So-called renewable energy has never lived up to its extravagant promise. Windmills are very expensive, hard to service, and produce power only when the wind blows, and solar only when the sun shines, and when precipitation doesn’t interfere. Solar panels are expensive, produce little electricity, and have limited useful life spans.
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Windmills are also avian Cuisinarts, killing millions of birds, including endangered species, every year. Their blades can’t be recycled, and only a few landfills in the country are willing to accept them. Likewise, expended solar panels can’t be productively recycled and contain a variety of poisons that leach into groundwater.
Graphic: X Post
And then there is the Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave Desert, an extraordinarily expensive flash-fryer for birds flying into its heat beams, and a futuristic failure. Even the Sierra Club has been forced to admit the thousands of birds and tortoises killed, and the despoiling of the desert ecosystem, are too much. And so was the cost to taxpayers:
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.”
When it opened, it was touted as the biggest solar plant in the world, but things quickly went bad:
“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.”
That’s one of the principal problems with solar and wind. They don’t produce power on demand, and there is no such thing as sufficient battery capacity and power to store and produce power at the scale necessary to replace fossil fuel or nuclear power generation. With the newly discovered necessity of massive amounts of power to run data centers, renewable energy is increasingly costly and inefficient. So, Ivanpah is likely closing after only 11 years of inefficient, expensive operation and waste of taxpayer money.
But maybe it didn’t have to be that way. A report published by World Economic Forum earlier this year noted that private investors can be more nimble with new technologies than the government.
“Unlike public market investors, private equity firms can implement transformative changes through hands-on management and aligned incentives,” the report read.
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Steven Milloy, senior fellow at the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute and former Trump EPA transition team member, agrees.
“No green project relying on taxpayer subsidies has ever made any economic or environmental sense,” he said. “It’s important that President Trump stop the taxpayer bleeding by ending what he accurately calls the Green New Scam.”
In the meantime, California, which imports much of its energy and has the highest energy costs in the nation, is desperate to keep Ivanpah open: www.foxnews.com/us/13-obama-backed-22b-solar-plant-leaves-taxpayers-hook-costly-green-energy-boondoggle-part-1
Both the Trump and Biden administrations — along with the utility company that buys its power — have sought to shut it down, saying it underperforms, produces expensive electricity and has been overtaken by cheaper energy sources. But California regulators have refused to allow it to close, warning that closing the plant could strain the power grid. [skip]
“This project makes no economic sense to keep afloat, and the market itself has shown that,” Daniel Turner, founder of the energy advocacy group Power The Future, told Fox News Digital.
“This is a boondoggle, like most of California’s large projects are a boondoggle,” he said, arguing it is being kept alive for political reasons, with costs ultimately passed on to customers.
Green energy advocates are admitting Ivanpah’s technology is outdated, but claim new solar tech is somehow a viable replacement for fossil fuels. But even California, among the most fanatic green energy states, has been forced to keep its Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which it once bragged about shutting down, operating.
Ultimately, Ivanpah proved to be yet another massive “clean energy” this-will-be-the-future money pit in the California model down the drain.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.