Ivanpah is the multibillion dollar solar electrical generation plant that was built in the California desert a few years ago; we’ve written about it here, here and here. Well, there were doubts aplenty then about it and now the bill is about to come due. From MIT Technology Review (emphasis mine):
When it first came online in late 2013, the massive Ivanpah concentrated solar power plant in the California desert looked like the possible future of renewable energy. Now its troubles underline the challenges facing concentrated solar power, which uses mirrors to focus the sun’s rays to make steam and produce electricity.
Last week the California Public Utilities Commission gave the beleaguered Ivanpah project, the world’s largest concentrated solar facility, one year to increase its electricity production to fulfill its supply commitments to two of the state’s largest utilities (see “One of the World’s Largest Solar Facilities Is in Trouble”).
The $2.2 billion plant is designed to have 377 megawatts of capacity. But it has been plagued by charges of numerous bird deaths (the birds are supposedly zapped by the fierce beams between the mirrors and the collecting tower; these charges have been largely discounted by environmental impact studies) and accusations of production shortfalls.
Saying that over the last 12 months the facility has reached 97.5 percent of its annual contracted production, BrightSource officials dismissed the supply issues as a normal part of the plant’s startup phase. But the troubles at Ivanpah have joined the delay or cancellation of several high-profile projects as evidence that concentrated solar power could be a dying technology.
Percentages matter, especially as California has legislated that its energy consumption must (arbitrarily) be composed of higher and higher ratios of renewable energy, this failure can be a coffin nail. Remember, our GDP this year is only about 1.4% – any less and we’d be heading into a recession. Given how close CA production is to complete demand, that 2.5% is not just statistical noise. And why?
Nukes in this country had their costs driven up artificially by protests and lawfare back in the 70s (right, Carol Shea-Porter and Jeanne Shaheen) as the Left weenies did everything they could to stop this “dangerous” energy source. Nowaday, solar is the Left’s darling but what is going to sink it?
Ayup:
Last year BrightSource canceled a 500-megawatt concentrated solar project planned for Inyo County, California. That move followed the 2014 decision of French nuclear giant Areva, which acquired an Australian concentrated solar startup called Ausra in 2010, to exit the solar business after losing “tens of millions” of dollars. And the Spanish company Abengoa, which has developed several large concentrated solar projects and received $2.7 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy, is in talks to restructure its debt and is in danger of becoming Spain’s largest-ever bankruptcy.
Most of these shuttered projects have been doomed by one factor: cost. Given cheap natural gas and the continued fall in solar photovoltaic prices, concentrated solar has been priced out of the market. Concentrated solar plants use thousands of mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on a tower, where they heat a liquid to make steam. The mirrors, known as heliostats, are motorized so as to track the sun’s path over the course of the day. The process has certain advantages over solar photovoltaic technology, including higher efficiencies in terms of the amount of solar energy converted to electricity, but in today’s low-cost environment it’s simply too expensive.
Gee, and all I’ve heard for the last couple of decades has been “free energy”. Well, it seems just like “free healthcare”, free is really quite costly.
TANSTAAFL wins again.
