Posted on 10/10/2025 5:49:41 PM PDT by CFW
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycallernewsfoundation.org ...
$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
I have panels on my rooflines, vertical on the southern faces of my structures and vertical solar fencing around my inner property area. Vertical bifacial panels are now cheaper by the linear foot than 8 foot cedar privacy fencing . A 2.3 meter tall by 1.3 meter wide dual sided panel can be mounted vertical long side up or long side horizontal both ways is still cheaper per linear foot than home depot will sell you fencing supplies for. Retail those panels are $165 they are half that price wholesale with a TIN from an LLC.
Haven’t had a power bill in years no matter the season the only thing that changes is how much excess I sell to the grid. It’s 65F in my bedroom right now and has been all summer zero F given about the kWh used.
Crisped just like the dead birds.....
If you read carefully, Ivanpah is totally different solar plant.
It is called “concentrator”.
NO solar panels!
Just huge field of mirrors concentrating the solar energy into one spot on a tower. There it melts some salts and eventually powers more-less conventional power plant.
Totally different concept than solar panels.
So, if they dismantle the plant, nobody gets any solar panel, the only thing salvageable would be the mirrors!
The rest of the Ivanpah keyword, sorted:
After all is said and done...how much did the electricity produced there cost per KWH?
Is there any data which takes into account all “loans”, grants, land costs, planning and development costs, operating costs, attaching-it-to-the-grid costs, tearing-down costs, environmental costs and so forth???
What a pathetic joke and in-your-face thievery.
Every one involved with it should be in prison.
The problem was the scale — peak generation in a heliostat-based system taxes materials and the ability to move the heat quickly enough. Typically they overbuild in order to compensate for overcast, seasonal variations, whatever else — but when the Sun is shining (in the desert, and probably altiplano, very little overcast) the reflected energy has to be mitigated — reduced — to keep the whole thing from melting.
Smaller turbines on smaller arrays would work better, and there’d be some economy because they’d be identicql in size and parts, but it ain’t gonna getcha there from the standpoint of cost. Particularly at night.
This array might make part of a system for water reclamation, would need to be set up next to, say, Salton Sea. Something to capture the hot vapor and pipe it to secondary filtration, and in a matter of years there’d be loads of water towers along the high rim of the whole basin, for use with trickle irrigation.
Oh well.
Well then, we agree! What a load that project was eh?
How will he dispose of the current ones when they wear out? Asking for a friend.
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