From the air, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert looks like a vision of the future. On the ground, its performance tells a different story.
Built at a cost of $2.2 billion, the plant includes three 459-foot towers surrounded by thousands of computer-controlled mirrors known as heliostats. Construction began in 2010 and finished in 2014, but the facility is now slated to close in 2026 after failing to generate power efficiently, the New York Post reported on Wednesday.
The plant’s failure is likely going to haunt Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, a so-called “green energy” champion who is thought to be gearing up for a 2028 presidential bid, where he will no doubt continue to support “renewable energy” despite its dicey results and significantly costs.
In 2011, the Obama administration’s Department of Energy backed the project with $1.6 billion in federal loan guarantees. Then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz praised it at the time as a sign of America’s leadership in solar energy.
In the end, the project has come to symbolize wasteful government spending and reliance on technology that was poorly conceived and quickly outdated, The Post noted.
“Ivanpah stands as a testament to the waste and inefficiency of government subsidized energy schemes,”Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, an American energy advocacy group, told Fox News via statement this past February. It “never lived up to its promises, producing less electricity than expected, while relying on natural gas to stay operational.”
When it opened in 2014, Ivanpah was the largest solar plant in the world and was promoted as a key step toward California’s renewable energy goals.
The facility, located near the California-Nevada border about 65 miles southwest of Las Vegas, spans five square miles and features 173,500 computer-controlled heliostats. The mirrors focus sunlight onto three glowing towers, producing temperatures that can reach 1,000 degrees, said The Post.
“The idea was that you could use the sun to produce a heat source,” alternative energy consultant Edward Smeloff told The Post. “The mirrors reflect heat from the sun up to a receiver, which is mounted on top of the tower. That heats a fluid. It creates steam [that spins] a conventional steam turbine. It is complicated.”
“It simply did not scale up,” said Smeloff. “It’s kind of an obsolete technology [that’s] been outpaced by solar photovoltaic technology.”
Steven Milloy, senior fellow at the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute and former Trump EPA transition team member, said the government should have never been involved in such a project because private industry is much more nimble and responsive to new developments and technologies.
“No green project relying on taxpayer subsidies has ever made any economic or environmental sense,” he said. “It’s important that President Trump stop the taxpayer bleeding by ending what he accurately calls the Green New Scam.”
