More than a decade after it opened, the Ivanpah Solar Power Plant in California's Mojave Desert still fires up natural gas every morning to get running, and monitoring reports filed with state regulators continue to document hundreds of bird and bat deaths at the site each year. The sprawling facility, built with billions in federal backing during the Obama administration, was sold to the public as a landmark in clean energy. The record tells a different story.
The plant sits near the California-Nevada border in San Bernardino County, covering more than 4,000 acres of desert floor. Roughly 350,000 mirrors mounted on over 170,000 heliostats track the sun and reflect concentrated beams toward three massive towers. The heat generates electricity. It also generates something else: a zone of superheated air that federal researchers have documented incinerating birds in flight.
Fox News Digital reported that a 2016 U.S. Geological Survey video captured a bird trailing smoke as its feathers burned after passing through the concentrated solar beams, what the industry calls "solar flux." That same year, a federal study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found evidence of birds suffering feather damage and trauma consistent with exposure to intense heat near the towers.
Those findings were not a surprise. Environmental reviews conducted before construction anticipated some level of wildlife impact, including bird deaths linked to mirror collisions and the solar beams themselves, California Energy Commission documents show. The plant was approved and built anyway.
Lewis Grove, director of wind and energy policy at the American Bird Conservancy, told Fox News Digital the problem has not gone away.
"Bird mortality is still a significant concern at concentrated solar plants like Ivanpah. Public estimates are that thousands of birds are killed every year by this single facility."
Grove described the tradeoff as "generally not worth it for birds." Monitoring reports reviewed by Fox News Digital and filed with California regulators continue to document the toll, with hundreds of birds found dead at the site each year.
The wildlife damage extends beyond birds. Early monitoring reports showed dozens of protected desert tortoises went unaccounted for during initial operations, including animals held in controlled enclosures, according to California Energy Commission documents.
Even the Sierra Club, hardly a fossil-fuel lobby, has raised alarms. Julia Dowell of the Sierra Club was quoted in a previous Fox News Digital report calling the project what it is.
"The Ivanpah plant was a financial boondoggle and environmental disaster. [It] killed thousands of birds and tortoises. Not all renewable technologies are created equal."
That assessment from one of the nation's most prominent environmental organizations should have been enough to prompt a serious reckoning. Instead, the plant keeps operating.
For a facility marketed as clean energy, Ivanpah has a conspicuous fossil-fuel habit. The plant uses natural gas to start operations each day. And it uses far more than originally planned. Project documents show the facility was approved to use significantly less natural gas than it ultimately required. Operators later sought approval to increase usage by roughly 60 percent, citing the need to "maintain reliable operations," California Energy Commission filings reviewed by Fox News Digital show.
The result: Ivanpah produces roughly 25,000 to 30,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. That output is large enough to place the plant under California's cap-and-trade program, which requires major polluters to pay for their emissions. A "clean energy" project paying pollution penalties, the irony writes itself.
As we have previously covered, the Obama-era Ivanpah solar plant keeps draining taxpayers while California regulators refuse to pull the plug.
The price tag for this experiment was staggering. The project was built with more than $1.6 billion in federally backed loans, with hundreds of millions of dollars still outstanding. On top of that, the U.S. Department of the Treasury provided a $539 million grant to help build the facility, covering about 30 percent of construction costs.
Add it up: American taxpayers underwrote this project to the tune of well over $2 billion. In return, they got a facility that burns natural gas every morning, emits tens of thousands of metric tons of CO2 every year, and incinerates birds mid-flight.
NRG Energy, which operates the facility, said in a previous statement that it remains committed to providing renewable electricity. The company declined additional comment regarding environmental issues, Fox News Digital reported.
Here is where the story gets especially galling. Officials under both the Trump and Biden administrations have supported shutting the facility down, citing the high cost of its electricity compared to newer alternatives. That is a rare point of bipartisan agreement.
California regulators blocked those efforts. They argued the power Ivanpah provides is still needed to support the state's grid. The California Energy Commission told Fox News Digital that "the project remains in compliance with its environmental requirements, with wildlife impacts addressed through ongoing monitoring and coordination with federal and state agencies."
"In compliance" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The monitoring reports document hundreds of dead birds a year. Protected tortoises vanished from controlled enclosures. The plant burns 60 percent more natural gas than originally approved. But the paperwork is in order, so everything is fine.
Daniel Turner, founder of the energy advocacy group Power The Future, put a fine point on the regulatory imbalance at work.
"If oil and gas spills a drop, literally a drop, the entire operation is shut down. And to an extent that's a good thing. But you label something 'green' or 'clean' and all regulations are waived."
Turner's observation captures something broader than one solar plant in the desert. The entire green-energy apparatus operates under a different set of rules. An oil company that killed thousands of birds a year at a single site would face enforcement actions, congressional hearings, and wall-to-wall media coverage. A solar plant backed by the right political coalition gets a compliance letter and a pat on the back.
Environmental reviews before construction knew birds would die. The regulators approved it. Federal studies in 2016 confirmed the deaths. The regulators kept it open. Monitoring reports year after year documented the toll. The regulators called it compliant. The plant exceeded its natural-gas limits by 60 percent. The regulators approved the increase.
At every stage, the system bent to protect the project, not the wildlife, not the taxpayers, and not the grid ratepayers stuck with expensive electricity when cheaper alternatives exist.
Fox News Digital has indicated it will examine in a future installment how projects like Ivanpah were approved in the first place. That reporting should be worth watching. The exact amount of federally backed loans still outstanding has not been publicly specified. The names of the officials under both administrations who pushed to close the plant have not been disclosed. And the full scope of wildlife losses, the precise body count across all monitored years, remains unclear from publicly available documents.
What is clear is the pattern. A politically favored project, lavished with public money, shielded from the consequences that would shut down any conventional energy operation overnight. The label "clean" became a permission slip, for emissions, for wildlife destruction, and for a regulatory double standard that insults every taxpayer footing the bill.
When the government picks winners, the losers are always the same: the birds, the tortoises, and the people who pay the tab.
