There's a massive solar power plant glowing in the Mojave Desert near the California–Nevada border, and it's costing you money whether you know it exists or not. It’s called Ivanpah, and it’s Barack Obama's $2.2 billion monument to green energy hubris, a project so economically broken that both shutting it down and keeping it running costs big money. You truly cannot win either way.
Spread across more than 4,000 acres of desert, Ivanpah uses roughly 350,000 mirrors mounted on over 170,000 heliostats to reflect sunlight into three towers. When it opened in 2014, concentrated solar power at this scale — nearly 400 megawatts of nameplate capacity — was considered cutting-edge. The Obama administration fast-tracked it as part of the post-2008 stimulus push, backing it with a $1.6 billion federally guaranteed loan and a roughly $539 million Treasury grant covering about 30% of construction costs. Tax credits and accelerated depreciation sweetened the deal further for private investors such as NRG Energy and Google.
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The problem? Between $730 million and $780 million of that federal loan remains unpaid. If the plant shuts down, taxpayers are on the hook for those hundreds of millions. If it stays open, electricity customers keep paying roughly $100 million more per year than they would for power from newer, cheaper solar alternatives.
Some choice.
"This project makes no economic sense to keep afloat, and the market itself has shown that," said Daniel Turner, founder of energy advocacy group Power The Future. "At some point, you have to stop throwing good money after bad," Turner added, calling Ivanpah "a boondoggle, like most of California's large projects are a boondoggle," and arguing it survives purely for political reasons.
He's not wrong.
The project was fast-tracked during the Obama-era stimulus push, prompting concerns about the speed of its environmental review. It was part of a broader federal effort to boost the economy following the 2008 financial crisis and expand renewable energy.
It represented a significant scale-up of relatively new technology, expanding from smaller pilot projects to a nearly 400-megawatt facility — a leap that introduced uncertainties about long-term performance.
But the industry moved on faster than expected.
Cheaper and more efficient photovoltaic solar panels, often paired with battery storage, quickly overtook the concentrated solar technology used at Ivanpah — leaving the plant at a competitive disadvantage.
Originally expected to hit a capacity factor of 25% to 30%, Ivanpah managed just 17% in 2023, and last year, an audit by California regulators found recurring forced outages and equipment reliability concerns.
"There's no role for a concentrated solar plant without storage," Stanford energy expert Mark Jacobson said, pointing out that modern systems store energy for overnight use — something Ivanpah simply cannot do.
The project was such garbage; not only did the Trump administration try to shut it down, but so did the Biden administration. PG&E has described its Ivanpah contracts as "uneconomic resources," and argued that terminating them would save customers money. California's Public Utilities Commission has blocked those efforts anyway, warning that closure could strand more than $300 million in ratepayer-funded transmission infrastructure, and threaten grid reliability.
This isn't the first Obama-era green energy disaster, of course. Solyndra collapsed in 2011 after taking $535 million in federal loan guarantees. Ivanpah is just bigger, messier, and harder to walk away from. As Borenstein noted, "these are long-lived assets with long-term contracts" — and "even if they no longer make economic sense, you can't easily just walk away."
That's the trap Obama built. Taxpayers are stuck holding the bill either way.
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