The Ivanpah solar project, partly owned by Google, is now seeking a $539 million federal grant to help pay off a controversial $1.6 billion loan it has already received from taxpayers. The project, notorious for frying birds in midair with intense solar rays that are reflected within an array of mirrors, joins Solyndra on a list of failing “green” projects funded by the controversial, giant Obama administration federal stimulus of February 2009.
In July 2012, scientist Lindsay Leveen wrote at Breitbart News that Ivanpah risked being “Solyndra times three” because the sheer scale of the investment was not justified by the amount of energy the new solar project was expected to produce. “My reasoning is that the 392 megawatt (nominally 400 megawatt) power station will cost 3 billion dollars to build…the higher cost figure of the PV [photovoltaic] solar farm might be 1.4 billion dollars, which is 1.6 billion dollars less than the BrightSource project [at Ivanpah],” Leveen wrote.
“The level of wasted investment in Ivanpah is three times the amount of wasted tax payer money we gave to Solyndra. That is why Ivanpah equals Solyndra times three.”
Fox News reports that the company blames cloudier-than-expected weather for Ivanpah’s poor output and notes: “…taxpayers will receive none of the millions in revenues the plant will generate over the next 30 years.”
Senior Editor-at-Large Joel B. Pollak edits Breitbart California and is the author of the new ebook, Wacko Birds: The Fall (and Rise) of the Tea Party, available for Amazon Kindle.
Follow Joel on Twitter: @joelpollak
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