Overpriced Solar Project Burns Up Birds

Everyone knows that enviromoonbats kill birds — prominently including our national symbol, the bald eagle — with their hideous, noisy, inefficient, and massively taxpayer-subsidized wind turbines (see here, here, here, and here). But did you know they also kill birds with their comparably inefficient solar boondoggles?

A giant solar-power project officially opening this week in the California desert is the first of its kind, and may be among the last, in part because of growing evidence that the technology it uses is killing birds.

The government has flushed massive fortunes down solar boondoggles that could never stand on their own two feet under free market conditions. The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station received a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee. For your money, you will get fewer birds, until it inevitably goes bankrupt.

The $2.2 billion solar farm, which spans over five square miles of federal land southwest of Las Vegas, includes three towers as tall as 40-story buildings. Nearly 350,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect sunlight onto boilers atop the towers, creating steam that drives power generators.

Extravagantly expensive plants like this are being built not only because of government financial support, but because of lunatic legislation. A state law in California requires that one third of electricity come from “renewable” (i.e., favored by liberals) sources by 2020, no matter how much it costs consumers.

Utility-scale solar plants have come under fire for their costs–Ivanpah costs about four times as much as a conventional natural gas-fired plant but will produce far less electricity—and also for the amount of land they require.

That makes for expensive power. Experts have estimated that electricity from giant solar projects will cost at least twice as much as electricity from conventional sources. But neither the utilities that have contracted to buy the power nor state regulators have disclosed what the price will be, only that it will be passed on to electricity customers.

These customers include not only private homes, but whatever businesses have not yet been driven out of the state by the single-party system of left-wing extremists that has become entrenched in power thanks to massive Third World immigration displacing much of the native population.

The heat around the towers can reach 1,000°F. The effect on birds is predictable.