Quote of the Day
In all, the energy from the plant costs too much money. It produced around 70% of what it was projected to produce annually. The sea of mirrors that the plant relied on to produce the energy led to the plant catching on fire in 2016, after mirrors were wrongly positioned in relation to the sun. The plant struggled with energy production due to weather, clouds, and jet streams, and was also pretty bad for the environment, what with the whole burning-birds-to-death thing. The plant also used natural gas to keep itself running, around six times the limit allowed by the California Energy Commission.
What is most shocking is the scope and scale of this project compared to the icky nuclear energy California has tried to rid itself of over the same time period. In 2020, Ivanpah produced 856 gigawatt-hours of energy. This represented a “substantial increase in efficiency and output,” and 91% of the plant’s production goals. The plant takes up 3,500 acres of land.
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Meanwhile, the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant is the last nuclear plant in California. It takes up around 750 acres and produces over 17,700 gigawatt-hours of energy. That is around 20 times more than Ivanpah and accounted for over 8% of California’s in-state energy production in 2023.
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Also, Diablo Canyon doesn’t have massive mirrors that work as bird death rays. Not bad for the only form of clean energy that environmentalists despise.
You would think California would be eager to recreate those numbers if a zero-carbon future were truly the state’s goal, but you would be wrong. Instead, the state bets its future on grand projects such as Ivanpah, which are more inefficient in energy production and land use. Sure, massive solar plants may not keep the lights on without natural gas, oil, and nuclear propping up the state’s grid, but at least it makes environmentalists feel good about themselves (so long as we don’t talk about the dead birds).
To say something positive about Ivanpah as it prepares for the end, at least it was actually constructed. Take that, California High-Speed Rail Authority.
Zachary Faria
June 6, 2025
The sun sets on California’s massive solar plant
The solar energy plant is being shut down. Some portion, the exact amount is unknown, of the 1.6 billion dollars loan from the U.S. Department of Energy will be refunded. I asked Copilot to find the numbers for me. Nope. That number is not available:
I did a more targeted search, and it turns out that the refund amount for the $1.6 billion in DOE loans remains officially undisclosed. Multiple sources—such as the Washington Examiner article reporting on the Ivanpah solar project—reiterate that taxpayers are to receive a refund for these loans, but none reveal a specific figure beyond noting the total loan value. Even the Department of Energy’s official pages on its Loan Programs Office do not provide further details on the refund amount.
Draw your own conclusions.
My conclusion is if you want to waste billions of dollars and enable corruption on a massive scale you should have a collection of politicians and government bureaucrats design and implement whatever project feels good to people unable to think rationally.
There seem to be two kinds of clean energy that greenies hate: nuclear first of all, of course, but also hydroelectric power. And while they pretend to like the idea of nuclear fusion power currently when it doesn’t exist, if it ever becomes real I’m sure they will hate it too. (And in fact many of the arguments against fission that aren’t totally specious carry over to fusion also.)
A cynic might say that the only “clean energy” they don’t hate is the kind that doesn’t really work. And a student of Atlas Shrugged might say that the reason is that they don’t like humanity to exist.
Constantly shifting goal-posts.
When I was younger, hydro-electric power was the eco-friendly “green” rage. It was clean, produced zero emissions, ran reliably 24/7, and if the dams were designed properly they don’t interfere with fish migrations. And as a bonus, the dams also help with flood control, by holding some excess floodwaters and releasing them downstream slowly.
So naturally, as more “green energy” projects become marginally possible (not even feasible or reliable), hydro-electric is getting the hate.
The pattern seems to go, as “green” power options become better, they become more hated. The enviro-weenies only seem to like power generation options that don’t work efficiently or reliably.
The only remaining reasonable explanation is that they DON’T want abundant, reliable power generated, no matter how clean and eco-friendly. And the only remaining reasonable explanation for that is that they hate humanity and progress.
I think they resent the democratization the industrial revolution created, and all the spreading of the wealth as all sorts of specialized skills are necessary to keep the modern economy going. They want a world where the biggest toughest warlord is the king, and any learning is the monopoly of the church of Gaia. Like the middle ages but without the church putting limits on the kings (such limits as they were).
This is why they consistently give such a pass to certain religions that seem to impose no limits on what the rich must do with their wealth, and no limits on government beyond throwing out some scraps and alms periodically to keep the peace.
Most fusion recipes will result in the containment vessel becoming hellishly radioactive, and the entire plant hazardous.
One plan I saw for addressing this would be to build 5 plants: one to be in service and the other four in various stages of “cool-down,” with rotation every 20 years or so to the longest out of service plant.
That last paragraph was chef’s kiss
“To say something positive about Ivanpah as it prepares for the end, at least it was actually constructed. Take that, California High-Speed Rail Authority”
California High Speed Rail is the most enormous swindle and government incompetence combined. The original contractor SNCF quit in disgust, started a project in Morocco and was running trains before California laid a single piece of track.
I saw some of the numbers from the Ivanpah construction project, including the number of desert tortoises they relocated and how much they spent relocating them. It was something like $50K per tortoise. I guess each one needs a brand new pickup or something.
Multiple sources … reiterate that taxpayers are to receive a refund for these loans, but none reveal a specific figure beyond noting the total loan value.
If California is anything like Oregon, that refund will end up being about $0.20 per person. They’ll redirect as much of the money as possible to new boondoggle projects and other “public necessities” that weren’t laid out in the original state budget.
(For those unaware, Oregon law has a provision that if the state revenue exceeds the budget by a certain percentage, the excess is refunded to the taxpayers. It’s known as the “tax kicker”. The legislature, however, is notorious for finding new ways to spend that excess and making the “kicker” as small as possible. No government entity will easily or quietly give back money it already has in-hand.)
https://dor.georgia.gov/press-releases/2025-06-02/gov-kemp-special-tax-refund-checks-begin-issuing-week
Georgia somehow failed to create any programs to spend their surplus on. For the third year in a row. You’d think they’d learn…
The BIG negative about the Diablo Canyon plant is within 300 meters of the Shoreline Fault and close to the Cascadia Fault line….not a great place to put something that holds that much nuclear material.
The puppet-masters behind the Green Movement are globalists who are trying to destroy western civilization, primarily Christianity and people of European descent, because they are hard to control. Khaleghi plan, et al, are real. They want you dead or enslaved (via law, debt, or porn and tik-tok brain induced apathy they do not care). Plan accordingly.
They had one built back in the 90’s down there in that same area. I remember driving by it on my way to San Bernadino down hwy.395.
They knew it wouldn’t work back then. So, they built some more just to get government subsidies? I guess.
I was just north of there working 7/12’s getting the Coso junction geo-thermal steam plants done before Reagan killed the tax exemptions.
(All the power for which probably goes to China lake naval weapons base the plants were built on.)
There’s only a couple of clean renewable power sources in this world. And nuclear ain’t one of them. Ain’t many places to put in more dams. And the best one is out of elites/governments control. So it got brainwashed as bad-think and ain’t going anywhere soon.
Even though the power wars are comings sooner than we think.
We just use electricity for a modern society. But it’s AI’s food. The less of us, the more it gets to eat. And it’s a glutton with Bill Gate/Joe Stalin’s morals.
Plan accordingly.