One Of America’s Priciest Green Boondoggles May Be Going Offline After Sucking Up Subsidies And Incinerating Birds

One of the most expensive green energy projects ever undertaken in American history looks like it is now on borrowed time after eating up massive amounts of taxpayer dollars and killing thousands of birds.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) — a major utility company — announced in January that it is terminating power purchase contracts with the owners of Southwestern California’s Ivanpah Solar Power facility, a massive and unique solar project that received hundreds of millions of subsidy dollars as it launched in 2014. Just over a decade after it started operations, the facility appears to be headed toward its demise after killing thousands of birds because it could not provide the utility sufficiently cheap energy.

“PG&E determined that ending the agreements at this time will save customers money,” the company said in its Jan. 17 statement on the plant. The original owners of the plant — which cost about $2.2 billion to build — included Google and NRG Energy, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The Los Angeles Times reported in 2016 that the Ivanpah project killed an average of 6,000 birds each year, with some of the unlucky creatures colliding with the development’s 40-story towers and others being incinerated instantly upon flying through concentrated sunlight while chasing prey. The project received tax breaks, a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Obama Department of Energy (DOE) and a further $535 million subsidy from the Obama Department of Transportation (DOT), but it failed to reach advertised power output levels, according to analysis by Benjamin Zycher, an energy-focused senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

“Ivanpah Solar Generating Station Units 1 & 3, two of the three units of the 386 [megawatt] facility located in the Mojave Desert, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy, have finalized negotiations with PG&E to terminate their two long-term purchase power agreements, which will provide significant savings for California ratepayers,” a spokesperson for NRG said in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The concentrating solar power project was an innovative public-private partnership uniting government entities with private business in the advancement of renewable energy. When the power purchase agreements were signed in 2009, the prices were competitive, but advancements over time in photovoltaics and battery storage have led to more efficient, cost effective and flexible options for producing reliable clean energy. Once deactivated, the units will be decommissioned so that the site can potentially be repurposed for more conventional renewable energy production.”Other than causing numerous bird deaths, the redirected concentrated sunlight that is central to the project’s operation almost caused a severe problem when a misalignment led to that concentrated energy being focused on the wrong part of a tower, resulting in a small fire that forced the closure of the plant for several hours. Moreover, the project also gave off a glare strong enough to affect the vision of pilots flying far overhead.

The project, which was built to reduce emissions and provide energy from a non-fossil fuel source, also used considerable quantities of natural gas to operate, according to UtilityDive. In fact, the Ivanpah solar project used enough natural gas in 2014 to qualify for California’s cap-and-trade emissions program, but it was not covered by the policy because the gas it burned at night to keep itself running was not counted toward its allowance for fossil fuel use.

In 2016, local California news outlet The Press-Enterprise reported that emissions from the facility’s natural gas use increased by nearly 50% in 2015, and that the plant’s gas consumption through the first three quarters of 2016 was up 7% relative to the same time period in the year prior.

Google did not respond immediately to a request for comment.