Mojave Desert Solar Plant Once Hailed as a Marvel Will Close as a Glowing Relic

As Southern California Edison pulls out as a buyer, California’s $2 billion Ivanpah plant becomes the latest casualty of the renewables race.

The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility located in the Mojave Desert, Calif., on Jan. 6, 2025. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

LOS ANGELES—It is a familiar sight for revelers traveling Interstate 15 from Southern California to Las Vegas: In the final stretches of the Californian Mojave Desert, just before the Nevada border, there is little else interrupting the vast, Martian expanse aside from a near-abandoned border town and this glittering relic of California’s renewable energy boom.

A little more than a decade ago, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System opened to great fanfare, with a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)—part of the Obama administration’s push to install green energy production on public lands—and a promise to help California meet its increasingly ambitious decarbonization goals.

At the time, it was the world’s largest solar plant, its nearly 4,000 acres covered in a blinding array of high-tech mirrors, arranged in supplication around three 450-foot towers. It nearly doubled the amount of solar thermal energy then produced in the United States, according to the DOE.

Originally, the project had an estimated operational life of 50 years, according to the final environmental impact statement. Its two buyers, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), had purchase agreements through 2039.

Now, Edison has pulled out of its contract, and Ivanpah is set to close. The facility’s concentrating solar power (CSP) technology will likely be converted to a photovoltaic (PV) installation, a technology that experts say has outpaced CSP in terms of cost, efficiency, and versatility.

”To save money for our customers, Southern California Edison has agreed to stop buying electricity from the Ivanpah Solar Power Plant,” Jeff Monford, a spokesperson for the utility, told The Epoch Times. The decision, he said, has been an “ongoing negotiation among a few parties, including the owners of the plant and the Department of Energy.”

For-profit utilities have reason to fear customer revolt over soaring electricity prices. California has the second-highest in the country, after Hawaii, and is approving more rate hikes to compensate for fire safety, aging infrastructure, and demands on the grid.

PG&E announced in January that it would opt for a buyout of its contract. Both Edison and PG&E have cited cost savings and the superiority of PVs as reasons for pulling out of the project.

“Ivanpah was a landmark in renewable energy, but concentrated solar power can’t match today’s photovoltaic systems,” California Assemblyman Tom Lackey, a Republican who represents the area, told The Epoch Times.

“Unfortunately, technology does age out, and while it’s disappointing to see the facility close, I’m committed to supporting the workers and hopeful that plans to upgrade the site to photovoltaic solar come to fruition so it remains a clean energy asset for our region.”

In an email to The Epoch Times, California Energy Commission Chairman David Hochschild said the state remains on track to reach its 2045 decarbonization goals.

“Last year, we added a record 7,000 [megawatts] of new clean energy capacity with solar being the largest share of that,“ Hochschild said. ”Solar PV is the lowest cost resource on the market today, which explains why it has been the fastest growing energy industry in the world. And in the United States, over 80 percent of new energy last year came from solar.”

In 2010, when the plant’s construction began, California was still in the early phases of its Renewables Portfolio Standard program, initially established in 2002. It required that renewable resources provide 20 percent of the state’s electricity retail sales by 2017. Since then, progressive increases have brought the requirement to 60 percent by 2030 and 100 percent carbon freedom by 2045.

At the time, both investors and utilities were jumping into developing technology, diversifying to see what stuck.

Ivanpah’s CSP system uses hundreds of thousands of software-controlled mirrors that follow the sun and reflect it onto water-filled boilers atop three 450-foot towers. Sunlight heats the water and creates steam, which can then be piped into conventional turbines to generate electricity.

The technology had worked on a smaller scale in Europe, PG&E stated in its January announcement, and the early 2000s saw a surge of private investment in larger-scale CSP in the United States.

“It’s not clear in the early stages what technologies will work best and be most affordable for customers,” said Don Howerton, PG&E’s senior director of commercial procurement.

Ivanpah’s demise, according to him, is a normal outcome of the competitive evolution of technological development. Howerton pointed to the fact that PV and battery energy storage were once unaffordable at scale but now constitute a central part of the utility’s clean energy portfolio.

But others say the writing was on the wall from the start.

“It’s about 13 or 14 years too late,” Chris Clarke, executive director of the Desert Advocacy Media Network, told The Epoch Times, referring to the plant’s closure.

“Intelligent observers and investors knew at the outset that photovoltaic was going to be cheaper when Ivanpah was getting approved. It was a doomed project from the start.”

Before his current role, Clarke was environment editor at KCET TV in Los Angeles from 2011 to 2017, where he covered Ivanpah extensively. He pointed to European companies that had hoped to build with various solar technologies but went bankrupt because PV was already cheaper by the time Ivanpah was being proposed.

“As an experiment, I think it was probably worth doing somewhere, but I would’ve picked somewhere else, because that was an incredibly biologically diverse habitat that it replaced,” Clarke said.

Early boosterism heralded the “engineering marvel,” the future of clean energy “ready to shine,” and the “Hoover Dam of solar power.” But before the plant even went online, conservationists decrying the impact on endangered tortoises considered it “the emblem of harmful siting” in their growing battle against government-backed renewable energy development on public lands.

The project was a bipartisan bête noir, dogged by criticism from both right and left. Critics penned scathing takedowns of the “monstrosity,” and when PG&E in January announced that it would stop buying energy, climate-friendly observers said good riddance to “the world’s ugliest solar plant.”

In the planning process, critics accused those behind the project of engaging in a “bait-and-switch,” presenting the plant as a clean energy source when in fact it would function as a hybrid. But burning natural gas to supplement solar power to heat the boilers was part of the design, outlined in the Bureau of Land Management’s final environmental impact statement in July 2010.

The plant went from emitting more than 46,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in its first year to emitting 68,676 metric tons in 2015. This was a nearly 50 percent increase, and far more than the 25,000-metric-ton threshold at which California mandates that power plants and factories participate in its Cap-and-Trade Program.

The threat to endangered tortoises, the plant’s proximity to a nature preserve, and reports that the mirrors were incinerating thousands of birds each year added to the controversy.

“Probably the longest lasting impact of construction of that plant, even after it’s decommissioned, even after it’s removed every last little scrap of rebar, was that old growth Mojave Desert habitat,” Clarke said.

Casualties, he said, include 900-year-old yucca trees and 60 or 70 different species of woody shrubs, as well as tortoises and various other animals such as owls, rattlesnakes, and insects.

“That was a habitat that will not grow back naturally because the climate is different than when it evolved,“ Clarke said. ”It just had immense ecological value. And that was removed for a project that, even if it had been wildly successful, would’ve had a 30-year shelf life. And you know, we’re at one-third of that now.”

Then there is performance.

According to a January analysis by the Free Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, the plant averaged about 702,322 megawatt-hours (MWh) of power annually from 2015 to 2023—substantially less than the 1 million MWh it was supposed to produce.

In 2024, the plant’s three units generated a total 696,585 MWh, according to federal data.

Ivanpah’s downfall, according to some industry observers, was not the CSP technology itself, but its use of water. It is not as efficient at storing or transferring heat as newer versions of the technology are. According to the CSP industry network SolarPACES, Ivanpah was the last CSP plant to lack energy storage, without which it could not dispatch solar energy on demand. To compensate, it used fossil fuels.

Ivanpah is a relic for more reasons than one. The era of renewable energy development on federal lands has come to a grinding halt.

The Interior Department recently announced that it is ending preferential treatment for “unreliable, subsidy-dependent” wind and solar energy, and that all decisions will now undergo “elevated review.” The shift aligns with President Donald Trump’s energy dominance agenda and his July 7 executive order ending “market distorting” subsidies and “foreign-controlled” energy sources.

On Sept. 24, the Trump administration announced that it was returning more than $13 billion in unobligated funds that had been appropriated to advance the previous administration’s “Green New Scam agenda.”

NRG Energy, one of the project’s biggest investors and the Ivanpah plant’s operator, did not respond to questions about a timeline or costs for decommissioning the site.

Neither NRG nor the DOE responded to questions about how much of the federal loans were recovered as both utilities finalized negotiations for terminating their power purchase agreements.