The Economics of Solar Power
Haley Zaremba

When the massive Ivanpah solar plant was finished in the Mojave Desert in 2014, it was touted as the future of solar power and a cutting edge approach to clean energy. The plant was the world’s largest solar thermal plant when it was built, spreading over 5 miles of federal land. It cost about $2.2 billion and received loan guarantees worth $1.6 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy. Now, barely over ten years later, it’s already closing. 

Called ‘concentrated solar’ or ‘thermal solar,’ the technology used at Ivanpah involves hundreds of thousands of computer-controlled mirrors reflecting the sun’s rays at three enormous towers containing boilers. The idea was that beaming concentrated amounts of solar power onto these boilers will create steam to generate totally clean and renewable energy. Together, Ivanpah’s 3 boiler towers and 900,000 mirrors generate 386 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 140,000 homes.

When plans for the plant were greenlit in 2010, ‘concentrated’ or ‘thermal’ solar technology was just one of many approaches being piloted around the world in a race to determine the best one. In addition to thermal solar power, other piloted systems included solar panels and other forms of mirror-centric solar generation including parabolic trough collectors and linear Fresnel reflectors. 

And now the race is over, and it turns out that solar panels have completely lapped every other contender. Over the years since Ivanpah began construction, photovoltaic solar panels have become so cheap that no other solar technology can even hope to compete. Between 2014 and 2021, the cost of utility-scale PV solar plummeted by over 50%.

NRG, the company that built Ivanpah and now wants to decommission it, says that "it has been surpassed by solar photovoltaics due to much lower capital and operating costs in producing clean energy.” If NRG gets the regulatory approval it is currently seeking, it will close Ivanpah early next year, and potentially ready the site for a different form of solar power production.

Depending on where you stand, this is either a success story for photovoltaics and for the solar power sector in general, or it is a gigantic financial boondoggle and waste of funds for thermal solar and the taxpayers that supported it. “For some, Ivanpah now stands as a huge, shiny monument to wasted tax dollars and environmental damage — campaign groups long criticized the plant for its impact on desert wildlife,” CNN recently reported. “For others, failures like this are a natural part of the race to find the winning solutions for the clean energy transition.”

In today’s climate in which everything is political, and everything is partisan, the story of Ivanpah is being used to support many divergent claims. For the right, it supports the worldview that the government is overspending on useless clean energy projects. For the left, it’s normal collateral damage to avoid much bigger damage from fossil-fuel induced climate change. And for some environmentalists it's the happy end of a killer machine that purportedly roasted up to 6,000 birds a year. 

While Ivanpah was certainly a failure in many regards, it was part of a research and development process that has inarguably been enormously successful. Solar power has grownmore than any other renewable technology, and is almost on track with the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario. Solar panels are becoming more efficient all the time, and solar energy has proven to be a critical part of affordable and reliable energy mixes around the world. 

As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” Granted, Edison’s experiments were a little bit cheaper than Ivanpah. But spending on clean energy research and development is critical if the United States wants to remain competitive in global energy markets. The West is rapidly losing its upper hand in energy technologies, and a willingness to invest in daring projects is a critical part of staying at the vanguard – just ask China. 

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com 

  

 

 

Haley Zaremba is a writer and journalist based in Mexico City. She has extensive experience writing and editing environmental features, travel pieces, local news in the Bay Area, and music/culture reviews.

 

 

 

oilprice.com