It cost $2.2 billion US to build, it has 347,000 garage door-size mirrors that stretch over five square kilometres of federal land in the California desert, and it will generate enough electricity to power 140,000 homes per year, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The mirrors at the new Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station reflect sunlight onto boilers that sit atop three 40-story towers, creating steam that drives the facility’s power generators. Temperatures around the towers can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the Journal reports.
The facility’s owners— NRG Energy, Google and BrightSource Energy, which developed the so-called “tower power” technology— received investment tax credits and a $1.6 billion of federal loan guarantee to build the solar farm in the Golden State, where utilities must use renewable sources for a third of the electricity they sell by 2020.
And just how economic is Ivanpah? Well, consider this. It cost about four times as much to build as a conventional natural gas-fired power plant, the Journal reports, and electricity is estimated to cost at least twice as much as power from conventional sources.
But that’s not the only downside. Apparently the intense heat from the towers is frying birds, as well.
BrightSource reported finding dozens of dead birds at Ivanpah over the past several months, while workers were testing the plant before it began operating in December. Some had singed or burned feathers.
“Regulators said they anticipated that some birds would be killed once the Ivanpah plant started operating, but that they didn’t expect so many to die during the plant’s construction and testing,” the Journal notes. “The dead birds included a peregrine falcon, a grebe, two hawks, four nighthawks and a variety of warblers and sparrows.”
“With the data we’ve gathered, it’s far too early in the process to draw any definitive conclusions about long-term impacts on avian or other species,” Jeff Holland, a spokesman for NRG, the project’s operator, told the newspaper.
In response to BrightSource’s plan to build a second big solar farm in Riverside County, near Joshua Tree National Park, biologists working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told state regulators that they were concerned that heat produced by the project could kill golden eagles and other protected species.
“We’re trying to figure out how big the problem is and what we can do to minimize bird mortalities,” said Eric Davis, assistant regional director for migratory birds at the federal agency’s Sacramento office. “When you have new technologies, you don’t know what the impacts are going to be.”
