BONNER COHEN: Taxpayer-Backed Solar Facility In Mojave Desert Will Shut Down Next Year
The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert is finally headed for the scrap heap, and that outcome should prompt a hard discussion about national energy priorities. Built with massive taxpayer backing and grand promises, the project never lived up to the hype and now stands as a warning about the limits of politically driven energy bets. This piece lays out what went wrong and why America should rethink where it places its energy bets.
Ivanpah was born in 2011 on a wave of political theater and taxpayer largesse, boosted by roughly $1.6 billion in government loans and roughly $2.2 billion in total costs. It covered five square miles with 173,500 mirrors and three towering receivers meant to concentrate sunlight into steam, promising to make America a solar superpower. Reality didn’t cooperate: complexity, maintenance headaches, and poor economics left Ivanpah far short of the glossy sales pitch.
Energy consultants summed up the machine simply and unflatteringly: “The mirrors reflect heat from the sun to a receiver mounted on top of the tower,” energy consultant Edward Smeloff told the New York Post. “That heats a fluid. It creates steam [that spins] a conventional steam turbine. It is complicated.” Those sentences capture the core problem—an elegant physics demo that did not scale into a robust, competitive power source.
Beyond poor economics, Ivanpah created a different kind of damage: environmental harm to wildlife and the broader desert ecosystem. The facility’s concentrated solar flux regularly reached temperatures of around 1,000 degrees, turning flight paths into lethal corridors for birds. Reports documented thousands of avian fatalities annually, a grim irony given the project’s green branding.
From a policy perspective, Ivanpah exposed the danger of letting politicians and subsidy seekers design the energy future. When projects depend on taxpayer loans and political narratives rather than market signals, costly mistakes get locked in. This is not just about one failing plant; it’s about the pattern of throwing public money at prestige projects instead of scalable, reliable solutions.
News of Ivanpah’s shutdown arrived as President Trump used his UN platform to question the renewables playbook and push a different national strategy. “We are getting rid of the falsely named renewables,” he told delegates, bluntly rejecting the idea that every energy problem is solved by more wind and solar. That rhetoric matches policy moves favoring fossil fuels, nuclear, and other firm generation options.
Lest anyone miss the message, he added: “The entire globalist concept of asking successful industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely.” Those are not just slogans; they reflect a strategic rethink about resilience, sovereignty, and industrial policy. The administration’s direction aims to prioritize dispatchable power that keeps lights on and factories running.
Critics warn the U.S. could cede manufacturing leadership in green tech to China if it abandons renewables wholesale, and that risk is real in supply chains for panels, batteries, and turbines. Yet clinging to failing technologies or expensive subsidies is not a sensible counterstrategy to Beijing’s dominance. A better approach is to invest in technologies where America can lead on economics and security, not where it is dependent on foreign raw materials and forced supply chains.
That means doubling down on reliable, high-density power sources: small modular nuclear reactors, natural gas where appropriate, expanded LNG exports, and a pragmatic embrace of geothermal and advanced fossil technologies. These choices support the grid needs of a modern economy, including power-hungry AI data centers and manufacturing. Market-driven competition, not grand political projects, should decide winners and losers.
Ivanpah’s end is a moment to learn, not to gloat. We should study why costly central-planning experiments fail and stop treating energy policy as virtue signaling. If the goal is energy independence, affordability, and durable infrastructure, then policy must favor resilience and American competitiveness over photo ops and grants.
Let the politics be clear: conservatives should push for technology neutrality, tough cost-benefit accounting, and a focus on firm capacity. Subsidizing fashionable technologies until they collapse is not leadership; it is fiscal negligence and strategic drift. If Beijing wants to own the solar panel market, let them spend their investment; America should invest where it wins.
