Trump and Biden both want this California solar facility to close. The state has other plans

The electricity it makes is expensive, its technology has been superseded, and it’s incinerating thousands of birds mid-flight each year. The Trump administration wants to see this unusual power plant closed, and in a rare instance of alignment, the Biden administration did, too.

But the state of California is insisting the Ivanpah power plant in the Mojave Desert stay open for at least 13 more years. It’s an indication of just how much electricity artificial intelligence and data centers are demanding.

Ivanpah’s owners, which include NRG Energy, Google and BrightSource, had agreed with their main customer, Pacific Gas & Electric, to end their contract and largely close Ivanpah. But last month, the California Public Utilities Commission unanimously rejected that agreement, citing concerns about reliability of the grid to deliver electricity. The decision will effectively force two of Ivanpah’s three units to remain running rather than shutting down this year.

PG&E and the federal government had argued that closing would save ratepayers and taxpayers money compared with paying for Ivanpah’s electricity until 2039, when the contract expires. But some experts and stakeholders agreed with the state’s call, noting that the troubled power plant is still providing electricity at a moment when the state has little to spare.

“We’re seeing massive electricity demand, especially from the great need for data centers, and we’re seeing grid reliability issues, so all in all, I think this was a wise move,” said Dan Reicher, a senior scholar at Stanford. “Having said that, I think reasonable people can differ on this one — it’s a closer call.”

Ivanpah was the largest plant of its kind in the world when it opened to great fanfare in 2014. The 386-megawatt facility uses a vast array of about 170,000 mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto towers, creating heat that spins turbines to generate electricity. This is known as solar thermal, because it uses the heat of the sun.

But the plant has been plagued by problems nearly from the start. The mirror-and-tower technology that once seemed so promising was outpaced by flat photovoltaic solar panels, which soon proved cheaper and more efficient and became the industry standard.

Ivanpah has no on-site battery storage, which means it mainly makes power while the sun is shining, and it relies on natural gas to fire up its boilers each morning.

The plant also developed a reputation as a wildlife killer, with a 2016 report from The Times finding about 6,000 birds die each year after colliding with Ivanpah’s 40-story towers — or from instant incineration when they fly into its concentrated beams of sunlight.

Some of the 347,000 garage door-sized mirrors

Despite these issues, the CPUC determined the facility must stay online to help the state meet “tight electricity conditions” expected in the coming years, including surging demand from data centers and artificial intelligence, building and transportation electrification, and hydrogen production. Ivanpah qualifies as clean energy and California has committed to 100% clean energy by 2045.

The state’s most recent Integrated Resources Plan, which looks ahead at how it will meet energy needs, “would dictate that Ivanpah should remain online in light of the current uncertainty regarding reliability,” the CPUC wrote in its December resolution.

The five-member decision came despite PG&E’s assertion ratepayers will save money if it closes, a conclusion generally supported by an independent review.

It also came despite support for Ivanpah’s closure from both the Biden and Trump administrations, which rarely converge on the issue of energy. Construction of the $2.2-billion plant was backed by a $1.6-billion federal loan guarantee that has not yet been fully repaid.

How much remains on that loan has not been made public, but an internal audit reviewed by The Times indicates it may be as much as $780 million.

In the final weeks of his term, Biden’s Department of Energy helped negotiate terminating the contract between PG&E and Ivanpah’s owners. Trump’s Department of Energy — which has been adversarial toward renewables such as wind and solar — urged California to accept that deal.

“Continued operation of the Ivanpah Projects is not in the interest of California or its customers, nor is it in the interest of the United States and its taxpayers,” Gregory Beard, a senior advisor with the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing, wrote in a Nov. 24 letter to the CPUC.

Yet the California agency pointed to Trump’s policies among its reasons for keeping Ivanpah open. Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum will increase prices for new energy technologies and could delay the expansion of the nation’s energy grid, the agency said. Trump also ended tax credits for solar, wind and other renewable energy projects in a move that could reduce up to 300 gigawatts of nationwide build-out by 2035, the CPUC said.

In August, Trump’s Interior Department effectively halted wind and solar development on federal land in favor of nuclear, gas and coal. That decision could affect Ivanpah, which sits on nearly 3,500 acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management near the California-Nevada border.

These “shifting federal priorities” are creating uncertainty in the market, the CPUC noted in its resolution. California ratepayers have already paid in excess of $333 million for grid updates to support the Ivanpah project, and terminating its contracts “risks stranding sunk infrastructure costs,” it said.

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System concentrated solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert in 2023.

Stanford expert Reicher, who also served at the Energy Department under the Clinton administration and as director of climate change and energy initiatives at Google, said from an energy perspective, the decision is sound.

“I lean toward keeping it online, running it well and making improvements, particularly as we face an electricity shortage the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades,” he said.

Reicher noted that while concentrated solar has fallen out of favor in the U.S., it was seen as an attractive investment at the time. Some places are still building concentrated solar facilities, among them China, Mexico and Dubai, and it can have some advantages over photovoltaics, he said. For example, many new concentrated solar facilities have a higher capacity factor, meaning they can generate electricity more hours of the year.

Stakeholders such as Pat Hogan, president of CMB Ivanpah Asset Holdings and an early investor in the plant, also applauded the CPUC decision. While Ivanpah has never operated at its target of 940,000 megawatt-hours of clean energy per year, it is still providing electricity, he said. The plant produced about 726,000 MWh in 2024, the most recent year for which there are data, according to the California Energy Commission.

“It doesn’t operate at the optimum performance that was originally modeled, but it still generates electricity for 120,000 homes in California,” Hogan said.

Hogan said terminating the power purchase agreements would leave investors and taxpayers in the dust, benefiting the utility company and the plant owners. The plan would have converted a “partially performing federal loan into a near-total loss event,” he wrote in a formal complaint filed with the Energy Department’s Office of the Inspector General.

Others said solar photovoltaic and battery storage are the best, most cost-effective way to secure California’s energy future. The state has invested heavily in both, but Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and the CPUC should work to ensure more are brought online quickly, said Sean Gallagher, senior vice president of policy at the Solar Energy Industries Assn., a national trade group.

At the same time, bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., should work to stop the federal solar slowdown, which has placed an estimated 39% of California’s planned new capacity for the next five years in “permitting limbo,” Gallagher said.

“The CPUC’s decision highlights the precarious energy position California is in, with electricity prices and electricity demand rising at historically fast rates,” he said.

But Beard, of the Energy Department, criticized the agency decision as a “continuance of California’s bad policies that drive up energy bills.”

“California’s decision to keep this uneconomic and costly resource open is bad for taxpayers and worse for ratepayers,” Beard said in a statement to The Times.

He declined to say whether the federal government plans to appeal the decision, but said his office “has been working closely with the parties involved to ensure maximum repayment of U.S. taxpayer dollars while driving affordability through customer savings.”

For its part, PG&E said the company is now evaluating next steps.

Thousands of software-controlled heliostats concentrate the sunlight on a boiler.

“Ending these agreements would have saved customers money compared to the cost of keeping them for the remainder of their terms,” spokesperson Jennifer Robison said in an email.

NRG spokesperson Erik Linden said Ivanpah’s ownership has continued to invest in the facility and “remains steadfast in its commitment to providing reliable renewable energy to the state of California.” The existing power purchase agreements remain in effect and the plant will operate under their terms for the duration of the agreements, he said.

It’s not the first time California has delayed the retirement of a power facility over concerns about system reliability. Last month, the California Coastal Commission struck a landmark deal with PG&E that will extend the life of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo until at least 2030. It was originally slated to close last year.

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