As Southern California Edison pulls out as a buyer, California’s $2 billion Ivanpah plant becomes the latest casualty of the renewables race.
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.
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 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, after Edison has pulled out of its contract, Ivanpah is set to close. In place of its Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technology, the facility will likely be converted to a photovoltaic installation, a technology that experts say has outpaced the former 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.
Edison and PG&E—the latter announced in January that it would opt for a buyout of its contract— both cite cost savings and the superiority of photovoltaics as reasons.
