV is. PV has its own and worse issues and never produces as promised either, nor wind, to complete the list. Ivanpah would run (according to GM, above) for 10-11 hours daily at full output. Published data show Ivanpah’s full output lasted only 6 hours MID-SUMMER and was never achieved mid-winter, dropping by over 1/3rd for peak output in winter. Ivanpah used natural gas to heat the boilers in the morning – a KICK-START. Storage of heat in molten slats ‘for the night’ was built, but was just a distraction from the real issues. Storage spreads the output over a longer time but causes yet more, large losses- at least 30%, for round trip conversion. Positive predictions were promotion-presentations = “pie in the sky.” None were realized.
Sadly for the taxpayer, this reality applies not only to CSP, but to PV and wind. It is very clear, given the past 20 years of waste, the entire energy transition is going NOWHERE, and was always a boondoggle and scam. The REAL purpose was/is to make YOU and ME freeze, while enriching the crony capitalists. That part was/is successful; to the tune of more than15$trillion over the past 20 years. Fortunately, governments are running out of other people’s money.
RenewableTrans Energy has about as much chance of producing next generation energy as Trans People have of producing the next generationMild correction. Supercritical coal in China in their biggest newest plants reaches about 43% net thermal efficiency. Turk in US (smaller, older) is about 40%.
CCGT from all major suppliers reaches 61%, and still 59% at 80% load.
Whatever happened to fluidized bed coal burning? Crush coal to a powder then put it in a “bed” (essentially a fancy tray) with a lot of holes in the bottom to pump in pressurized air. Just enough to keep the powder fluffed up and moving, not enough to blast it into the air. Light part of it on fire and keep adding coal powder at one end while ash is collected off at the other. Park that setup underneath a boiler.
the Sierra Club and others spun this disaster as a “learning experience”
They’ll never learn.
In other words, Sierra Club isn’t giving up on solar. Ivanpah was just a step towards an end they are still pursuing. No scientific or engineering thought processes involved here.
They very seldom mention that when they say “climate change” they are not talking about long-term thousands to millions of years climate but 30-year weather which the UN/IPCC now calls “climate” and that is always changing anyway since it is the weather over 30 years.
I spent some time in the field at the site, before it was developed. It was very windy and dusty. It might not be the best site for PVs, unless they have trained Merino sheep rolling around the top surface of the panels to clean the dust off every day.
Ivanpah needs natural gas to keep the molten salt heat storage warm overnight. So far, it has been able to reach a 21.29% annual capacity factor only not accounting for the significant natural gas combustion. As the natural gas can be burned better in a combined cycle gas turbine plant, the actual annual capacity factor is reduced to 14.42% when corrected for the consumption of natural gas in a combined cycle gas turbine plant. 28.84% might have been OK, classic half as&&& solar array.
“the project was successful, but unable to compete” The operation was a success, but the patient died.