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.
