As its name implies, the Ivanpah Concentrated Solar Thermal Power Plant in the Mojave Desert is supposed to provide renewable energy from the rays of the sun.

But on March 26, 2014, Ivanpah applied to the California Energy Commission and the California Air Resources Board to increase, from one to five hours, its auxiliary gas-fired boiler’s use of pre-warmed fluid for its steam generators.  Ivanpah generates power for about 12 hours of solar insulation each day, of which four to five hours are peak generation. Ivanpah is projected to generate electricity for 249 days each year due to cloud cover, desert windstorms, nighttime and other constraints.

So Ivanpah has morphed into a hybrid natural gas-solar power plant.  But it shouldn’t be considered like a Toyota Prius car that has a nearly non-polluting hybrid gas-electric engine. It is more like a 1950’s hot rod without a modern catalytic converter in the exhaust tailpipe.

Ivanpah denied any environmental impacts because a similar-sized natural gas power plant would emit greater tons of C02 per year. Ivanpah’s application to the Energy Commission stated that “the Project’s impacts therefore round down to 0.0” (Section 3.2).

The application asserted that Ivanpah met all applicable state and federal ambient air quality standards. But so did many of the coal-fired power plants in Arizona and Utah that Ivanpah was designed to replace that still serve the Los Angeles area with electricity, albeit with greater C02 emissions.

The application further said emissions of particulates (soot) exceeded regulatory standards, but the background concentrations already exceeded the standards anyway. The application said, “However, PM10 (particulate) impacts from Ivanpah operations are very small, and will not contribute significantly to the exceedance of an AAQS (Ambient Air Quality Standards).”

Worse air quality

Yet according to an April 26, 2010 article in the Las Vegas Sun, “New Wave of Solar Plants Could Worsen Air Quality,” there were 60 new solar plants planned to build out in the Ivanpah area, many of which also would be solar-thermal power plants.

The relatively small impacts from Ivanpah alone might not exceed air quality standards. But the cumulative impacts from massing solar thermal power plants all in one area of Southwestern Nevada and Southeastern California likely will exceed air-quality standards. Ivanpah could have been sued by environmental groups on the grounds of cumulative impacts and possibly stopped.

But as noted in the first article in this series, on October 4, 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 226, amending the California Environmental Quality Act so that “cumulative” impacts from a number of related public projects do not disqualify a project from categorical exemptions under certain circumstances.

Like much of urban California, Las Vegas is located in an arid basin surrounded by mountains. (For smog to become a visible problem, there needs to be a topographical smog trap such as an air basin.)

The emerging problem of massing solar thermal-power plants originates with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s policy of designating specified areas for solar energy development that do not create visual impacts on highway visual corridors or on the natural view sheds of national or state parks.

Yet massing thermal-solar power plants runs counter to Paracelsus’ first principle of toxicology: concentrating anything will make it toxic.

Ivanpah solar now ‘dirty power’

With a number of other large solar projects queuing up behind Ivanpah to locate nearby, the ultimate result could be just exporting Los Angeles’ air pollution to the desert 35 miles from Las Vegas, the Lake Mead Recreation Area and the Mojave Desert National Reserve.

Las Vegas so far has not been initially opposed the Ivanpah plant near the Nevada borderline with California because of the jobs solar projects would create for the area. Nevada’s unemployment rate in March was the second worst in the country, at 8.5 percent; California’s was fourth worst, at 8.1 percent. So the jobs will be appreciated in both states.

Ivanpah received a $660 million federal tax refund under the 30 percent Investment Tax Credit in Lieu of Production Tax Credits as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (President Obama’s  2009 federal Stimulus Program).

It has also been reported that Google profited from tax credits for its $750 million renewable energy investment plan.

California’s environmental policies are proving to be more successful reducing relative regional air pollution, not overall pollution — with the dirty air just shifted to the Las Vegas-Lake Mead areas.

It’s supposed to be the latest thing in solar power.

Gov. Jerry Brown and other state politicians tout the new Ivanpah Concentrated Solar Thermal Power Plant in the Mojave Desert as a showcase of the state’s green-energy future. The plant will help the state meet the target of 33 percent of state electricity coming from renewable sources, as mandated by a 2011 law signed by the governor.

Unfortunately, it’s about as “green” as a souped-up 1957 Chevy hot rod belching exhaust fumes without a catalytic converter. Southern California hot rodders used to race their modified cars on empty, dry lakebeds in the desert. And the Ivanpah solar also is located on a dry lake-bed near the California-Nevada borderline 35 miles west of Las Vegas.

Public TV station KCET estimated Ivanpah’s increased emissions:

“The plant’s total CO2 footprint from burning natural gas would rise to just above 92,200 tons per year, approximately equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas output of 16,500 average passenger cars.” 

Ivanpah’s application to the Desert Air Resources Board says it will emit 95,545 tons of Greenhouse Gases per year that would contribute to smog, excluding any carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Ivanpah is the largest solar power plant in the world, encompassing 4,000-acres of land with 173,400 heliostatic mirrors used to focus heat toward three central towers rising as high as 40-story buildings, each driving a steam turbine to generate electricity.

Different types of solar

There are four different types of solar technology, as described by Go Solar California, an initiative of the state government:

1. “Photovoltaic (PV) systems, which convert sunlight directly to electricity by means of PV cells made of semiconductor materials.
2. “Concentrating solar power (CSP) systems, which concentrate the sun’s energy using reflective devices such as troughs or mirror panels to produce heat that is then used to generate electricity.
3. “Solar water heating systems, which contain a solar collector that faces the sun and either heats water directly or heats a ‘working fluid’ that, in turn, is used to heat water.
4. “Transpired solar collectors, or ‘solar walls,’ which use solar energy to preheat ventilation air for a building.”

Ivanpah uses No. 2: CSP, also called “solar thermal technology.” It uses heat to produce steam-generated electricity.

Turbines

Each of Ivanpah’s three steam turbines has auxiliary boilers that are used to pre-heat fluid in the early morning, to keep fluid warm at night, and to boost production especially during cloudy days or when there are desert dust storms.  Natural gas is needed to heat the auxiliary boilers when the sun is down or covered by clouds.

You have to leave a thermal solar power plant idling on natural gas fuel rather than on clean solar power.

As reported in the Sacramento Bee, In Feb. 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown certified Ivanpah as a special “leadership project” that qualified for fast tracking under the 2011 California Environmental Quality Act reforms. The Bee wrote:

“Brown’s office said the California Air Resources Board has certified that the $1 billion solar project will not generate additional greenhouse gas emissions during construction, and that it will provide enough electricity to power about 264,000 homes.”

Fast-tracking

By fast-tracking Ivanpah’s construction, opposition to the impact of the project on bird kills, desert tortoise habitat, and potentially dangerous glare from its mirrors on commercial passenger aircraft was overcome. But now that the project is operational, another loophole in environmental laws designed specifically for solar projects like Ivanpah is coming into light.

Burning natural gas to pre-heat the boilers is generating 383.7 tons of carbon dioxide (C02) per operating day at Ivanpah. C02 is classified as a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.

This was overlooked by regulators at the California Energy Commission, large electric utilities such as PG&E and Edison that have signed 25-year contracts to buy solar power from Ivanpah, and even co-investor Google Inc. that put $168 million into the project.

Back on October 4, 2011, Brown signed Senate Bill 226, amending the California Environmental Quality Act so that “cumulative” impacts from a number of related public projects do not disqualify a project from categorical exemptions under certain circumstances.  The bill’s author was state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, who chaired the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality at that time. Simitian’s constituents included Google.

Brown signed SB226 into law over the opposition of his own party’s 2010 political platform.  Oddly however, no opposition was filed by environmental organizations to SB226 while in committee review in the Legislature.

By 2012, Brown sanctified more CEQA reforms to fast track pet projects by calling them “the Lord’s work.”

Ivanpah was cleared to go online.

Part 2 will be on Ivanpah as a hybrid gas-solar plant