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by Tiffany Lane
LAS VEGAS (KSNV) — A $2.2 billion solar power plant in the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas is drawing renewed scrutiny over whether it has delivered on promises of clean energy while relying heavily on taxpayer support to keep operating.
The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility sits just past Primm in California along Interstate 15, where drivers leaving Las Vegas can see what appears to be a vast line of mirrors in the desert.
Ivanpah was known as the world’s largest solar thermal power station when it opened in 2014, but it has faced ongoing disputes over performance and operating costs.
Daniel Turner of Power the Future questioned whether public money should be used to back high-risk energy projects.
“That’s the problem with Ivanpah, is that there is always a need for ingenuity and breakthrough technologies. But is it right for the government to use taxpayer money to subsidize risk? And this has been a risk. It has not worked and we’re never going to get our money back,” Turner said.
The project received a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy during the Obama administration’s stimulus program.
Investors also applied for a $540 million federal grant to finance the federal loan. Estimates have also raised concerns that Ivanpah could cost customers $100 million more a year in energy costs.
Turner pointed to reported efficiency levels as a key measure of the plant’s performance. “Reports have come out that they hit around 15 to 17% efficiency. And there’s no other investment that you can say, hey, it’s going to work only around a quarter of the time, or maybe a little bit less. Again, $2.2 billion for something that only works 17% of the time is a colossal failure,” he said.
Ivanpah uses about 350,000 mirrors to reflect sunlight to a central point to spin turbines and generate electricity. Stanford University civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobsen said the facility’s design has a major drawback. “Its main disadvantage is it does not have storage. As a result it has to use some gas to start up in the morning. Whereas if it had storage, it would not need any gas,” Jacobsen said.
Jacobsen said concentrated solar power plants are generally inexpensive, but those built in deserts typically include storage, which he said Ivanpah lacks. He said that leaves the facility outdated compared with photovoltaic solar technology. “Photovoltaics are like panels that you could put on your roof. You can put in a you know over a large area of land as well lots of them. They take sunlight convert that sunlight into electricity. And they’re very convenient because you can put them up pretty much anywhere. They are coupled usually with batteries so that because the sun doesn’t shine at night,” Jacobsen said.
The facility currently sells power to PG&E and Southern California Edison, but both utilities are trying to exit contracts that are not set to expire until 2039. The California Public Utilities Commission has not approved terminating the agreements, citing the hundreds of millions already paid into the facility by customers and concerns about grid stability.
Jacobsen argued that shutting down Ivanpah now could end up costing more, depending on what replaces it. “Yes, if we replaced it with gas which is most likely because California has the third highest gas prices in the United States and in the it would just be used intermittently especially. And so that would mean the gas would actually be more expensive. So it’s actually cheaper to keep it running,” he said.
Turner blamed California’s renewable energy standards for keeping demand for projects like Ivanpah in place. “California has very, very strict green energy targets, and your governor brags about them. So if you’re the electric grid producer, if you’re a PG and E and you have to produce x percentage of your megawatt hours from a quote, unquote green source, or you get fined. You will. So they’ll they need Ivan Potter hit their green requirements,” Turner said.
The debate over Ivanpah’s future continues as questions remain about whether the plant can justify its costs and whether taxpayers and customers will remain on the hook for keeping it running.
2026 Sinclair, Inc.

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