Ivanpah Solar Project, Mohave Desert. (Photo: doe.gov)
California’s Failed $2.2B Ivanpah Solar Power Facility is Shutting Down
California has the most expensive and least reliable electricity
By Katy Grimes, September 24, 2025 7:44 am
California has taken nuclear power plants offline while increasing mandates for wind and solar, resulting in statewide power shortages and power outages. Nuclear power is clean and reliable; wind and solar power, while “clean,” are unreliable, significantly more expensive, and emit the dreaded greenhouse gases (but don’t tell anyone that part).
There have been power outages since the 2006 California Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32, was passed by the Legislature and signed into law. The California Public Utilities Commission has rejected previous attempts, but following the deadly 2018 fires, allowed power shutoffs under the guise of protecting public safety.
And now, one of the largest solar projects and bird killers is quietly shutting down. The $2.2 billion Ivanpah Solar Project in the Mohave Desert, which received $1.6 billion dollars in federal loan guarantees from the Obama administration, is shutting down. Larger than the Obama Solyndra solar scandal, the Ivanpah project is another California boondoggle that harmed the environment more than it provided much needed electricity to the state’s 40 million residents.
And Ivanpah incinerates more than 6,000 birds a year.
Besides AB 32, in 2011, California passed the Renewables Portfolio Standard setting the mandate at 33 percent renewable energy by 2020. When it became clear that California was nearly there, in 2015, the Legislature moved the bar again and passed SB 350 the “Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015.” SB 350 requires the state to procure 50 percent of electricity from renewable energy and double energy efficiency savings by 2030. In 2018, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 100, setting a 100 percent clean electricity goal for the state, and issued an executive order establishing a new target to achieve carbon neutrality – both by 2045. These mandates leave utility companies no wiggle room.
The Legislature continues to move the bar, justifying more failing clean energy projects.
Using more renewable energy causes the entire electricity grid to be unreliable because sun and wind are intermittent and inconsistent. And, energy costs in California are among the highest in the nation, and only continue to increase due to California’s mandates of renewables in electricity production.
Only one year after adopting SB 350, the announcement in 2016 from PG&E that it was closing Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant ironically came on the same day there were rolling blackouts in Los Angeles amidst sweltering temperatures. PG&E said they planned to replace the loss of the cheap, clean nuclear energy with renewable energy, the Globe reported in 2019.
How did that work out?
“As Gavin Newsom takes a taxpayer funded vacation at Climate Week in New York City, the environmental catastrophe that is the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California is shutting down,” Kevin Dalton posted to X. “The 2 BILLION dollar blight built on 3,500 pristine acres of Mojave desert has been responsible for incinerating more than 60,000 birds, created TWICE the pollution of a typical power plant, created 86 jobs instead of the promised 2000, and will abandon 173,500 thermal collectors in the environment they were trying to save.”
In a nutshell, he is so right.
California has the most expensive electricity west of the Mississippi River in the continental U.S., and has the least reliable electricity, Forbes reported six years ago. “California easily leads the nation with nearly 470 power outages a year, compared to 160 for second place Texas, which is really amazing because Texas produces 125% MORE electricity! (here).”
“California’s reliability problems will be multiplied as more wind and solar enter the power mix, intermittent resources located in remote areas that cannot be so easily transported to cities via the grid.”
According to the Department of Energy, “Ivanpah uses power tower solar thermal technology to generate power by creating high-temperature steam to drive a conventional steam turbine. Mirrors are used to concentrate sunlight and create steam, which is then converted to electricity.”
And here we are, shutting down the multi-billion dollar solar project because it just doesn’t produce the electricity expected and still relies on natural gas to even remain functional.
In January, PG&E announced it would stop buying power from the Ivanpah solar facility. Ivanpah was slated to run until 2039, Marc Morano with Climate Depot reported in February.
Morano continued:
According to Department of Energy, “the cost of electricity from concentrating solar power has dropped more than 50 percent in 10 years. Supporters of the technology say it could play an important role in cutting emissions because of its ability to store heat for days and act more like baseload power, as well as replace some fossil-fuel-heavy industrial processes that rely on high heat. With predictions of surging electricity demand in years ahead, it’s important to continue developing new power options, they say. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado is among the entities researching ways to bring down costs of concentrating solar.”
“But Jenny Chase, a solar analyst at BloombergNEF, said the prospect for solar thermal plants like Ivanpah is poor, since existing solar projects have historically underperformed. Ivanpah never generated more than 75 percent of its planned electricity output in a year, she said. That’s partly because the technology is unwieldy with a lot of moving parts, she said.”
Just about every impulsive, crazy clean energy project the left has dreamed up and foisted on the American public has failed, or dramatically underperformed – the electric car versus the internal combustion engine car; solar power cannot replace clean natural gas or abundant coal power.
The weird guy in my neighborhood who used to drive a vegetable oil powered 1970’s Mercedes is just one example.
A California native and Navy mom, Katy lives in Sacramento, CA.
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I seem to remember that the Ivanpah CEO stated that jet contrails were blocking the sun and was the reason why there was not enough solar to fire up the boilers so they had to use an exponential amount of gas to make electricity.
Globalists block the sun while demanding solar power and laugh all the way to the bank.
Having the things we want reliably and in abundance, a very achievable goal, is an anethema to the globalists.
Power shutoffs under the guise of public safety? Downed power lines cause fires. If a precautionary power shutoff prevents another Carr Fire or Camp Fire, so be it.
Deferred maintenance on old infrastructure ALSO causes fires, but as long as public utility executives get paid their bonuses for beating profitability budgets, so be it…
AND, avoiding fuel load removal ALSO contributes to BIGGER, HOTTER fires, but placates the “green cabal” that provides financial and OTHER (ahem) $upport to Democrat politicians….
We never used to shut off power for high winds, and yet there were no fires. What’s changed? The utilities don’t maintain the lines.
Hallelujah! Somehow I missed this, I don’t know how. Very grateful to Katy Grimes for covering it.
Who else out there despaired to see that ugly, bird-killing, pilot-blinding Ivanpah built in the first place, not confident that it would EVER be mothballed? But now it has, although how the heck these freaks are ever going to dispose of that non-recyclable mess left behind in the once-pristine Mojave desert is something I wonder if anyone can answer. Maybe dig a giant hole a couple of miles deep, and dump ALL of the rusting windmills and solar panels and poisonous EV batteries and etc. into it?
I’ve actually seen people with my own eyes (a good 15-20 years ago, now) who sat on my local city “citizens’ environmental commission,” hand-picked by the left-wing mayor to do his bidding, who did not know that transmission lines were required to funnel “renewable” energy from solar farm or wind farm to light bulb. Is it possible that some even thought the sun and wind magically created renewables without the mechanism of solar panels or windmills? They definitely followed the Church of Green and Gaia was invoked, and I’m not kidding. Some read aloud from the Kyoto Protocols. Of course they didn’t like natural gas or dams, which were “not green,” but they were unable to explain why. Solar salesmen showed up regularly in hopes of sucking off the govt trough. Ah, memories…..
Can we hope for a safe and sane nuclear energy future, someday, maybe? Fracking expansion, perhaps? Cheaper, or at least more manageable energy bills in California one day soon?
Not until idiots quit voting for democrats.
Is there any other state, or country, that proudly broadcasts commercials “asking” for people to turn off or adjust their power consumption during certain hours of the day because there isn’t sufficient electricity?
“Flex and Alert are here to help you stop an outage and save your power this summer!
When a heatwave hits and a Flex Alert is called, there’s no need to be alarmed, just follow Flex’s energy saving tips and together we’ll all be savin’ power!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NDG6ug2Lrg
Maybe parts of Africa?
Nut, absolutely nuts.
Germany actually is facing an energy crisis as well.
Dave Walsh an energy expert has been sounding the alarm for years.
Here is a podcast where he explains the lunacy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1YA1KbCV9Fk
Democrat administrations do not build successfully because they don’t build test structures. But building is not the issue. And we can guess why:
They build pie in the sky unproven crack pot ideas, chock full of union labor, with maintenance intense materials – basically 170,000 windows to wash.
This thing is the solar version of rail*, generating constant cash flow from tax payer pockets to unions to democrats.
*It can’t be called a train, because there is no train. It cannot be called high speed because rails do not move.
I hope no (((Conders))) were among the greenly slaughtered avians.
“Even before it came online last year, the massive Ivanpah solar facility in Southern California’s Mojave Desert was touted by its supporters — from then-Gov. Schwarzenegger to President Obama — as the gold standard for clean energy projects.
~KQED~
(((Condors)))
I heard their best income came from their little roadside stand selling “Solar Cooked Dinners”, $20 with fries and a drink!
You’re probably not wrong, Amish Warrior 🙂
Ivanpah was a failure from the beginning. I heard the PG&E power purchase agreement was for an extremely expensive $200 per megawatt hour (MWh) for inherently unreliable power. This is all about the “luxury beliefs” of the California political elites. The elites shunned safe, reliable nuclear power. Our nonprofit, Californians for Green Nuclear Power (CGNP dot org] has been courageously and persistently fighting the political elites since we were founded in 2013. In 2025, Diablo Canyon (nuclear) Power Plant produced safe, abundant, 24/7/365 reliable, cost-effective, and non-polluting power cost about $43.00 per MWh That is about 1/5 the cost of Ivanpah which as a full=power ON time of about 25%.
SCE had a similar generation project outside of Barstow called “Solar One.” My memory is hazy about it, but I think it was shut down around 1990 because it was economically unfeasable. The difference here is that the stockholders and investors were responsible for Solar One while Ivanpah was made possible by Obama throwing taxpayer money to grifters who had no stake in whether the project was financially viable.
That is exactly it!
Private companies are beholden to stakeholders, the government is but ignores the taxpayer, it just takes tax dollars as if it were play money!
I tried to look up solar one, it turns out solar one was active between maybe 1981 and 1986 as a partnership between DWP, SCE and the Department of Energy. I have no actual information how the project was funded. I found this through my browser’s AI, the info is buried deeper than I know how to search and I don’t use google search. There was also a Solar 2, which seems to differ with using molton salt so that the project could generate electricity after dark through residual heat. Solar 2 operated just 3 years, from 1996 to 1999. If either projects were financially viable, I think they would have remained on line. I believe the plant was located around Dagget, a few miles east of Barstow on I-40
One failure after another….Newsom’s Legacy.
Have you ever noticed that every Democrat project is a failure? Democrats are ignorant people driven by emotions rather than logic.
This state is on a collision course for total failure. As computing gets more sophisticated and powerful, so do the energy demands. Yet the Democrats who have no intelligence are leading the state down the road of electric energy poverty. That just leads to human poverty. A first world economy can’t continue without plentiful and growing energy supply. Fact.
Coward&Piven
Another eyesore left to rot on the road to Vegas, just like Rocka Hula (formerly Lake Delores) and so many others.
And they don’t even mention all of the “protected” tortoises that were euthanized to build this monstrosity.
I worked on a desert project where every morning we were harangued by the “leaders” of the monitors, which included wildlife, native, archeology and so on, it is just slight exageration that there were more observers with power to immediately shut the job down than workers. The most obnoxious of the bunch was the “tortoise nazi,” who declared every morning that for every tortoise accidently killed somone was going to jail. I looked it up, the only known persons who had gone to jail for killing tortoises was a Cambodian who was harvesting them for the oriental market in Los Angeles. I told her so in a meeting and she shut up after that.
Wind and solar power generation is neither 1) clean to manufacture, or 2) recyclable as waste. It is abject lies told by the left, that either of these are a net-positives for the “environment.”
I rarely see a solar panel that appears clean and fully operational.