A concentrated solar plant in the desert between LA and Las Vegas, Ivanpah was supposed to last 30 years. Cutting that down to little over a decade must hurt the depreciation schedule.
From 2014:
The US’s 392MW Ivanpah Solar Electric system, a breakthrough project in concentrating solar power (CSP), has now reached full commercial operation…The project has an expected life span of 30 years.
The facility was also had a reputation for frying birds.
The Fall of Icarus: Ivanpah’s Solar Controversy https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/fall-icarus-ivanpahs-solar-controversy At 3,500 acres, Ivanpah is more than four times as large as New York City’s Central Park and would cover more than 2,600 football fields…Unsuspecting birds fly through Ivanpah’s airspace, where the superheated air between the heliostats and the towers can reach temperatures as high as 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Flesh catches fire as the birds are ignited in midair. Indeed, surveys of bird deaths at Ivanpah reveal that the facility is responsible for deaths of a wide variety of birds, including the common Mourning Dove, the pink-throated Anna’s Hummingbird, and the Greater Roadrunner, the inspiration for the famous cartoon speed demon.
Ivanpah’s owners haven’t paid off the project’s $1.6 billion federal loan, and it’s unclear whether they’ll be able to do so…It’s possible Ivanpah’s third and final tower will close too. An Edison spokesperson told me the utility is in “ongoing discussions” with the project’s owners and the federal government over ending the utility’s contract.
I never thought the design was scalable. It seems it was a test project and nobody wanted it. But I don’t know what the engineers were thinking, they should have known better. Stick towers in the air and heat it up with solar to produce steam which turned turbines? Well not all ideas are good ones but I blame the engineers for even building this one.
I don’t think that was the original intent. The thermal solar facilities that can generate power at night usually use molten salt as the working fluid and the hot salt is stored in tanks, so they can generate power after the sun goes down. Ivanpah does not use that technology. I’m pretty sure it is just a water/steam boiler and steam turbine configuration. That is not very useful when the sun is low in the sky or after sunset.
The Crescent Dunes thermal solar facility in Nevada uses the molten salt and storage system, but that plant has had its share of problems, too. Crescent Dunes has been in and out of bankruptcy and forced to shut down for extended periods since it went into service.
Ivanpah is supposed to produce 1079 GWh per year, but it has never achieved that level of yearly performance. The most the combined plants (3 units) have produced in one year (2020) was 856 GWh. The plant has averaged 732 GWh per year since 2015.
Ivanpah also burns natural gas to help start up the plant every day. From the EIA consumption numbers, I figure the Ivanpah solar plant produces 65,000 metric tons of CO2 every year. That’s a little ironic for a green technology.
In the competition between solar thermal and solar PV, it looks like PV technology is the clear winner. But even the solar PV plants aren’t dispatchable at all hours of the day and night.
As an experiment is has provided a lot of good real life data points to guide any future similar plans, if any. (There are at least a couple of dozen other concentrated solar plants, mostly much smaller)
We have lots of solar PV, a number of solar PV+batteries and these seem like clear winners.