Solar power winning on price is about the least controversial thing you can say about energy right now. Panels got cheap, then cheaper, and they keep undercutting almost everything else on the grid. So it is a little strange that one of the biggest casualties of all that success is itself a solar plant. It sits in the Mojave Desert, right off the I-15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and if you have ever made that drive you have seen it: three towers throwing off light so bright they look like something a Bond villain would build on a tight budget.<\/p>\n
That is the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, a $2.2 billion bet that opened in 2014 as the largest solar thermal plant on the planet. Twelve years later, the utilities that buy its power have been trying to switch most of it off. The reasons are an odd mix. Part of it is that the air between those towers gets hot enough to incinerate birds in mid-air. The bigger part is that ordinary solar got cheap and made the whole expensive machine look obsolete. And here is the twist almost nobody saw coming: as of mid-2026, the plant is still running, because California regulators looked at the shutdown plan and said no.<\/p>\n
Ivanpah is what engineers call a concentrating solar power plant, or CSP, and it works nothing like the panels on your neighbor’s roof. Instead of turning sunlight straight into electricity, it uses around 173,500 heliostats, each carrying two mirrors, to bounce sunlight up at three towers that stand 459 feet tall. The concentrated light superheats water at the top of each tower into steam, the steam spins a turbine, and the turbine makes power. Picture roughly 347,000 mirrors all aimed at three points in the sky. It is genuinely impressive to stand near. It is also a real problem if you happen to be a bird.<\/p>\n
The air around those receivers gets brutal. Temperatures near the towers can reach about 1,000 degrees, and birds that fly through the concentrated solar flux can catch fire on the way past, according to Nevada Public Radio<\/a>. A 2023 report from the Association of Avian Veterinarians<\/a> estimated the plant kills at least 6,000 birds a year. The site even has its own grim word for the birds that ignite mid-flight and leave a little puff of smoke behind. It calls them “streamers.” That detail has followed Ivanpah around since before construction was even finished, and it has done the project no favors in a state that takes its wildlife seriously.<\/p>\n Birds are the part everyone remembers, but the performance numbers are what actually sank the case for Ivanpah. The plant was sized to generate around 940,000 megawatt-hours a year. It never got there. By several accounts it never even cleared roughly 75% of that target in a single year, which is a rough spot to be in when investors and regulators are watching the meter.<\/p>\n Then there is the gas. A concentrating solar plant needs heat to get its boilers going in the morning and to ride through passing clouds, and Ivanpah does that by burning natural gas. In 2014, the year it opened, the owners got permission from state officials to raise the annual gas limit for the boilers from 328 million cubic feet to 525 million cubic feet, citing the need to compensate for intermittent cloud cover, according to Engineering News-Record<\/a>. A solar plant asking for more fossil fuel in its first year is the kind of headline that sticks to a project. None of this made Ivanpah a fraud. It made it expensive and complicated at exactly the moment a much simpler technology was getting very cheap.<\/p>\n The real story here is not a scandal. It is a price chart. When the power contracts were signed back in 2009, concentrating solar looked like a reasonable bet, partly because it offered a path to storing heat and running closer to around the clock. Spain had built CSP projects, the Obama-era Department of Energy was backing the technology, and at the 2014 ribbon-cutting then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz called Ivanpah “a shining example” of American leadership in solar.<\/p>\n Then ordinary photovoltaic panels got cheap, fast, and batteries followed close behind. Pacific Gas and Electric, which had contracted for two of the plant’s three units, put it about as plainly as a utility can. In its January statement<\/a> explaining why it wanted out, PG&E said photovoltaic solar “raced ahead of its rival in affordability.” NRG Energy, the Texas company that built Ivanpah and remains its largest investor, framed the wind-down as the way to maximize recovery of the federal loans, E&E News reported<\/a>. The same decade that made Ivanpah look futuristic is the one that made it look like yesterday’s idea.<\/p>\n If you want to see what won that race, look at what is getting built now. China is finishing the world’s largest solar farm<\/a> out of plain PV panels, the kind that pair happily with batteries and do not cook anything flying overhead. Closer to home, the case for rooftop generation tied to home storage keeps getting stronger as electricity rates climb, which is part of why Tesla’s solar push<\/a> and a wave of cheaper panels keep finding buyers. CSP did not lose because it was fake. It lost because PV got boring, cheap, and very, very good.<\/p>\n Here is where the obituaries got ahead of themselves. PG&E filed to terminate its two contracts, planning to take Units 1 and 3 offline in early 2026 and pay the owners to exit deals that were originally supposed to run through 2039. Then, on December 4, 2025, the California Public Utilities Commission rejected the termination<\/a> “without prejudice.” That last part matters. It means the utilities and owners can come back with a revised plan, and in the meantime all three units keep running.<\/p>\n The commission’s reasoning had almost nothing to do with birds. Regulators worried about pulling clean generation off the grid right as demand is expected to climb from new data centers and from the electrification of buildings and vehicles. They also flagged the risk of stranding hundreds of millions of dollars in transmission lines built to serve the plant. On top of that, the Department of Energy has a seat at the table, because Ivanpah was built with a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee plus roughly $540 million in Treasury grant proceeds, and that money has not been fully repaid. Southern California Edison, which holds the contract for the third unit, is still negotiating its own exit. NRG and its partners have floated repowering the site with cheaper PV panels if they can line up the financing and the permits, though nobody is calling that a done deal.<\/p>\n So if you drive the I-15 this summer, the towers will still be there, still gleaming, still looking like the future as it was imagined around 2009. The fight over what to do with them, who eats the bill for years of underperformance, and whether the site gets a second life as an ordinary solar farm is going to grind through regulatory filings for a while yet. Ivanpah is not proof that solar failed. It is proof that not every version of solar wins, and that the expensive, complicated version can lose to the cheap one even while it is still technically working.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Solar power winning on price is about the least controversial thing you can say about energy right now. Panels got … <\/p>\nA solar plant that burns natural gas to wake up<\/h2>\n
Cheaper solar raced ahead and left it behind<\/h2>\n
Why Ivanpah is not dead yet<\/h2>\n