One of the most expensive green energy projects ever undertaken in American history looks like it is now on borrowed time after eating up massive amounts of taxpayer dollars and killing thousands of birds. [emphasis, links added]
Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) — a major utility company — announced in January that it is terminating power purchase contracts with the owners of Southwestern California’s Ivanpah Solar Power facility, a massive and unique solar project that received hundreds of millions of subsidy dollars as it launched in 2014.
Just over a decade after it started operations the facility appears to be headed toward its demise after killing thousands of birds because it could not provide the utility with sufficiently cheap energy.
“PG&E determined that ending the agreements at this time will save customers money,” the company said in its Jan. 17 statement on the plant.
The original owners of the plant — which cost about $2.2 billion to build — included Google and NRG Energy, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The Los Angeles Times reported in 2016 that the Ivanpah project killed an average of 6,000 birds each year, with some of the unlucky creatures colliding with the development’s 40-story towers and others being incinerated instantly upon flying through concentrated sunlight while chasing prey.
The project received tax breaks, a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Obama Department of Energy (DOE), and a further $535 million subsidy from the Obama Department of Transportation (DOT), but it failed to reach advertised power output levels, according to analysis by Benjamin Zycher, an energy-focused senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
“It was the future. It would demonstrate how to save the planet. It would produce electricity clean and cheap and immune to the vagaries of international shifts in prices, interest rates, currency exchange values, and the caprice of foreign governments,” Zycher wrote of the project in his analysis for AEI.
“It was a demonstration of the massive achievements possible from public/private ‘partnerships,’ that is, central planning American style.”
The Ivanah project consists of three large towers that are surrounded by fields of reflective mirrors that concentrate sunlight on the towers, according to the DOE.
That energy is then used to heat water into steam, which then powers a turbine that generates electricity.
The power produced by two of the three towers will no longer be purchased by PG&E.
Southern California Edison — the utility that buys the rest of the power produced by the facility — is reportedly in contact with the Ivanpah solar project’s owners and the federal government about a possible buyout for its contract with the facility, according to The Associated Press. …
Other than causing numerous bird deaths, the redirected concentrated sunlight that is central to the project’s operation almost caused a severe problem when a misalignment led to that concentrated energy being focused on the wrong part of a tower, resulting in a small fire that forced the closure of the plant for several hours.
Moreover, the project also gave off a glare strong enough to affect the vision of pilots flying far overhead.
The project, which was built to reduce emissions and provide energy from a non-fossil fuel source, also used considerable quantities of natural gas to operate, according to UtilityDive.
In fact, the Ivanpah solar project used enough natural gas in 2014 to qualify for California’s cap-and-trade emissions program, but it was not covered by the policy because the gas it burned at night to keep itself running was not counted toward its allowance for fossil fuel use.
In 2016, local California news outlet The Press-Enterprise reported that emissions from the facility’s natural gas use increased by nearly 50% in 2015 and that the plant’s gas consumption through the first three quarters of 2016 was up 7% compared to the same period in the previous year.
Top images via Mason Obscura/YouTube screencaps
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