California solar plant is riding into the sunset, thanks to cheaper panels

There is a blinding beacon of light at the top of a tower in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

It’s a solar power facility called Ivanpah. It’s been supplying enough juice to power 140,000 homes for more than a decade. But it doesn’t generate electricity directly like rooftop solar panels do. It’s surrounded by a bunch of mirrors in concentric circles.

“Those mirrors reflect the heat of the sun to a receiver that’s mounted at the top of a big tower,” said Ed Smeloff, a clean energy consultant. “And then that receiver heats up, and the fluid in the receiver is used to drive the energy through a conventional steam turbine.”

Ivanpah opened 11 years ago, and it’s run by a company called NRG Energy. It cost $2.2 billion to build, $1.6 billion of which came in the form of loans from the U.S. Department of Energy.

“The cost of the project compared to other renewable technologies looked reasonable,” said Smeloff. “That, of course, has changed dramatically over the last 15 years or so.”

Because over that period, the cost of photovoltaic solar power, or solar panels, has fallen about 70%. Now it is significantly cheaper than the energy that Ivanpah generates. The main buyer of the plant’s power — California utility PG&E — released a statement saying it’s pulling out to save its customers money.

Ivanpah is set to close early next year.

Whether that counts as a failure depends on how you view the mission of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, said Jigar Shah, its former director.

“It was clearly successful in that we gave them money and they commercialized the technology here in the United States,” he said. “It didn’t catalyze a trillion dollars’ worth of investment. So from that perspective, it wasn’t successful. Whereas, the solar PV [photovoltaic] investments that we made did catalyze a trillion dollars of investment.”

He also said taxpayers will get most of their money back. The Department of Energy declined to say exactly how much.

“Long term, the reason we’re doing all of this is to get the technologies that succeed to get successful at scale,” Shah said.

Concentrated solar power won’t die when Ivanpah shuts down. There are still people and companies who think the plant has value.

Fred Morse is one of them. He’s the guy who wrote up the report 55 years ago on whether it made sense to put solar on the roof of the White House. Today, he runs a startup called SolStor Energy that develops concentrated solar.

“I was there two months ago. It’s a beautiful facility. It works,” said Morse. “Clean, carbon-free. You really want to shut that down?”

He said sure, PV solar panels are cheaper in the daytime. But a concentrated solar plant can pump that superheated liquid it generates into an insulated tank so the plant can provide electricity at night.

But Morse said the future investments, like the one Ivanpah needed to get off the ground, are more uncertain as the new trade war and the shrinking of the federal government make investment less likely.