A futuristic-looking solar energy plant is doomed

A once cutting-edge solar energy power plant in the Mojave Desert that looks like something out of a science fiction movie may be facing its last days, according to its builder and largest customer.

The plant was built at a time when capturing solar energy with a complex array of mirrors and boilers was one of several ideas being tested. Now, solar panels (photovoltaic panels) have become so cheap that the plant's solar collection system is no longer cost effective.

"It has been surpassed by solar photovoltaics due to much lower capital and operating costs in producing clean energy," said NRG, the Texas company that built it.

The plant was built at a time when there was great experimentation in the field, said Pacific Gas Electric senior director of commercial procurement Don Howerton.

“It’s not clear in the early stages what technologies will work best and be most affordable for customers. Solar photovoltaic panels and battery energy storage were once unaffordable at large scale. Today, after years of sustained investment and improvement, those technologies provide thousands of megawatt hours of clean electricity for PG&E customers," he said in a statement earlier this year.

The rest of the contract is held by Southern California Edison.

Southern California Edison said in Thursday a statement to Paste BN that the utility is in ongoing discussions with the project owners and the Department of Energy regarding a buyout of the Ivanpah contact.

Located in San Bernardino County in California, the thermal solar power facility became operational in 2014. PG&E currently contracts for about two-thirds of its output, an agreement that was scheduled to run through 2039. Instead it will phase out by 2026, the utility said.

How does the solar energy power plant work?

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System consists of three plants, each of which contain more than 300,000 computer-controlled mirrors that focus the sun's rays on a central tower that contains boilers. These generate steam which drives steam turbines that produce energy. Together, they produce 386 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 140,000 homes.

The plant was built at a cost of about $2.2 billion and received loan guarantees worth $1.6 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Back in 2010, when the plant was first certified by the state of California, several methods of turning the sun's rays into electricity were being experimented with.

Just as Betamax and VHS tapes fought it out in the marketplace until VHS won, in the early part of the century multiple systems were being tried. They included:

• Photovoltaic panels (solar panels): These convert sunlight into electricity using photovoltaic cells made of silicon. The effect was first described in France in 1839 but not developed as a modern, energy-producing system until 1954 by Bells Labs.
• Solar Power Towers (Thermal solar plants): A large field of flat mirrors that track the sun and concentrate sunlight onto a central tower to heat fluid and run a steam generator. First developed in Barstow, California in the 1980s.
• Parabolic trough collectors: Long, curved mirrors that concentrate the sun's ray on a pipe in the middle, heating liquid in the pipes that produces steam to run a generator. First used in 1866.
• Linear Fresnel reflectors: Long, thin mirrors that focus sunlight to heat a liquid and power a steam generator. First developed in 1961 in Italy.

While multiple solar energy systems were tried, the eventual winner was photovoltaic solar panels, which became so cheap so fast that they are now the second-to-cheapest possible method of producing electricity. Only onshore wind turbines are cheaper.

Good news for green energy

The cost of a utility-scale solar panels has fallen 82% since 2010, according to the the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Utility-scale solar panels (i.e. not the ones on a house) produce a megawatt of electricity for between $29 and $92. Onshore wind turbines come in at between $27 and $73. These are figures from Lazard, a global financial advisory company whose "levelized cost of energy" estimates are the industry standard.

In 1975, solar panels cost about $115 per watt of energy they produced. By 2023, it cost $1.16. They also became more than twice as efficient.

Note that those costs for solar and onshore wind are for newly built projects without any federal subsidies. If U.S. tax subsidies are included, the cost of utility-scale solar falls to as low as $19 per megawatt to produce.