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The Egyptians had their pyramids and we’ll have our solar panels and windmills, giant piles of useless garbage cluttering up the landscape in the best Ozymandian arrogance after having burned up a lot of cash.
Back in the day, Obama Inc. bragged that “loan guarantees are helping Solyndra in Fremont, California, build a high-tech, solar panel manufacturing facility with the capacity to build 230 MW a year. The Department of Energy also has issued conditional commitments for BrightSource Energy to build a 377 MW solar power plant in Ivanpah, California. Together, Solyndra and BrightSource estimate that these projects will lead to over 4,000 construction jobs and over 1,000 ongoing manufacturing and operations jobs.”
Solyndra filed for a gigantic $570 million bankruptcy, now the Ivanpah mess is finally being closed down.
The $2.2 billion plant that was supposed to be the largest of its kind was going to gift us solar power for a generation. Obama’s Interior Secretary Ken Salazar described it among the projects that were “milestones in our energy future. They show what great strides we are making through innovation and technology. And they reflect President Obama’s focus and commitment to standing up America’s renewable energy economy. The Department of the Interior is resolute and determined to secure a safer, more sustainable energy future for our nation.”
The solar retrofuture however is already past tense. The owners and energy companies drawing ‘clean energy’ from Ivanpah have agreed to shut it down. The plant was supposed to run for 25 years, but it’s being shut down 13 years ahead of schedule.
The green future is done. But not until the taxpayers got socked well and good.
When fully operational, it was supposed to generate about 1 million megawatt-hours of power annually; for 2015–2023, actual annual output has averaged 702,322 MWh.
This poor performance has obtained despite a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, for which the plant owners did not have to pay even the usual credit subsidy cost (the expected default liability for the federal government), under the DoE section 1705 loan program. The plant owners then applied for and received a grant of $535 million from the Treasury Department under the section 1603 program to pay back part of the loan already guaranteed at no charge by the DoE. There also was the 30 percent investment tax credit, the accelerated depreciation (an assumed plant life of five years), and a depreciation bonus of 50 percent in the first year. And there is the guaranteed market share for wind and solar power—the “renewable portfolio standard”—which meant that the major California utilities were forced to buy the power produced by Ivanpah. (Pacific Gas & Electric buys the power from towers 1 and 3, while Southern California Edison buys the power from tower 2.)
Closing down this gargantuan green monstrosity will save the lives of thousands of birds and other animals.
Environmental groups claim the plant’s intense solar reflections have caused numerous bird deaths, with around 6,000 being incinerated mid-air every year. Additionally, concerns have been raised about its impact on the habitat of the threatened desert tortoise.
“Along with killing thousands of birds and tortoises, the project’s construction destroyed irreplaceable pristine desert habitat along with numerous rare plant species,” Julia Dowell, a senior campaign organizer at the Sierra Club, an environmental organization, said. “The Ivanpah plant was a financial boondoggle and environmental disaster.”
Go Green, go broke.
Why are these projects never built where the green voting idiots live?
Instead they are built in environmentally sensitive places or plastered all over productive farming land.
If the leftard greenies want these sorts of power plants they should be built right in the neighbourhoods they infest and they should draw all their power from them, and them only, and actually pay real prices for it, not subsidised by the government and other consumers.
I’m sure as they dismantle this, they’ll probably stumble across a huge pit under it with millions of Obama’s memoir buried inside.
Government economics.
Yes, and yet another legacy of Obama failure and waste. They never seem to end.
Not to mention solar panels don’t generate any juice at night when you need it the most.
It looks like climate change and renewable energy has sparked an unlikely new industry, “going broke, for fun and profit”.
2 billion bucks spent with only a fraction of the product reaching the market, I gotta figure somebody got filthy rich. I betcha there isn’t any accounting trail to verify where that money went.
Business can’t survive with a negative ROI, unless “Uncle Sam” is there with a bail out.
And PG & E and SC Edison will likely raise their prices yet again. As if they didn’t fleece the public enough already, especially with the Bidenflation hikes.
But hey, it’s all President Trump’s fault. Just ask the Dirtbagocrat Minitrue Media and human garbage like Fauxcahontas Warren. Eggs cost $7. to $30. because of Trump, too. After all, those people would never lie and project their sabotage on Big Don.
DERP.
We need to get back to some Common Sense and that means dumping Wind and Solar and getting back to the basics
Yes, burn as much coal as possible. The days when smokestacks spewed particulates into the air are LONG gone. California has areas that lose electrical power on a regular basis. The Dirtbagocrat and RINO government scumbags and their Minitrue Media sycophants call them “rolling blackouts. They seem to have disingenuous euphemisms for all their crimes.
Hello Mr. Musk….
Solar panels are a joke but I don’t see how they can harm land based desert tortoises. The tortoises probably use the slightly elevated panels for shade. Most Americans don’t know but tortoises tend to live in burrows. I had a friend back in the day who had a tortoise living in a burrow under his mobile home in the high desert of the Mojave. It was pretty cool.
If birds really are being cooked mid flight, that’s bad, though. I wonder if the crooks at BrightSource Energy are going to dismantle their failed solar panels? After all, it’s their reflections of the sun reportedly cooking birds, not the electricity they failed to generate sufficiently. I’m going to take a wild guess and say no. I seriously doubt they’ll even cover them. No doubt they’ll be maintained at tax payer expense in hopes of future public rip-offs.
The poor birds don’t even know what hit them.
The birds aren’t just being cooked either.
Turns out the best places for wind turbines are the wind corridors that migratory birds use twice a year and they kill tens of thousands.
Then there are the bald eagles that prey on those migrations and get killed by the turbines as well.
A farmer who accidentally kills a bald eagle is liable for a $50,000 fine or time in jail, but when wind farms kill dozens, or even hundreds of them over time, nothing happens.
Obama’s stimulus bill was ment to expand the wealth of
Soros and alike. SOROS fleeced America with 3 solar plants plus manufacturing. 2 of 3 Soros solar deals went south before ever being used.
Obama lined Soros and alike pockets with an insane amounts of fraudulent deals
FOR his stimulus affordable care Act. This Act was a 100%
redistribution of wealth for democrat causes.
And so the Obama legacy can be summed up thusly: One failure after another.
Daniel, I’ll make this short & sweet and on point: When you’re spending other people’s money, who cares what it costs? It’s not your money!
That’s business as usual in Washington DC. Their good intentions funded with our, John & Jane Q Taxpayers, money. What could possibly go wrong?
My brother was working on building one of those desert solar sites, just not that one. He told me about one time there was a guy digging a trench. Seven different observers were present to be sure their interests were cared for, all paid for by SCE. One for the tortoise, one for native artifacts, one for, one for, one for….
No way that equipment operator worked hard enough to cover paying all those other people. Thank the rate payers. And the taxpayers.
A 1.6 $Billon dollar enviro death ray. Fascinating…..
Tesla could’ve done it much more cheaply. He invented a death ray, you know. Too bad the plans died with him. I bet it would’ve worked great on mobs protesting President Trump’d deportation of violent illegal aliens and Hamas supporters.
700GWh?
Color me skeptical. The panels don’t work when they’re too hot. Or too cold. Or …
We cannot be sure without an audit, but the ‘results’ from these ‘green’ projects are ‘too good to be true.’
And I mean: Engineers with actual performance results show far lower energy outputs than those calculated for most of these projects.
So what gives?
What gives is natural gas. Here in Texas the windmills can produce so much more power than one would expect from real-world performance results …
because the ‘green’ generators are allowed to substitute natural gas-fired electrical power generation for their windmill power..
Allegedly this never happens because blah, blah, blah, blah.
I don’t care. Solar panels in real-life have sucky performance – 10-20% of expectations are outstanding results. Anything more than that should lead to an investigation as to
where is the actual power coming from?
Pretty good article, until you quote the Sierra Club. The Nevada desert hasn’t been a “irreplaceable pristine desert habitat” since about 1850. Right now, it’s the world’s largest garbage dump. I’ve found a wringer washer, half of a 1957 Sears catalog, a wooden box that had dynamite in it, etc. The dry desert preserves stuff, and it will probably be treated as a treasure trove by archeologists 500 years from now.
One answer to meet our energy needs going forward is to build thorium based molten salt nuclear reactors. Thorium has several advantages over the conventional nuclear fuel, U-235. Thorium can generate more fissile material (U-233) than it consumes while fueling a water cooled or molten salt reactor.
Thorium is also 3 times more abundant in the earth’s mantle than Uranium. A Thorium-fueled reactor is also more environmentally friendly than a Uranium fueled reactor in that it produces less long-lived nuclear waste products than present-day Uranium and Plutonium fueled reactors.