The $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar project approved by the Obama administration is shutting down – leaving behind 173,500 thermal collectors on 3,500 Acres in the Mojave desert
Obama’s Department of Energy also provided $1.6 billion in loan guarantees to Ivanpah, a $535 million grant, and tax credits – even though the site was within the critical habitat of the desert tortoise, an endangered species native to the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts – forcing the tortoise to be relocated.
The plant also killed between 3,500 – 6,000 birds each year, according to a 2015 report, from collisions with heliostats or from being incinerated when flying through the concentrated heat beams that reached 800 degrees Fahrenheit – Meaning over the course of 11 years from 38,500 to 66,000 total birds were killed.
Conservation groups, like the Sierra Club, have called Ivanpah an “environmental disaster” because of the wildlife impacts.
Plus Ivanpah emits more than 46,000 metric tons of CO2 – almost twice the threshold for California’s cap and trade program (25,000 tons) and it relied on gas consumption undermining Ivanpah’s ‘clean energy’ claim.
So – the $2.2 billion Obama-era green energy investment meant to benefit the environment depended on natural gas because of cloud cover, killed tens of thousands of birds, displaced hundreds of desert tortoises causing risk of higher mortality, destroyed rare plant species and sacred Indigenous sites, and had ecological costs that outweighed its benefits.
Plus the site’s altered ecosystem may never fully recover.
This marks the latest in a long list of Obama DOE funded large scale solar plants that went belly up.
According to Solar Insure, 16 large solar companies have gone under since 2023, with over 100 solar companies filing for bankruptcy in the year 2023 alone.
