Post-modern temples to the Sun God
By Jo Nova
It was supposed to last 50 years...
The PR writers want us to believe the legendary Ivanpah has been beaten out by better cheap solar, and that this is somehow a “success”. But the truth is, it’s been killed by the same subsidies and crooked market that birthed it.
The Big Government Blob distorted the free market, and created a boom in solar power. But the business case was not that good, there was no miracle in the storage of electricity, nobody wanted fried birds, and the subsidies kept forcing more solar power generation in at the same useless time of day.
Since there were too many generators at lunchtime and not enough customers, the last surviving part of the free market has solved the imbalance.
Just another artificial boom and bust
In 2014, the project cost $2.2 billion dollars. Ivanpah has 173.000 heliostats, and theoretically could make 390 megawatts in a perfect moment. But no one in their right mind would have spent so much to get so little, so the government spent $1.6 billion taxpayer dollars as a “loan guarantee”.
I wonder how that is working out for the taxpayers, especially now that the capital depreciation has shifted from 50 years to 11.
11 years after a celebrated opening, massive solar plant faces a bleak future in the Mojave Desert
LOS ANGELES (AP) — What was once the world’s largest solar power plant of its type appears headed for closure just 11 years after opening, under pressure from cheaper green energy sources. Meanwhile, environmentalists continue to blame the Mojave Desert plant for killing thousands of birds and tortoises.
The Ivanpah solar power plant formally opened in 2014 on roughly 5 square miles of federal land near the California-Nevada border. Though it was hailed at the time as a breakthrough moment for clean energy, its power has been struggling to compete with cheaper solar technologies.
So it was struggling to compete with cheaper solar technologies, and yet, in a market where customers keep paying more and more all the time, it still couldn’t make money?
Even the Sierra Club didn’t like it:
“The Ivanpah plant was a financial boondoggle and environmental disaster,” Julia Dowell of the Sierra Club said in an email.
“Along with killing thousands of birds and tortoises, the project’s construction destroyed irreplaceable pristine desert habitat along with numerous rare plant species,” Dowell said. “While the Sierra Club strongly supports innovative clean energy solutions and recognizes the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels, Ivanpah demonstrated that not all renewable technologies are created equal.”
Apparently the plant would sometimes blind drivers too. It certainly blinded investors.
The company did not reply to AP questions about what would happen to the giant industrial wreckage.
h/t To Willie Soon!
Ivanpah Photo by Cliff Ho. – U.S. Department of Energy from United States
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By the time this monstrosity was completed, solar panel costs had come down to the point where it was cheaper.
Also, Ivanpah needed to burn a few truckloads of LPG just to keep steam up until the sunrise each day.
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So it wasn’t so pure after all? I wonder who will pull it down and pack it away. Could it be used in the border wall? I was out around Wellington recently and saw several hundred acres covered in glass. Where will it end up ? And to think one coal plant could replace the whole thing and provide real power. Let’s hope Dutton has the courage to build one while we wait for a nuke or maybe we just build more coal and forget the nukes.
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No need to panic in the rush to build new ones.
First stop closing old ones.
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I’m proud to have earned a red tick, it says that I’ve upset another green loon somewhere.
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Unless they had to create a closure plan as part of a permitting process, such as typical power plants are required to do, the facility will likely be abandoned. This has happened with the previous generation’s wind farms. If the facility represents a hazard, it will have to be demolished. With public money. It would be interesting to see if it is designated a RCRCA superfund site. Then, there would at least be an existing remediation process to follow.
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At the very least, the mirrors will represent hazards due to the possibility of blinding pilots and drivers and will have to be removed.
This remediation work will be a work opportunity for all those woke Leftists doing useless or destructive “green” and other woke jobs who now find their useless jobs cancelled. They can work at minimum wage to help pay off their debt to society.
Incidentally Ivanpah does not use molten sodium but other CSP’s do.
When others shut down, the sodium, which is extremely hazardous, will need to be removed. It’s a nightmare to handle, especially in the vast quantities used, so will also be very expensive.
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Maybe, David, all those green jobs we keep being promised will be in restoration work on old wind and solar factory sites. Bowen and Bandt were right after all.
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That would be first: A W&S project created more jobs than can be counted on one hand.
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What laughable lunacy that any child could understand, but not the so called scientists or stupid investors or pollies and all of the delusional idiots who couldn’t care less about the environment.
They should demand that they clean up the TOXIC mess and they should be taken to court ASAP.
They should have used reliable, base-load gas in the first place and saved the then pristine environment for the future. What a toxic disaster.
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The failure of projects like this means Australia will.be even more determined to go ahead with similar projects.
Australia loves spending taxpayer money on failed technologies and harvesting taxpayer subsidies.
SEE LINK FOR REST
Also see additional propaganda at:
https://arena.gov.au/blog/commercial-concentrated-solar-one-step-closer/
It gets even worse because they want to make “green” hydrogen and methanol as well.
And ARENA uses the US as an example, but these prijects are shutting down as per Jo’s article. They simply can’t survive without subsidies from the hard working people Donald Trump represents:
About Ivanpah’s subsidies:
And if Goolag, one of the richest companies in the world, is a co-owner of Ivanpah, why do they need loan guarantees and other subsidies?
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That solar concentrator at Pt Augusta supplies power to that big greenhouse tomato farm that supply to Coles, they use the waste heat to make desal water to grow veges and provide heat in winter to the greenhouse.
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I believe that’s a different system because the one that powers the tomato farm opened in 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundrop_Farms?wprov=sfla1
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Ok, so there’s two there then, interesting.
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Oops, read that article again, the Sundrop Farms solar concentrator seems to be the only one operating.
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Unfortunately this is correct. As far as Labor is concerned, anyway. Their climate evangelists, spruikers and Coolaid drinkers will most likely double down on any and every rubbish scheme. How can we coax out into the light the energy realists on the left – despite appearances there are bound to be some.
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Goolag AI says this about the Spanish concentrated solar power projects:
It must be bad if even fully woke Goolag AI doesn’t give it a glowing review.
Another failure.
More motivation for Australia and our leading chief “scientist” and “engineer” Chrissy “the simpleton” Bowen to throw more taxpayer money at failed technologies.
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As it happens I took a road trip across the USA just a few months ago and saw the Ivanpah Solar plant from the highway on the last day, between Las Vegas (Sin City) and the city of Angels,
Fortunately there were no birds flying by at the time!
Ivanpah has been in trouble since its inception. This article confirms all that Jo has published here and it was published in 2016!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/03/17/fail-ivanpah-solar-power-plant-not-producing-enough-electricity-may-be-forced-to-close/
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We went past there on a coach trip including Vegas back in 2016, over on the right, you could see the sunbeams leading up to the tower, the tour director mentioned how expensive it was, how much trouble it was in, the hazard to birds, even lowflying Cessnas and the constant battle with dust settling on all the mirrors.
All three units were online back then.
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A Solar Power Plant lasting 50 years? They are having a larf’. It would have probably needed replacement after 20 or so years. Was that cost factored in?
Meanwhile, a well built modern HELE Coal Fired Power Plant or a modern Nuclear Energy Power Plant will last a lot longer than 50 years, all things being equal.
Peter Dutton, you need to follow the lead of the QLD State Guv’ment who intend to keep all of their Coal Fired Power Plants.
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The shiny things are mirrors, not solar panels. What type of mirrors I don’t have a clue. How long could they last? Good question.
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Here is a video showing how the Ivanpah facility fried birds and insects. It was enormously destructive of both aerial and ground wildlife, including the threatened desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii).
Thankfully the facility has ended operations now.
https://youtu.be/ICLXQN_lURk
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And this is how the environmentalists save the planet? I think the planet would be far better off if those puffs of smoke were the loony environmentalists like Bill 350 or Al of the big house.
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Just WOW, it’s like the worlds biggest bug zapper except some of those zapped birds looked like hawks and eagles.
The mirrors must be slathered in dried blood and bird guts and bones.
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I’m not sure how it happened.
Most political opinions are industrial products.
(It’s the reason something like 7 of the 10 wealthiest counties in the US surround Washington DC.)
But ‘environmentalism’ got hijacked by ‘climate’.
The ‘decarbonize’ scam was able to disguise itself as ‘environmentalism’.
Really basic provocateurism to sabotage grassroots popular political power so the establishment faces no viable opposition.
Similar to if you argue for vaccine safety, you’re labeled anti-vax.
A really terrible period of political history.
Maybe it’s turning, but the place is ransacked.
People should go to jail.
But they won’t.
We can wave at them as they pass by on the way to the bank.
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Bingo
I’ve been saying forever that the ‘Green/Net Zero movement’ and the ‘Environmental movement’ are fundamentally incompatible.
Greens want to raze forests for ‘biofuel’ (which burns dirtier than coal), plow under environments off all kinds to accommodate low-density energy sources like wind and solar (which require 40-100 times more land use than nuclear), and don’t give a tinker’s damn about wildlife endangerment related to their holy power sources, but feign concern for endangerment when it is caused by heretical fossil fuel infrastructure (just look at offshore wind versus offshore drilling). And don’t even get me started on the lack of concern over the ‘CO2 offset’ industry being almost entirely fraudulent. They don’t care if their religious indulgences are a sham, so long as they make them feel better.
It’s similar to how the transgender movement is fundamentally incompatible with women’s and LGB rights. Women have to give up women’s spaces to dudes in dresses, gay kids are pressured to go through Iranian-style ‘conversion therapy’ so that they can become ‘trans-heterosexuals’, and lesbians are shamed for not wanting to have sex with ‘trans-women’ who are still packing one-eyed love muscles in their panties.
Or how DEI race-essentialism has made racial tensions WORSE, not better, by making it clear to everyone that it is a zero sum game where people of no-color are discriminated against.
Every leftist social movement accomplishes the opposite of what it claims to do.
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I wonder if the birds are chasing insects attracted by the light, and getting zapped themselves.
Plenty of charcoal chicken on the ground.
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Streamers
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That’s just incredible, why aren’t pics of ‘streamers’ up on advertising hoardings everywhere, counter those muppets and their oily sea birds.
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I remember at one point pictures of sea fowl covered in oil were used as the posterchild to turn everyone against fossil fuels.
I wonder if we can use pictures of fried birds and tortoises as a postershild against solar farms?
This is a marvelous display of the hyprocisy, outright lies and total disregard of the environment of the greens and far left. How do people still fall for their rubbish???
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The hypocrisy of the Left is due to doublethink.
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I keep thinking of the latest hypocrisy; AI and data centres.
The amount of power that is projected to be used in the next decade is staggering but no one considers this harmful to the environment, Why not? There is a heavy NIMBY bias here.
We need a new word to describe the communications/social media/electronics world including launching satellites. The total energy used is seldom discussed because we don’t see data centres driving down the road and greens would use their ‘puters more than brickies do so they will never raise the matter.
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Hopefully when this appalling waste of taxes is shut down, it will be a win for commonsense and wildlife safety.
Contrast this bird frying abortion with ducks swimming on power station cooling water lakes.
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In Australia the Hazelwood power station was maliciously destroyed by the Andrews regime. Its cooling water pond contained introduced tropical fish and introduced barramundi (for fishing) and was a year-round refuge for humans and animals seeking warmth.
Just before the communist Dictator Dan of Victoriastan destroyed it I went there specifically to have a last swim in it.
The water was a constant 22C (71.6F).
When Dan turned the power station off the water temperature dropped and all the fish died or were killed.
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Just imagine being able to go barra fishing in Victoria, but sadly no more.
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Shortly before the Andrews regime vandalised Hazelwood Power Station they spent $150,000 of taxpayer money stocking it with barramundi.
SEE LINK FOR REST
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Oh dear – tilapia. A mouth brooding ciclid from the Rift Lakes of Africa. The cane toad of the waterways.
These lakes have some beautiful fish but they are all savage survivors in water where only the tough survive. Our native rainbow fish, by comparison, scatters it’s eggs in the roots of floating plants and they are left to live or die. They just can’t compete.
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When will people start talking about coal power? Thirty seven years of ‘dirty’ coal and no one in the West wants coal.
In the UK, the government is sealing the existing gas fracking wells with concrete, to make sure no one ever uses them again. They used a fake earthquake scare for Theresa May to turn them off. Liz Truss tried to turn them on again but Rishi Sunak reversed it. So the UK is importing gas when it has plenty.
It’s the same with coal power stations around the world being blown up, dismantled, buried, covered. Again to make sure that no matter how desperate people are, they have to use expensive power which doesn’t work.
And all the money flows to China which is using its cheap massive coal power to take over the manufacturing world.
Why do our politicians all seem to work for China?
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“Why do our politicians all seem to work for China?”
Just follow the money.
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All politicians should have to wear jackets with all their ‘sponsors’ names on them, you know, like the Nascar drivers, just so we can see who owns them.
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Indeed. Even “opposition” “leader” Dutton has gone soft on China.
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Sad to report there is a twin to this green abortion called Tonopah and is about 196 miles NW of Las Vegas.
Hopefully it is in a similar death spiral.
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It’s called Crescent Dunes.
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I am making guesstimate of 500GWh/yr average output over 11 years to total 5.5TWh. Amortising the capital of $2.2bn over that output gives $400/MWh. And that is just the capital. No O&M, no lost opportunity of the money, no repairs, no compensation for the environmental destruction and no removal cost.
Anyone want a used 15m^2 mirror or hundreds of thousands of them? Make good tilting garage doors that could be arranged to blind drivers of passing cars.
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In a few thousand years we’ll scratch our heads at that site and conclude the remains are obviously connected to the Nazca Lines in South America.
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Never mind a few thousand years the head scratching is already alive and well. Why do we keep voting for the same thing in the hope of a different answer. If Peter what’s his name doesn’t get his act together and present us with a viable alternative The Nationals will breakaway that will open the door for a Labor/Green/Teal Marxist Government
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The trouble is, the Coalition is coming from a long way back, so it’s hard to see them picking up the required seats to win government outright.
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I wonder when the Sierra Club started to not like it … was that after the collapse started??? Just asking.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windorah_Solar_Farm
QLD is proud to announce that not to be outdone by the yanks, we also have our own failed concentrated solar array out in the desert which failed spectacularly years ago after relieving the taxpayer of at least $4,500,000.
It died because of lack of maintenance, being so far from the bright lights that no one with the expertise wanted anything to do with it, plus desert dust and wildlife did it in.
It was projected to save the longsuffering taxpayer the cost of 500,000 litres of diesel per year.
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Obviously should be renamed “LoseDorah”. There’s probably a net zero probability that Ergon will ever build another array of any kind.
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Imagine how bad it must have been if even Their ABC doesn’t write a glowing report:
Not surprisingly it was partly taxpayer funded:
(From Wikipedia.)
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Speaking of Boondoggles they tell me that Snowy 2.0 has slowed to a crawl, again and virtually doubled it’s potential cost. It’s still 10 years away from producing any power or at least more than it needs work. So here we are subsidizing solar panels that, on average, only produce electricity for about 30% of plated values. Wind mills limited to low – moderate wind speeds. Too little and they require diesel generation to maintain viability and too much they are turned off to minimise the chance that centrifugal force might self destruct and send the blades into orbit. The only thing that doesn’t stop are the subsidies and the cost power to consumers. We are the original crash test dummies.
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Two borers were parked up recently because of underground safety concerns.
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A post at Climate Etc by Planning Engineer also argues that solar and wind are not the efficient energy source they are purported to be” The main reason
is their asynchronicity with the grid.
‘The green energy narrative is misleading in presenting intermittency as the major problem and implying that as we address this problem,
wind and solar become comparable resources to more conventional generating resources. The green energy narrative hides the problems of asynchronous
inverter-based generation when it can, and minimises the concerns around this technology when it can’t.”
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As always:
Follow the “spillage”.
And the “tax breaks”.
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Due to the election of TRUMP, there has been an outbreak of common sense and reason in the United States.
Unfortunately all the insanity leaving the US will be absorbed in the fanatically woke, Anthropogenic Global Warming believing and UN/WEF/Paris-compliant countries like Australia.
The destruction of the Australian energy grid will now accelerate even more.
The Uniparty won’t stop until we revert to living in caves (or bark or stick lean-tos as per the previous inhabitants as we don’t have enough caves). Under the Liberal Party faction of the Uniparty (fake conservatives) the destruction may be slightly delayed.
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It’s (Solar Thermal) sometimes difficult to explain, really.
The problem with Ivanpah is that basically, they wanted to see if it could work, so they used Units of 125MW and 133MW, and I’ll get to that in a second comment here.
When it comes to Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) or as it is referred to, Solar Thermal Power, about the best they can manage is Units of 50MW.
Now, all of that depends on the amount of steam (high pressure high temperature steam) that the solar part of the operation can ‘make’. The mirrors are focussed onto a central point, and the heat from those (concentrated on one point) mirrors is used to heat (up to a molten point) a ‘salt’ compound. Once molten, that (supposedly) now immense (loosely speaking) heat boils water to steam ….. the steam ‘drives’ the turbine, and the turbine ‘drives’ the generator. There has to be enough drive in the turbine to ‘turn over’ the weight of the rotor in the generator itself, and the bigger the generator output, (in MW) then the larger the weight of the Rotor on that generator. (See the point here) It all works backward from that rotor weight. bigger generator, bigger turbine, bigger steam (both pressure and temperature) bigger furnace, bigger heat source, and here that heat source has to be a constant heat, not cold (overnight) then slowly warming up, (morning) then reaching that point (midday into the afternoon) and then cooling again.
As an example here, look at this image of a large coal fired Unit, just the one Unit here. (and for perspective, see the men standing around in the image) The 1350MW generator is in the foreground, with the green pipes. Behind that is the (really) immense multi stage turbine with the huge steam piping on top, feeding in that immense quantity of mega hot super high pressure steam. That size turbine is REQUIRED to actually be able to turn over the rotor inside that generator and then keep it rotating at a speed of 50 rotations ….. per second, so 3000RPM.
It is all dependent upon that steam.
Now, what has been found is that all the heat they can muster to make the best steam they can get to drive a turbine to turn over the generator and then keep it rotating, is to have a generator with a max power output of 50MW, so every CSP plant you see has Units with multiples of 50MW Units.
Okay, back in 2008, when I started all this, it intrigued me, so I chased it all up. Numerous word structures in word searches etc and days and days of looking. Hidden away on around page 12 of one particular search was a huge 286 page ‘Paper’ on the future for CSP, (it’s referred to as ….. ‘Modelling’) commissioned by the US Department of Energy, and dated back in 1996, so now almost thirty years back. It was as dry as all get out, but it gave me an insight into CSP.
Now as it got further into the modeling, the end resultant thinking was that feasibly, they could scale it up across the years with better improving technology. And, with confidence, the thinking was that they could end up with CSP being able to drive 660MW generators and have enough residual overnight heat to have the generator operational for 24 hours a day, all year round, and the prediction of the modeling was that all this was achievable by ….. 2012 at the earliest.
Needless to say, they haven’t even got remotely close to this.
More to come.
Tony
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So, Ivanpah believed that they (Ivanpah) had got THEIR modeling right, and that they could drive a 126MW and 133MW generator.
Needless to say, they couldn’t, on the scale they actually thought possible.
Now, (and this is something not really known by many people) most of these CSP plants, even those 50MW Units as well by the way, use Natural Gas (NG) fired technology every morning to, umm, ‘start up’ their Units for an hour, and usually more than that, while the solar process is heating up the compound to that molten stage where it can make the steam required, and then that cuts in and the NG cuts out.
Now, once Ivanpah was up and running, they found the problem that they couldn’t get enough steam from the solar process as early as they expected, so the NG portion of the plant was operational more than expected. So much so in fact that the plant itself ran into the problem that it was in danger of now being classified as a NG fired power plant. In 2015 in fact there was the thinking that because of this excess NG consumption, then this ‘Renewable’ power plant was in danger of becoming subject to the Cap and Trade tax, and, umm, that might have just proved a tad embarrassing even.
Okay, so blah blah blah, the plant operated, delivering its power since 2014, so ten years of operation.
Most of you wouldn’t remember, but these plants were touted to be the future of renewable power, the great saviour in fact, the ACTUAL future replacement for coal fired power.
It was originally expected that this Ivanpah plant could deliver its power at a Capacity Factor of 30%. (and shh! don’t tell anyone that this figure is supposedly fantastically fabulously incredibly good, being as high as that)
It never reached that figure, and is currently delivering at around 20%, not much better than solar panel power plants, and in fact at a lower CF than wind power even.
Back in 2013, when the hype was at its highest for CSP, I did some research on these CSP plants, and I honed in on Spain, where they were building them at a large scale. At that time, they had 24 of these CSP plants, so I ‘did the maths’, and made this Post with a chart listing each plant, comparisons, the whole deal, and again, the overall CF was below 30%, and this was not for just one isolated plant, but for the whole ‘fleet’ of them in Spain at that time. At that Post of mine, there’s also an image and text explaining the process as well.
So, you’ll hear all sorts of stories on why Ivanpah closed down.
But basically, it’s just a failure stemming from ….. Physics really!
Tony.
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A while back now, I, umm, rationalised my collection of bookmarks, and sometimes it’s like which ones to keep. I got rid of around 300 plus, and now I only have around 200 or so, and since then, I’ve added 70 or so recipes, now I’m ‘into’ cooking.
One of the ones I got rid of, and perhaps inadvertently was the reference I used for those Spanish CSP power plants.
Luckily, at the bottom of that Post, I actually included that link I used for those solar plants.
Here, if you click on any of the plants and look closely in the ‘Description’ box of data, you’ll see that most of these CSP plants use Natural Gas for Startup and Backup.
On the menu bar at the top, you can also ‘chase down’ and power plant you want to as well, so I’m glad I have this link back. (Phew!)
Tony.
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I used to teach about one of the Spanish (Acciona) parabolic trough systems in Nevada. If I remember it’s rated at about 70MW. One wonders whether drill baby drill is going to rule a red line through this and other heliostat and trough systems. After all, cap. factor is a concern for all solar systems, no matter how fancy the design.
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Thanks Tony.
I wonder what the physics and engineering folks were doing when these CSP facilities were first proposed.
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For Australia it’s critical that we stop building any more toxic ,unreliable W & S disasters and only build safe, reliable base-load energy like Gas, Coal or Nuclear.
IOW if it isn’t base-load energy we should forget about it, because the W & S CFs are a joke and will make our future very uncertain if we have to defend ourselves against China, Russia, Iran, Nth Korea etc.
I think everyone who has the time should watch Alex Epstein’s latest video and he makes this most important statement at the beginning and the data supports him…… “Fossil fuels didn’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous, instead fossil fuels started with a dangerous climate and made it safe”.
Today we have 8.1 billion people at risk and yet we also live in the safest period in Human history.
OWI Data shows this to be true and the honest Scientists compare the 1920s deaths to 2024 and extreme weather deaths have dropped by 98% over the last 100 years.
Under 2 billion people in 1920 and over 8.1 billion today and yet the death toll is only one fiftieth today. And Dr Koonin always wins his debates easily when he quotes the honest data.
Here’s Alex Epstein’s latest video and his important statement is at the beginning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dj-2to3NJk
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Again here’s the number of global deaths from natural disasters for every year from 1900 to 2024 and OWI Data supports Alex Epstein’s true statement about the safety of fossil fuels.
You’ll note that droughts and floods were the big killers in the earlier 20th century and deaths since 1960 are very low.
Again important to remember that population in 1960 was 3 billion and over 8.1 billion in 2024.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-natural-disasters
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One of the problems for early Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) electricity generators like Ivanpah has been no electricity generation between sundown and sunup and also intermittant electricity output on claudy days. Just like with solar panels. Also, with China flooding the market with cheap panels, energy generation by CSP at Ivanpah became unprofitable.
However one advantage of newer CSP electricity generators, like the 110MW Crescent Dunes power plant in Tonopah, Nevada, is the successful use of heat storage by various means that allows electricity to be generated after dark. Unlike solar panel electricity generators which use huge banks of potentially dangerous Li batteries to run electricity to the grid for a few hours after sundown, the latest CSP generators use either water or sand to store energy for use in efficient heat exchangers to keep generating electricity after sundown. Molton salt is also being trialled.
See: (1). https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/thermal-storage-system-concentrating-solar-thermal-power-basics
(2). https://www.aiche.org/chenected/2015/05/molten-salt-storage-forefront-solar-tech-evolution
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For 1.6 Billion dollars, I’m truly shocked. They told us all that solar energy was cheap. / sarc
Anything that isn’t market driven, ought be funded by the salaries and pensions of the companies and pollies that advocate them.
Or, their salaries and pensions ought be inversely paid according to residential electricity costs, with a reference base of $30/Mwh.
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