11 years after a celebrated opening, massive solar plant faces a bleak future in the Mojave Desert

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-01-years-celebrated-massive-solar-bleak.html

by bennmorris

7 comments

  1. >NRG said in a statement that the project was successful, but unable to compete with rival photovoltaic solar technology

    No shit sherlok.

  3. At the time it sorta made sense. Of course they were aware that PV would drop in price but with the forecasts at the time of planning they could probably count on having a viable business for 20+ years.

    Really no one could have predicted that PV prices would drop *that* quickly.

    From time of first operation (2014) PV panel prices have dropped from about 75ct/W to 13ct/W. At time of approval (2010) PV prices were still around 2.4$/W …and if we add a year for when they started planning this then we’re talking 3.06$/W.

    That’s a 96% drop in 15 years!

    I think calling anyone out for ‘failure’ on this isn’t merited.

  5. This is maddening. I worked at that plant briefly in 2015 and it was clear that solar trough was less efficient than PV way back then. They were too far down the road to change the design. I argued that if you are going to bulldoze the environment you should be maximizing energy capture for the area destroyed.

  6. This technology is dead. Extremely high initial capex, very high maintenance costs with so many parts and such complexity. And Thai was well known 10 years ago. Wish the journalists would put solar thermal in the tittle. Solar thermal has lost to plain Jane solar PV in a massive way, the latter being infinitely cheaper and more competitive on a commercial level. No one but no one is building commercial scale solar thermal plants today globally.

  7. One advantage Ivanpah had is that it’s a natural gas fire plant at night, right? PV can’t do that.

    So I’d imagine it’s not just the falling cost of PV panels, but also the falling costs of grid level storage… maybe they’ll install a PV over the area, since it’s annihilated anyway and install KES (flywheels) or industrial scale lithium or whatever the latest grid level battery tech is…

    (there’s a *shitload* of PV acreage out there anyway… I drove through Vegas last year, saw all this stuff first hand.)

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