Hey friends;
Ever since I served as Environment Editor at KCET TV in Los Angeles, the Ivanpah solar plant next door to Mojave National Preserve has been a bête noire for me. So you’d think I’d be glad to hear the news that NRG, the plant’s owner, is in talks to shut the whole thing down.
But sometimes it sucks to be right. There was nothing about the problems with Ivanpah — not only technical but also the toll the plant would take on wildlife — that we didn’t already know before the thing was built. There were far more tortoises on site then expected, but biologists found that out early on, and USFWS let the plant go head anyway. The world acted surprised when journalists reported on the grisly bird deaths caused by the plant’s concentrated solar energy, but scientists had known about the issue by 1986, based on the impacts of a much smaller solar plant that was scrapped in the 1990s.
We knew all this before a single bulldozer blade hit the ground in the Ivanpah Valley. Nonetheless, regulatory agencies and environmental groups looked the other way as Brightsource, NRG, Bechtel and Google scraped five square miles of absurdly biodiverse desert to put in their Rube Goldberg technology at taxpayer expense.
This Mojave Yucca, killed in 2011, could have lived for centuries more:
We put together a history of the Ivanpah debacle for our most recent episode. We think you may find it interesting, perhaps enraging.
Even the plant operators admit that something like 38,500 birds died over the 11 years the plant has been running. The actual death toll is almost certainly significantly higher, up to a quarter-million birds and more. We may not ever know.
In other news, our work to put together an online social space for desert activists is gaining speed. If you’d like to be among the first invited to join, either reply here or sign up at our Patreon site as a free member.
I can’t help but think of that little 70s book, Small Is Beautiful. It seems that scaling up ruins everything. Eventually, if we make it that far, humans will have to come to terms with the limits of capitalism and growth. I don’t know the answers but I do know it’s not what we have now.