Government projects are incredibly wasteful:
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 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.”
But ultimately, it’s been more emblematic of profligate government spending and unwise bets on poorly conceived, quickly outdated technologies.
“Ivanpah stands as a testament to the waste and inefficiency of government subsidized energy schemes,” Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, an American energy advocacy group, told Fox News via statement this past February. It “never lived up to its promises, producing less electricity than expected, while relying on natural gas to stay operational.”
I remember reading about this type of design when I was a child (I loved reading Popular Science magazine even in grade school). The initial concept was in the 1960s-70s. Yet with all that time to get things right the estimate price for their electricity is “over $0.135 per kWh—significantly higher than utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar, which now averages under $0.03 per kWh in many regions.”
The plant should have never been built. With a price point for their product at 4.5 times the current market price it seems like that should have been easy to predict it could not compete.
It is easy to speculate that the “real” purpose was not to create electricity at a competitive price. It was to give taxpayer money to political cronies. If that is the case, then the money is not considered wasted by the politicians who advocated for the project. Such politicians should be prosecuted for corruption.
As usual, this could have all been avoided if the U.S. government would have “stayed in its lane” as specified by the U.S. Constitution.
I once visited the Ivanpah plant when I had been doing a site survey for a very small gas turbine power plant improvement at the Mountain Pass rare earth mine just to the west up in the mountains. The heliostats (the sun-tracking mirrors) take up a ginormous amount of desert real estate, and of course the plant was at its standard operational capability…not working.
I believe that part of their problem was that the liquid sodium that they were using as their heat transfer fluid was very difficult to contain and maintain, with their primary heat exchangers for the steam generation frequently failing. This would take the system off-line, and of course all of the material in their collecting tower, piping, and storage tanks would have to be cooled off before they could begin repairs. Then it all had to be heated up again. Cycle time for this was measured in weeks, and it happened all the time.
This completely discounts the environmental “costs” which would never have been allowed to be suffered for a fossil fuel plant. Just the environmental destruction of the desert habitat was immense. They also routinely fried on the order of 12,000 birds every year, even though the plant was not in operation for very much of that time (their claimed figure of only 6,000/year is totally bogus). The plant personnel referred to these incinerated birds as “comets” when they’d try to fly through the concentrated solar radiation impinging on the tower.
Solar and wind power have some EXTREMELY limited roles for isolated areas where it literally costs too much to run a power line from conventional coal/nuclear/gas power sources. Or for people who can afford the cost to NOT be on the grid (I’m thinking of an underground bunker somewhere, maybe). One example I’m familiar with are some remote islands in northern Minnesota, where cabins are used seasonally and small-scale wind and/or solar panels directly running 24-volt systems actually make sense. You can use large 24-volt batteries to store enough energy to run small refrigerator/freezers and LED lighting systems for the entire season, recharging via panels/windmills as they go. Using the 24-volt output directly, without having to go through inverter losses (and complications) can work reasonably well.
For large-scale (industrial and commercial) power generation an intermittent and unreliable source makes no sense what so ever. There isn’t enough material in the Earth’s crust to provide for the battery back-up for when the sun doesn’t shine (much less than half the time on average) and when the wind doesn’t blow either too weakly or too strongly.
The entire “renewable” energy propaganda is pure scam intended for grift and graft.
Ivanpah uses water instead of sodium: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/williams-g1/
Joe:
I’m pretty sure that they started out using liquid salt (sodium) but had so many problems that in later years they switched over to pressurized water, which caused its own set of new problems. I remember thinking about this when they first built the plant…but my memory may be faulty, since a fair number of other solar-concentrating plants also used sodium.
Utility scale photovoltaic of any type should never be built. I can’t function without fossil or nuclear backup or proximately to hydro where you can do pumped storage. And if you have load bearing plants, you don’t need the panels. I would put subsidies into roof top and batteries to reduce the load on the grid. Plus it is more resilient.