Why California’s closed $2 billion solar plant is not a signal of industry failure

Why California’s closed $2 billion solar plant is not a signal of industry failure



by ObtainSustainability

8 comments

  2. Many people do not understand the difference between a solar concentrating plant (Ivanpah) and a solar photovoltaic power plant. Two different animals. Solar PV globally is stronger and cheaper than ever. Solar concentrating is a dead technology and has been for years. The largest player in solar concentrating, Abengoa of Spain, went bankrupt years ago. Source: self, worked in large scale solar for many years and built solar PV plants around the world.

  3. It was an early experiment with an entirely different kind of solar plant technology. It made sense back when PV panels and batteries were far more expensive, but I’m afraid it no longer does. It was still worth the investment. We’ve wasted far more on clean coal and carbon capture boondoggles that never amounted to anything.

  4. Three Gorges Group in China built one of these recently. It has onsite PV. [The solar thermal system makes molten salt, which is stored during the day, then used to boil water and generate power at night. It is essentially a thermal battery.](https://newatlas.com/energy/dual-tower-solar-thermal-gansu/) Hard to say how the economics work, it may be rendered obsolete by chemical batteries just as Ivanpah was rendered obsolete by PV. It is hard to say how profitable it is; power pricing and subsidies are fiendishly complex in the US, and I haven’t seen any article that begins to explain it in China.

  5. Solar concentrators and thermal solar has pretty much failed. Even for residential you’re better off with solar pv + heat pump than thermal solar.

  6. Even as Concentrating solar, it was the last of an era. It ran on just water(steam) which doesn’t store energy as well as molten salts or other more advanced storage so Ivanpah had no thermal energy storage. So every time a cloud passed, the heat would go down, the thermal power station diminished. They tried to be so pure, and ironically, that meant they then had to add a little gas generator to warm up the turbines to be ready again for the sun in the morning.

    Ivanpah was the last CS plant to not include storage. The ones now in Morocco, the UAE and Chile include storage. There are about 30 built in China now, and China **requires** them to include thermal energy storage because this can duplicate the rolling inertia of thermal coal or gas plants being replaced with renewables. A Chinese firm, Cosin just won the SolarPACES Technology Implenmentation award as having aced the tech and it is involved in nearly all the new ones being built there as part of the gigantic renewable energy parks.

  7. Of course it isn’t.  This is concentrated thermal solar, not photovoltaic, and as such is plagued with engineering challenges that simply don’t exist with PV.

    It’s infuriating how every headline about this plant’s closure utterly fails to make the distinction.

    Careless headlines like that are now being actively used by NIMBYs to try and stop new solar projects.  “See, solar is being phased out, they’re shutting them down!”

  8. Ivanpah was clearly experimental technology and an expensive boondoggle,so it is easy to come to the conclusion that due to the proliferation of solar panels that solar is a cost effective solution.

    But this ignores an ugly reality that may be changing.

    In spite of high demand for solar panels, all of the major solar panel manufacturers are hemorrhaging money by selling panels at huge losses. In spite of high demand, revenues have been collapsing as equipment has been sold well below the cost of manufacturing.

    To this point, central and regional chinese government subsidies have kept the industry afloat. Irrational business practices driven by chinese government industrial policies has ensured that nobody has experienced the true cost of solar.

    In the 1H 2025, Longi solar had Rmb 119.6bn in revenues, but lost <12.226bn> in earnings.

    Jinko Solar revenues were down -36% yoy to rmb31.813bn, which was down -33% yoy, and lost RMB <2.909bn>

    JA Solar revenues were down -36% to rmb 23.905bn and lost RMB <2.58bn>, an increase in losses of 195% yoy.

    Trina Solar revenues were down -27% to. Rmb 31.056bn, and lost RMB <2.918bn>

    Tongwei solar revenues were only down -7.5% to RMB 40.509bn, but they still lost RMB <4.955bn> a decline in earnings of -58% yoy.

    Since last year, 40 chinese solar equipment companies have either gone bankrupt or folded into other companies due to irrational competition. However, this may be changing. On August 19th the chinese government initiated a conference to address what they called “harmful competitive practices” in order to make solar equipment companies profitable. That means one thing…all of these losses and subsidies that made solar look artificially affordable in the past will no longer be absorbed by the chinese companies or governments.

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