I was in Las Vegas with my family the week before Christmas. On the drive back to California we passed a solar generation site called Ivanpah. If you haven’t seen this before it’s pretty striking in person. Instead of using photo-voltaic cells, the site has three towers surrounded by mirrors. The mirrors focus light and heat on the towers which use the concetrated heat to turn turbines.
The site was built with funds from several major companies including Google and a federal loan guarantee of $1.6 billion dollars. When this site opened in 2014, it was considered a step into the future of solar energy, but that quickly changed for several reasons. First, the site never produced as much power as was promised. Second, the cost of PV solar panels dropped dramatically to the point that rate-payers were paying a lot more for Ivanpah’s solar energy than they would be if the site were just full of regular solar panels. And thirdly, the site had some environmental problems including interfering with local tortoises and killing as many as 6,000 birds a year.
A macabre fireworks show unfolds each day along I-15 west of Las Vegas, as birds fly into concentrated beams of sunlight and are instantly incinerated, leaving wisps of white smoke against the blue desert sky.
Workers at the Ivanpah Solar Plant have a name for the spectacle: “Streamers.”
And the image-conscious owners of the 390-megawatt plant say they are trying everything they can think of to stop the slaughter.
Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.
For all of these reasons, both the Biden administration and the Trump administration agreed the state should shut down Ivanpah. Here’s a video Reason made about it last April.
Only it turns out that’s not going to happen after all. The California Public Utilities Commission decided Ivanpah needs to remain open because the state doesn’t have enough electricity to replace it at the moment.
The electricity it makes is expensive, its technology has been superseded, and it’s incinerating thousands of birds mid-flight each year. The Trump administration wants to see this unusual power plant closed, and in a rare instance of alignment, the Biden administration did, too.
But the state of California is insisting the Ivanpah power plant in the Mojave Desert stay open for at least 13 more years. It’s an indication of just how much electricity artificial intelligence and data centers are demanding.
Ivanpah’s owners, which include NRG Energy, Google and BrightSource, had agreed with their main customer, Pacific Gas & Electric, to end their contract and largely close Ivanpah. But last month, the California Public Utilities Commission unanimously rejected that agreement, citing concerns about reliability of the grid to deliver electricity. The decision will effectively force two of Ivanpah’s three units to remain running rather than shutting down this year.
You can imagine how it would go over in deep blue California if some natural gas plant announced it planned to incinerate 80,000 live birds over the next 13 years of operation. There would be outrage and possibly threats. But I guess because this is a “green energy” project the state is fine with it.
As mentioned, it’s not just the birds that will suffer. Rate-payers are locked into paying for electricity that is much more expensive than it would be if the site were just using regular PV cells. You have to wonder why California is saving this site at the same time it has killed its rooftop solar industry.
From what I can tell, you could replace all of the generation of the Ivanpah plan (all 3 towers) with about 56,000 rooftop solar installations which really isn’t that many in a state with 39 million people. You’d get the same amount of power with no need to transmit it from the desert to the city via miles of power lines and towers. And you wouldn’t be broiling any birds alive either. Seems like a better plan to me but the California Public Utilities Commission doesn’t see it that way.
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