Taxpayer-Backed Solar Facility In Mojave Desert Will Shut Down Next Year
By Bonner Cohen
The sun will soon be setting on the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert. Boosted by $1.6 billion in taxpayer-backed loans in 2011, the gargantuan project was hailed by President Obama’s first energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, as “an example of how America is becoming a world leader in solar energy.”
Instead, it has become yet another example of central planners squandering taxpayer money on an ill-conceived green-energy boondoggle. Covering five square miles of the sun-drenched Mojave Desert, 65 miles southwest of Las Vegas, Ivanpah features three 459-foot towers and 173,500 computer-controlled mirrors known as heliostats. “The mirrors reflect heat from the sun to a receiver mounted on top of the tower,” energy consultant Edward Smeloff told the New York Post. “That heats a fluid. It creates steam [that spins] a conventional steam turbine. It is complicated.”
So complicated, in fact, that the project ran with breathtaking inefficiency. Since going into operation in 2014, Ivanpah, built at a cost of $2.2 billion, never came close to meeting its boosters’ lofty expectations. In the world of solar energy, Ivanpah found itself unable to compete with conventional photovoltaic installations, which themselves are unable to meet the soaring demands of electricity-hungry artificial intelligence (AI).
But whatever its shortcomings in producing electricity, Ivanpah has been a super-efficient killer of birds. The light generated from the mirrors’ reflection of the sun can reach temperatures of 1,000 degrees. Birds unfortunate enough to fly over the “clean-energy” facility could be burned alive in the intense heat. According to the Association of Avian Veterinarians, Ivanpah is believed to be responsible for at least 6,000 bird deaths each year,” the Post reported.
News of Ivanpah’s impending demise coincides with President Trump’s recent address before the United Nations in New York, in which he lambasted green energy. “We are getting rid of the falsely named renewables,” he told the assembled U.N. delegates in September. “The primary effect of brutal green energy policies has not been to help the environment, but to redistribute manufacturing from developed countries … to polluting countries that are making a fortune.” Lest anyone miss the message, he added:
“The entire globalist concept of asking successful industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely.”
Friend of mine worked on that. It seemed like close encounters of third kind in the beginning. Sad waste of men and materials. And birds.