If you’d ever like to visit a physical embodiment of the argument that government should get out and stay out of just about everything, take Interstate 15 from Southern California toward Las Vegas and stop near the Nevada border to gawk at the Ivanpah solar power plant.
It looks like three alien amphitheatres, each sold-out with silver rectangular beings gazing at a spiky tower crowned with a glowing glass aquarium. On the ground, you may see the charred carcasses of birds that were sacrificed when they flew through the crowd’s hot gaze.
There’s nothing alien about the thing’s origins. It’s an accidental descendant of reckless subprime mortgages and the financial engineering that exploited them. When it all went wrong and threatened to take down the world financial system, the federal government launched a wild-spending, record-breaking federal bailout, with your money.
Then in February 2009, newly-elected President Barack Obama approved a $787 billion stimulus package. In the interest of spending your money as fast as possible, the hunt was on for “shovel-ready projects.” One of these was the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station. The Department of Energy gave Ivanpah’s developers $1.6 billion in loan guarantees to build it plus another $600 million in federal tax credits for being “green.”
Although the site out in the Mojave Desert was home to a threatened species, the desert tortoise, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gave the okay for the solar plant to stomp on 5.6 square miles of public land. (In June of this year, California declared the Mojave Desert Tortoise officially “endangered.”)
“With projects like this one, and others across this country, we are staking our claim to continued leadership in the new global economy,” Obama said in a radio address before the Ivanpah project broke ground.
The federally-backed loan was approved in 2011 and the plant was operating in 2014. By 2015, there was a problem.
The Ivanpah solar plant had emitted more than 46,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in its first year of operation, nearly double the level that triggered mandatory participation in the California Air Resources Board’s “cap and trade” program, which requires facilities to buy permits to emit greenhouse gases.
Huh? What? How?
It was the same problem that has baffled solar energy evangelists for decades: The sun goes down.
Ivanpah generates electricity by using circles of mirrors to reflect the sun toward the tank on top of the tower, thereby heating water to create steam to turn turbines. At night, the water would cool down, and then every morning the struggling facility would need time to get things boiling again. This limited the output of electricity.
So the operators used natural gas to generate heat at night, and also during the day if the sun was blocked by deplorable clouds.
David Lamfrom, desert project manager of the National Parks Conservation Association, told the Orange County Register he didn’t think the project would have gone forward if the fossil fuel component had been disclosed. “It feels like a bait and switch,” he said. “This project was held up as a model of innovation.”
In fact, the taxpayers were held up like stagecoach passengers, and the technology behind Ivanpah, far from being a model of innovation, was quickly overtaken by photovoltaic solar energy.
Now, ten years later, the utilities that purchased power from Ivanpah want out of those long-term contracts so they can buy less expensive photovoltaic solar power and let the stagecoach passengers finally save some money on their electricity bills. The Biden administration’s Department of Energy agreed. The Trump administration’s Department of Energy agreed.
But on Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission said no, rejecting the contract termination agreements that Pacific Gas & Electric had successfully negotiated and announced last January, pending CPUC approval.
Why did the CPUC reject the contract terminations and require Ivanpah to keep operating?
Because California’s idiotic laws require utilities to buy an ever-increasing percentage of the electricity they sell from “renewable” sources, as the law defines them. Solar and wind count as renewable. Nuclear and hydroelectric do not. Why not, you ask? I told you it was idiotic. You didn’t believe me.
The CPUC staff, which called for the rejection of the contract termination agreements, said there was simply too much uncertainty over whether the utilities would be able to meet the “Renewables Portfolio Standard” mandates if Ivanpah closed.
They also worried that the transmission and distribution infrastructure that ratepayers were billed to build would be “stranded” with nothing to do.
PG&E was morose. “Ending these agreements would have saved customers money compared to the cost of keeping them for the remainder of their terms,” a spokesperson said in a statement. Now the utility is stuck buying costly power from Ivanpah’s bird-frying amphitheatres through 2039. That will benefit investors in the Ivanpah project at the expense of ratepayers.
The Trump administration released a statement, too. “We will absolutely be appealing this decision,” a Department of Energy official said.
It’s not clear that taxpayers will ever see the $1.6 billion loan repaid, whether Ivanpah stays open or closes. And ratepayers will continue to be hosed by the blithering idiocy of a state government that never admits it was wrong and instead doubles down on pointless, costly, arbitrary targets that must be met by pointless, costly, arbitrary dates.
The legislature could pause the targets and make California instantly more affordable, but that would harm the habitat of the Lesser Green Grifter, a newly discovered species that thrives in California’s multi-billion-dollar ecosystem of emissions permit sales and carbon credit trading. Every dollar swimming in this pond comes from taxpayers, ratepayers or consumers, all paying higher taxes, rates and prices as costs are passed through. Yet California’s policies have no effect on the global climate. They’re ruthlessly enforced only to show “leadership in the new global economy.”
There is some good news. At least we’re not birds or tortoises.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley