‘World’s largest’ solar plant in Calif closing – $1.6 billion Ivanpah casts a shadow on DOE loans – ‘Federal data concluded the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year’

In January, PG&E announced a deal with the owners of the Ivanpah solar plant — which covers five miles of federal land in the Mojave Desert near the California-Nevada border — to stop buying power from the facility. That means that two of the plant’s three units may no longer be operational next year, assuming that California regulators back the plan. Ivanpah originally was supposed to run until 2039.

The move is a setback for concentrating solar thermal power, a technology that benefited significantly from DOE loans more than a decade ago and was viewed as a way to have a renewable option with storage that could potentially run around the clock.

Ivanpah, which is operated by Texas-based NRG Energy, is a very different model from most utility-scale solar farms with rectangular panels. It uses thousands of devices called heliostats that utilize mirrors to reflect heat onto a water boiler on a giant tower to produce steam for electricity. It was the world’s largest concentrating solar plant when it opened after receiving $1.6 billion in loan guarantees from DOE. That money has not been fully repaid.

The 386-megawatt plant lagged in producing promised electricity levels and faced criticism from environmental groups like the Sierra Club because of its associated bird deaths. While estimates vary, some federal data concluded that the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year flying into concentrated beams of sunlight.

PG&E’s announcement sparked criticisms of DOE’s loan program, which conservatives have targeted since one of its early recipients — Solyndra — filed for bankruptcy in 2011 after receiving a loan. The program is under renewed scrutiny because of the size of its lending authority and its fate under President Donald Trump, who repeatedly tried to ax the program in his first term.

The DOE loan program is “all cost, no benefit,” said Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the free market think tank American Enterprise Institute, who wrote a post on Ivanpah after PG&E’s announcement. He said it’s an example of the government funding projects that can’t compete in the market and don’t help the climate.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal similarly released an editorial saying Ivanpah would be just another “expensive symbol” of “state and federal central planning gone awry,” comparing it to Solyndra.

But Dan Reicher, a former assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy during the Clinton administration, said the funding is very different from direct grants that are not repaid. “It is making money,” he said of the loan program.

Like any portfolio of loans, there will be some projects that aren’t as successful, but the overall program is performing extremely well financially, he said. Ivanpah, even though it may eventually close, provided helpful information to utilities a decade ago that had not operated utility-scale solar projects at the time. Any comparison to Solyndra is unfair, as Ivanpah is not going bankrupt, said Reicher, who is now a senior scholar at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

A letter from Democratic lawmakers last summer similarly argued that DOE’s loan program has a better repayment rate than venture capital firms on clean energy. The program was signed into law in 2005 under President George W. Bush and has helped build major companies, including Elon Musk’s Tesla, that have gone on to pay large amounts of taxes, they wrote. Backers of DOE loans also say that there’s a long history of the federal government supporting the energy sector, including President Dwight Eisenhower’s support of the nuclear industry in the 1950s.

In December, DOE’s watchdog called on the loan office to suspend loans out of concerns of conflicts of interest, prompting Biden administration officials at the time to say the inspector general report was filled with errors.

The future of other concentrating solar plants, meanwhile, is uncertain. There remain several other large operating facilities in the U.S. and in the world, some of which were also financed with DOE loans. Unlike Ivanpah, some like the Abengoa Generating Station in Arizona store heat for later use.

According to DOE, 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 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.