I remember this project. Some of my first posts at Townhall were written about this solar farm in California. Ivanpah is another billion-dollar-plus failure in the renewable energy tale. It never lived up to its mission.
For starters, it cooked birds as they flew over it. No, that’s not accurate: thousands of birds were fried. As our avian friends sometimes soar above the towers, the temperatures could reach 1,000 degrees. It also emits a ton of greenhouse gas, as something needs to burn to start its boilers. And that would be natural gas, which is also used when the farm is under cloud cover. At any rate, this farm is being shut down next year (via NY Post):
Seen from the sky, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert resembles a futuristic dream.
Viewed from the bottom line, however, Ivanpah is anything but.
The solar power plant, which features three 459-foot towers and thousands of computer-controlled mirrors known as heliostats, cost some $2.2 billion to build.
Construction began in 2010 and was completed in 2014. Now, it’s set to close in 2026 after failing to efficiently generate solar energy.
In 2011, the US Department of Energy under former President Barack Obama issued $1.6 billion in three federal loan guarantees for the project and the Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz, hailed it as “an example of how America is becoming a world leader in solar energy.”
So, when are we going to be real here? This project failed. The electric car remains a clunker with consumers. Nothing is more plentiful or reliable than fossil fuels. We’re the Saudi Arabia of coal. We have hundreds of years of natural gas. Cheap energy is essential to our economic growth and prosperity. Enough with these renewable energy boondoggles. Solyndra is all you need to know about that industry.
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