It cost $2.2 billion, gorged itself on nearly 3,500 acres of the Mojave Desert, roasted birds, threatened indigenous tortoises, blinded pilots, and from both the air and the ground appears as an ugly scar on the landscape. It’s still there, but soon, instead of doing the job it was intended to do, it will become a monument to ineptitude, reckless aspiration, and government waste.
What is “it”?
It is the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility just off Interstate 15 in San Bernardino County in Southern California. At least two of its three units are scheduled to close next year because the project never lived up to the hype. The third might not be far behind.
This might come as a surprise to David Crane, president and CEO of NRG Energy, one of the site’s owners. He was sure 15 years ago that Ivanpah would capitalize “on California’s natural solar resource and demand for renewable energy,” as well as show “how far we have come in scaling up solar generation and in deploying cutting-edge American technology.”
The solar farm, which uses concentrated thermal technology (that relies on hundreds of thousands of mirrors and a bit of smoke to produce electricity) rather than photovoltaic panels, was cranked up in December 2013 and was expected to operate for 25 years. But its actual lifecycle will be only about half of that.
Pacific Gas & Electric, which has contracts on two of three units, announced in January that it plans to back out of its agreement 14 years early. The utility said it had “determined that ending the agreements at this time will save customers money compared to the cost of keeping them through 2039.” Southern California Edison, which operates the third unit, is in discussions to buy out its contract.
Going into the contract, PG&E was searching for “efficient and affordable technologies to reduce the need for greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels.” It found neither. The promise was Ivanpah would produce one million megawatt-hours of power a year, yet it averaged only about 70 percent of that. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that power from the plants cost about $200 a megawatt-hour that summer, compared to the average solar price of $57, and $35 for power from California natural gas plants. Regulation capped natural gas use at 5 percent, but in reality, 30 percent of its generation was produced by a fossil fuel.
The plant also caught fire and one of its towers had to be shut down in 2016 after sunlight directed by a misaligned mirror burned through electrical wiring.
“The collapse of Ivanpah illustrates the danger of letting politics rather than markets dictate energy choices,” says Jason Isaac, founder and chief executive of the American Energy Institute.
“For years, policymakers propped up an unproven technology with subsidies and mandates, only to see it collapse under its own weight,” he said. “Meanwhile, traditional fuels continued to deliver affordable power without subsidies. That should tell us something about what’s truly sustainable.”
The failure of Ivanpah, according to Isaac, should force policymakers to reckon “with the idea that government can engineer prosperity through energy mandates.” The future of American energy security is not “green” experiments that are politically favored, he said, “but in unleashing the full potential of oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear.”
One of Ivanpah’s primary drawbacks is its inability to compete with power produced by photovoltaic solar panel farms. A better comparison, though, is nuclear, a renewable resource that is truly green.
Only one nuclear plant remains in California, in San Luis Obispo County’s Diablo Canyon. It has been generating safe, clean, and reliable energy since 1985. On just 750 acres, about a fifth of the size of Ivanpah, the twin reactors produce 18 million megawatt hours of power a year, roughly 8 to 9 percent of the state’s power generation, enough to keep 3 million out of the dark, and nearly a fourth of its carbon-free electricity.
Perfectly in line with California’s antipathy toward energy sources that work and are affordable, the Diablo Canyon facility was scheduled to be shut down. But lawmakers realized that doing so would be hasty, and they not only delayed the closure and asked for federal dollars to keep it open, they decided it was a good idea to require the Public Utilities Commission “to adopt a plan to increase the procurement of electricity generated from nuclear facilities” on or before Jan. 1, 2028.
Maybe it’s dawning on Sacramento that nuclear energy is exactly what it wants: renewable, carbon-free, and available 24 hours a day.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute, and co-author of The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide.