Sundown in the Cards for Las Vegas-Adjacent Solar Plant

The Ivanpah Solar Plant, much like Pamela Anderson’s character in “The Last Showgirl,” has outlived its usefulness. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), its main customer, has canceled its commitment to purchase energy for 100K of its California customers from the plant, located just on the California side of Nevada’s border. In response, its operator, NRG Energy, plans to take two of the plant’s three towers offline by 2026.

The other third of the 940K megawatt hours generated by the plant each year is purchased by Southern California Edison, which has yet to announce plans to end its contract.

The solar plant — better known to motorists taking Interstate 15 to and from Las Vegas as “what are those things and why are they on fire?” — uses a technology called concentrated solar power (CSP), which was state of the art when the plant opened in 2013 but is now woefully obsolete.

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In CSP, thousands of mirrors built in concentric circles on the ground focus sunlight onto 450-foot-tall receiver stations, much like little boys burning leaves with magnifying glasses. The receiver stations then use the heat to boil water to create steam, which in turn rotates a turbine connected to a generator.

This multistep process has a lower solar-to-electric efficiency (about 18%) than newer photovoltaic (PV) solar technologies, which convert sunlight directly to electricity with up to 25% efficiency.

Because of all its moving parts, it also costs anywhere from two to five times as much to operate and maintain than a PV farm.

There are other problems with CSP, too. The larger land area it requires (3,500 acres in Ivanpah’s case) poses more of a potential threat to local wildlife, such as impeding desert tortoise migration and frying birds alive due to the intense heat around the towers.

And CSP produces extreme glare that PV plants do not. So closing the Ivanpah plant now avoids any potential conflict with the Southern Nevada Supplemental Airport, the secondary Las Vegas passenger airport set to open about 5 miles north of the plant in 2037.

Once the plant’s two towers are decommissioned, PV panels could replace their footprint. NRG says.