Ivanpah Solar Power Plant burns natural gas daily and produces up to 30,000 metric tons of CO2 annually
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. – More than a decade after it opened, an Obama-era taxpayer-backed “clean energy” solar plant in California still burns fossil fuels and kills thousands of birds each year.
The Ivanpah Solar Power Plant, a massive facility in the Mojave Desert near the California-Nevada border, uses hundreds of thousands of mirrors to reflect sunlight into three towering structures, generating intense heat to produce electricity.
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. – More than a decade after it opened, an Obama-era taxpayer-backed “clean energy” solar plant in California still burns fossil fuels and kills thousands of birds each year.
The Ivanpah Solar Power Plant, a massive facility in the Mojave Desert near the California-Nevada border, uses hundreds of thousands of mirrors to reflect sunlight into three towering structures, generating intense heat to produce electricity.
But those same beams have proven deadly.
Federal researchers and monitoring reports have documented thousands of birds being killed after flying through the plant’s concentrated solar rays — a phenomenon known as “solar flux.”
The plant also relies on natural gas to start up each day – producing tens of thousands of metric tons of carbon dioxide annually – an amount comparable to the energy use of thousands of homes, raising questions about how “clean” the facility really is.
Standing near the site, its footprint is unmistakable. The towers glow intensely as beams of reflected sunlight converge at their tops, creating an almost surreal scene against the desert landscape.
Once promoted as a symbol of the future of renewable energy, Ivanpah is now drawing scrutiny over whether its environmental costs outweigh its benefits, with critics saying the project raises broader concerns about how “clean energy” is evaluated.
“If oil and gas spills a drop, literally a drop, the entire operation is shut down. And to an extent that’s a good thing,” Daniel Turner, founder of the energy advocacy group Power The Future, told Fox News Digital.