Farewell to Ivanpah, Where Incinerated Birds Catch Fire So Often That Locals Call Them ‘Streamers’

Once upon a time, the Oracle of Change and Shining Prince of the New World Order had money to give away to finance another one of the utopian visions he and his true believers planned to impose on the country in the name of the Climate Cult.

Through the auspices of his Department of Energy, Barack Obama generously awarded the handsome sum of $1.6B – with a ‘B’ – dollars in hard-earned taxpayer money to a pie-in-the-sky, gleaming Green grifting dream built on shining solar towers in the remote California desert. This fairytale climate cultish emerald city rising mystically in the scorching sands of the Mojave Desert was to be dubbed not Ivanhoe, but Ivanpah. 

The Prince so ordered, so bestowed his grift…excuse me. Gift. And so it was done.

Three glittering towers rose from the desert floor amid a shimmering circular landscape of over 350,000 reflective glass mirrors.

Somewhere between LA and Vegas, the desert suddenly turns into a giant shimmering mirror — the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System outside Primm, NV, catching the sun like it’s signaling spaceships.🛸 pic.twitter.com/0LAsZsqTFb

— Andy (@Andy_travels_US) August 9, 2025

And it was good.

…“With projects like this one, and others across this country, we are staking our claim to continued leadership in the new global economy,” Obama said. “And we’re putting Americans to work producing clean, home-grown American energy that will help lower our reliance on foreign oil and protect our planet for future generations.”

Then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar freed up large expanses of public land for the plant despite environmentalists’ concerns about wildlife habitat and the loss of open space.

Ivanpah was built on 5.6 square miles of mostly undisturbed public land that was home to desert tortoises, a species threatened with extinction, and other species.

Once in operation, the sheer technological wizardry of the plant’s myriad moving parts became obvious.

…The plant produces energy in a similar way to how most of the world’s electricity is made: using steam-turned turbines. Across three distinct sites, more than 300,000 software-controlled mirrors follow the path of the Sun, reflecting its rays onto the summits of three 459ft-tall towers. At the top of each of these towers is a boiler that is rapidly heated by the concentrated sunlight, producing high-temperature steam that is piped back down to turbines on the ground.

Also, almost as immediately, the drawbacks and shortcomings became glaringly apparent. In fact, so much so that only a year after this renewable wonder was full-scale ahead – 2015 – people were wondering if it hadn’t been subjected to what’s commonly known as a ‘bait and switch.’

For one thing, ‘green’ it was not. The ‘solar’ plant used natural gas to run the boilers, not to mention those awkward times when pesky things called ‘clouds’ blocked the sunlight completely, and they were finding out it needed even more than it was allowed by the agreement. 

The carbon-friendly solar array was generating twice as much carbon dioxide as the level power plants in California were authorized to operate at.

OOPS

A solar power plant at the center of the Obama administration’s push to reduce America’s carbon footprint has its own carbon pollution problem.

The administration’s initiative, which uses millions of taxpayer dollars to promote green energy, has been a boon for the Ivanpah plant in the Mojave Desert. But Ivanpah uses natural gas as a supplementary fuel, and data from the California Energy Commission show the plant burned enough of it in 2014 – its first year of operation – to emit more than 46,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

That’s nearly twice the pollution threshold at which power plants and factories in California are required to participate in the state’s cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions.

The same amount of natural gas burned at a conventional power plant would have produced enough electricity to meet the annual needs of 17,000 California homes – roughly a quarter of the Ivanpah plant’s total electricity projection for 2014.

One fellow basically said, ‘I think we got took.‘

…David Lamfrom, desert project manager of the National Parks Conservation Association, said information about the amount of natural gas used at Ivanpah shows that the plant is essentially a hybrid operation that requires both fossil fuel and sunshine to make electricity.

He said he doubts the project would have gone forward if it had been billed a hybrid plant.

“It feels like a bait and switch,” Lamfrom said. “This project was held up as a model of innovation. We didn’t sign up for greener energy. We signed up for green energy.”

At that point in time, the excess fuel usage wasn’t helping production, either, which only increased everyone’s sense of insult to injury.

…The plant produced just 59 percent of its annual power goal between July 1, 2014 and June 30 of this year. Ivanpah is supposed to generate 940,000 megawatt hours of electricity a year, enough to power about 140,000 California homes.

“It is a poorly performing hybrid,” Ula said.

Plant and U.S. Energy Department officials say production is improving and that Ivanpah is expected to reach its full output after about four years of operation.

The facility never did ‘scale up’ and produce the electricity that had been forecast. 

And now they’re pulling the plug on the whole ugly thing next year, after sinking more than $2.2B into it.

And whenever you hear environmentalists waxing poetic about how wonderful renewables are for the planet and its living creatures?

They’re lying for the money they’ll get. Just as the Sierra Club and the rest have sold their souls to the offshore wind Gods and abandoned the whales and sealife, no one at the World Wildlife Fund ever protested outside Ivanpah’s gates about the SIX THOUSAND BIRDS that were incinerated by the mirrors’ reflections ANNUALLY.

ANNUALLY

…According to the Association of Avian Veterinarians, the power plant “is believed to be responsible for at least 6,000 bird deaths each year.”

They get fried “if they fly in the area where the reflection is going up to the tower,” Smeloff explained

My God. The treachery and lies.

The carnage these fools countenance to indulge their lunacy.

As Gavin Newsom takes a taxpayer funded vacation at Climate Week in New York City, the environmental catastrophe that is the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California is shutting down.

The 2 BILLION dollar blight built on 3,500 pristine acres of Mojave desert has been… pic.twitter.com/8IlLXxNjXe

— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) September 23, 2025

…The 2 BILLION dollar blight built on 3,500 pristine acres of Mojave desert has been responsible for incinerating more than 60,000 birds, created TWICE the pollution of a typical power plant, created 86 jobs instead of the promised 2000, and will abandon 173,500 thermal collectors in the environment they were trying to save.

Frauds. The unconscionable frauds.

And all that toxic killing trash is going to be left when it stands.

It’s criminal, yet it happens again, and again, and again.

…Just about every impulsive, crazy clean energy project the left has dreamed up and foisted on the American public has failed, or dramatically underperformed – the electric car versus the internal combustion engine car; solar power cannot replace clean natural gas or abundant coal power.

The weird guy in my neighborhood who used to drive a vegetable oil powered 1970’s Mercedes is just one example.

Unconscionable.

What makes it even more infuriating is that you can’t even expect they’ll have the decency to clean up the ruinous rubbish afterward.

Ed, David, John, and I love bringing you the best in conservative news and views, be it breaking or just so darn interesting, that we had to share.

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