LOS ANGELES – It’s a familiar sight for revelers traveling Highway 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.
Just over a decade ago, the Ivanpah Solar plant 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 deliver California to its increasingly ambitious decarbonization goals.
