Posted on 10/14/2025 11:04:51 AM PDT by Red Badger
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.”
Taking A Backseat To China?
The Trump administration’s rejection of wind and solar energy, along with the accompanying narrative of fossil fuel-driven climate change, has sparked concerns in the investment community that the U.S. runs the risk of ceding global leadership in green energy to China. “America has given up its effort to challenge China in the renewable energy industries that increasingly power the global economy,” The Wall Street Journal recently warned.
“Companies in the second quarter cancelled more green-manufacturing projects than they announced for the first time on record, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Rhodium Group,” the Journal added. “Clean-energy investment plunged 51% from the previous quarter.”
Such concerns assume that wind and solar power, battery storage, and electric vehicles will spearhead global energy use in the decades to come. If so, then China will indeed be the top dog in energy production and infrastructure, because it has an iron grip on these sources’ global supply chains. But what if the tide is already running out on green energy?
This is precisely the message Trump delivered at the U.N., and his administration’s embrace of fossil fuels, nuclear power, and even geothermal energy plays to America’s strengths — and underscores China’s weaknesses. Bereft of domestic oil and natural gas thanks to unfavorable geology, China seized the opportunity presented by short-sighted decarbonization policies adopted elsewhere in the world. Beijing became the supplier — not of choice, but of necessity — for the raw materials found in wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries. And it did so with an economy whose chief source of power is coal, the much-demonized fossil fuel targeted for extinction by the Obama and Biden administrations, as well as by camp-following governments in Britain, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere.
This is a game the Trump administration refuses to play. America’s creaky electric grid desperately needs reliable baseline energy to power the nation’s homes and businesses. Energy-hungry, AI-driven data centers require gobs of electricity 24/7/365 that is best generated on-site by small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). Furthermore, the U.S. can flex its muscles by exporting its abundant oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG), and even coal, to eager customers worldwide. In this emerging world, there should be no place for subsidized, intermittent wind and solar power, much less the soon-to-be shuttered Ivanpah monstrosity in the Mojave Desert.
And if the powers that be in Beijing still want to be the global leaders in green energy, let them.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour)
Will all that material eventually wind up in a landfill?
How ‘green’...
>> Ivanpah, built at a cost of $2.2 billion,
The true cost to build was probably more like $2.2 Million with all the rest used as a leftist slush fund.
—early in its life operators complained that the “sun doesn’t shine enough”—in southern Nevada—
Well, they were right. It only shines during the day..................
Well, they were right. It only shines during the day..................
Nah it’s the helostats they are Gucci expensive.
$126 per square meter in 2006 dollars which are worth 30% less today then then. It’s no wonder these types of plants fail.
https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ES/proceedings-abstract/ES2007/47977/1077/329277
You can get 720 watt commercial panels the bifacial kind thin film lead, cadmium,arsenic, Ga, free kind for $80 by the pallet of them. Those are 2.3*1.3 metres in size that’s basically 3 square meters of solar cell area for under 100 bucks. Today in 2025 dollars and they make electrons directly not heat up water to make steam then spin turbines then a generator losing exergy the whole process.
Now this could improve things if they can get to $10 not $30 per sq meter.
Solar thermal can create heat at 1000C something PV cannot do there are a number of industrial processes that need 600-1000C heat if you have $30 square meter heliostats the economics of that heat get interesting especially if you have sand,gravel,bricks or basalt to store it for later use. Thermal storage is cheap natural gas is not and coal has to be scrubbers at the stacks that even then still release heavy metals into the air as vapors and the ash is toxic too. Plastic mirror plus molten salt plus thermal mass. There is a fusion reactor in the sky at 5000K
The Obama-solar grift circus generated staggering amount of money for insiders, and I don’t believe that a single one persists today as a going business concern.
Solyndra......................
Migratory birds are thrilled.
“Well, they were right. It only shines during the day..................”
Solar thermal plants make power at night that’s why they were created. The power tower heats solar thermal salts specially mixed to be liquid at the temps the tower makes, those hot salts are either used to make steam right then and turn a turbine or they are stored in large tanks one for hot hot salt the other for cooler but still molten salt. The sized of the heliostat field is such that it makes more hot salt then the turbines can use so the extra heat is stored for overnight use or peak use if there is peaker turbines onsite.
There is plans to use these same salts to store nuclear heat from a fast reactor :) at that for load shifting and peak boosting.
https://www.terrapower.com/natrium/
^^^^^ this is the way. We need fast reactors that breed fuel and burn actinides while only fission products get vitrified into glass and put into salt mines or deep boreholes in shale, granite or basalt. 300 years and the fission products are at the same level as natural uranium except for two iodine and Tc both of which should be separated and also returned to the fast spectrum to be transmuted by said spectrum.
Desert ground critters probably enjoyed the shade.
Flying critters, not so lucky.
“Will all that material eventually wind up in a landfill?”
I just asked the net and got the usual runaround, answers I didn’t ask for, etc. which tells me few solar panels get recycled.
Folks need to know it wasn’t photovoltaic panels.
Mirrors directing 1000F heat to towers to spin a turbine.
Burning a bug when your 10 with a magnifying glass.
The BS in this statement is hip deep.
It did what it was planned to do! It put billions of taxpayer dollars in the pockets of the DC scoundrels who legislated and funded it and their cronies who were paid handsomely to accommodate them.
Millions of birds and thousands of turtles, too late...
You can get paid for your used panels my guy. Functional panels have a $2-20 payback. Even if at 80% state of health down to 75% SOH modern panels have 30 lifetimes till 80% some much longer as in 40-50 years. My 5 year old panels are only down just under 2% and the rate of loss is slowing not increasing at this rate they will be 50+ years old when they hit 80% SOH.
These panels were installed in 1982 with three generations old tech and they still are making 80%
https://x.com/JessePeltan/status/1921463441971155095
Two companies that are 48 and 50 state recyclers both pay for functional panels.
https://www.desktopdisposal.com/solarpanel.php
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