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From a distance, the Ivanpah solar plant looks like a shimmering lake in the Mojave Desert. Up close, it's a vast alien-like installation of hundreds of thousand of mirrors pointed at three towers, each taller than the Statue of Liberty. When this plant opened near the California-Nevada border in early 2014, it was pitched as the future of solar power. Just over a decade later, it's closing.
For some, Ivanpah now stands as a huge, shiny monument to wasted tax dollars and environmental damage — campaign groups long criticized the plant for its impact on desert wildlife. For others, failures like this are a natural part of the race to find the winning solutions for the clean energy transition.
So, where did it go wrong?
First, the technology proved finnicky and never quite worked as well as intended, said Jenny Chase, a solar analyst at BloombergNEF. But perhaps the biggest problem for Ivanpah is that photovoltaic solar — the technology used in solar panels — became really, really cheap.
Ivanpahs's location in the sweeping, sun-drenched Mojave Desert may have seemed ideal for generating solar power, but it is also a habitat for threatened desert tortoises. While the plant's developers agreed to a series of measures to protect and relocate the animals, many environmentalists believed the plant should not have been approved. The other big issue was bird deaths. Reports of "streamers" — birds incinerated midair by the beams of intense heat from the mirrors — solidified opposition.
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