S4E3: Ivanpah Solar to shut down

Uncorrected Transcript

0:00:01 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555
0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Neil's the Desert Protection Podcast.
0:00:46 - (Reporter):If you've driven to Las Vegas on the 15, then you've probably seen this thousands of mirrors and these huge 400 foot towers.
0:00:55 - (Chris Clarke): We're standing on the site of the proposed Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station, which would remove about 3,3600 acres of this old growth creosote habitat and replace it with an industrial facility consisting of more than 170,000 mirrored heliostats on 12 foot pedestals that would focus the sun's light on three boilers atop 459 foot towers. But critics say the Ivan Paw solar electric plant in the Mojave Desert is causing some disturbing problems with local wildlife.
0:01:33 - (Reporter): So it's really no wonder conservationist David Lamfrom is opposed to Ivanpah. He isn't surprised by a new report from the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory that found Ivanpah, with all its light, may act as a mega trap, attracting and killing birds, butterflies and insects. One heartbreak after another. They built this project in one of the most important places in the country for the desert tortoise. And after that sacrifice was made, we continue learning that more bad things are happening here in California's vast Mojave Desert.
0:02:06 - (Reporter): Solar isn't the only thing growing. Even though the desert seems big, when you start cutting it up and fragmenting it, it can really affect how the species and the animals and the plants both are able to survive in the long run. And while environmentalists generally support the idea of large solar plants, many want habitats like this one to stay intact. We should be reusing areas that have already been disturbed, old mining sites, for example, either on homes, on businesses, parking lots.
0:02:38 - (Reporter): But BrightSource has already presold energy to parts of Southern California, and they plan to flip the switch at the end of the year.

0:02:46 - (Chris Clarke): On my first summer in the Mojave many years ago, mourning the end of my marriage and the prior and not coincidental death of our dog, Zeke, I moved into a 700 square foot house in a hamlet of about 15 people in a long Mojave desert valley. The nearest stoplight was 20 miles away across the state line.
0:03:09 - (Chris Clarke): The house had no cooling to speak of. At the end of the day, I would venture into the yard and the Nighthawks would be there, controlling the local population of flying insects, drawing lines against the curvature of the sky. It would get to 110 degrees and higher in my little house at night, and on the hottest of those nights I would throw a pillow and a gallon of water into my Jeep and drive into Nevada, climbing about 1500ft into a forest of Joshua trees, and I would sleep there in the relative cool.
0:03:47 - (Chris Clarke): One night, in my slightly higher refuge across the state line, I watched a wall of thunderheads as they built on the eastern horizon. Night fell and the sky was sable flecked with a million stars. Except for its eastern edge, that view was full of those self same thunderheads, only now they were illuminated from within a hundred bright flashes of lightning per minute. But there was no thunder. I judged, and it turned out later I judged correctly, that the storm was watering the Magayan Rim country in Arizona.
0:04:22 - (Chris Clarke): That storm flooded the Grand Canyon's tributaries, rearranged waterfalls in Havasupai Canyon. I would find all that out in a few days. That night, though, I merely knew that all the events in my life had brought me to that moment, that sublime panorama of cataclysm. On the most peaceful night I had known in months, I woke to the sound of cactus wrens in the Joshua trees. I drove home. Against my better judgment, I checked my email.
0:04:54 - (Chris Clarke): One message in particular made me stop reading further. Dear Chris, I don't know if you've heard of this project. FYI, as the Ivan PA Solar project moved through the planning stages and towards implementation, those of us who cared to protect desert landscapes faced off against those who felt the threat of climate change outweighed the importance of protecting species diversity in the desert, or for that matter, almost anywhere else.
0:05:24 - (Chris Clarke): Some of these people, including some revered climate activists, were bluntly cavalier about the damage to the desert that would result from a massive conversion of habitat to energy production. The split happened even within groups. Few people fought harder to keep the Ivanpah solar power plant from being built than a handful of Sierra Club members in the California Nevada Desert committee. But in October 2010, the leadership of the Sierra Club announced it would not oppose Ivanpah's construction.
0:05:55 - (Chris Clarke): The leadership sent out a message to members that began, no one said that clean energy would be easy. The message ended with an admonition warning club members not to speak to the press on behalf of the club, lest the club's weak stance be further watered down before 2014, when the project went online. Much of the early opposition to Ivanpah Solar was driven by the project's feared impact on desert tortoises, which were at that time a threatened species on both the federal and California endangered species lists.
0:06:32 - (Chris Clarke): It's since been downgraded to endangered in California. The Avanpah Valley was once a stronghold for the tortoise. One biologist called it the last best habitat for the species. Tortoises had been decimated across their wider range by habitat disruption, roadkills, a deadly respiratory disease that swept tortoise populations like a prairie fire, and the longtime practice among desert visitors of pilfering the desert of its tortoise population to take home as pets and ravens.
0:07:06 - (Chris Clarke): Ravens eat baby tortoises. A half dozen ravens can wipe out all the young tortoises over many square miles of desert for years. But tortoises were still abundant in the Ivanpah Valley. In 2010, when the Oakland based solar company BrightSource, along with its partners Bechtel, Google and NRG began building the Ivanpah Solar Plant, the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service figured the tortoises were doing well enough that the builders could move, injure or kill, AKA take in endangered species jargon, about three dozen tortoises across the plant's five square miles without threatening the survival of the species.
0:07:49 - (Chris Clarke): And then the crew started finding lots more tortoises than expected. A couple weeks into construction, the 39th tortoise on the site was found. Feds stepped in. Scientists consulted the updated data, scribbled notes at meetings, sent memos back and forth between agencies, contractors and the project proponent. And finally, the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service made a decision. BrightSource and its partners could move, injure or kill as many as 1100 tortoises in the course of construction.
0:08:24 - (Chris Clarke): Most of the anticipated tortoise deaths were expected to be small juveniles or viable eggs, crushed underground in their burrows and never found. By the time construction finished, around 65 adult and 110 juvenile tortoises had been evicted from the solar project's footprint. An unknown number were killed. Some people made arguments that there was plenty of remaining habitat for tortoises. But those arguments rang hollow as one solar plant after another was built within a few miles of the Ivanpah solar plant.
0:08:58 - (Chris Clarke): A crucial part of the last best tortoise habitat in the Mojave had been excised. Many environmentalists, it seemed, couldn't bring themselves to understand why that mattered. But this wasn't the worst damage Ivanpah Solar would do to the desert. It looks like a mirage in the middle of the Mojave Desert, but it's actually 170,000 sets of mirrors the size of garage doors called heliostats. How much power do you get from each one?
0:09:28 - (Chris Clarke): So this project will fuel 140,000 California homes. So effectively, one heliostat can power one California home. Tom Doyle is the CEO of NRG, the company behind this $2.2 billion solar project. It's now under fire because the heat it produces, up to 900 degrees, is charring the feathers of birds flying through, often causing them to crash and die. Workers on site call them streamers because of the smoke plume created when the birds ignite in midair.
0:10:01 - (Chris Clarke): In September 2013, the first of three units of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station came online for a test run, delivering power to California's grid for the first time. That month, biologists found 34 bird carcasses on the site, 15 of which had been badly burned. The cause of death for the other 19 birds was somewhat vague. Some might have collided with plant infrastructure, like the hundreds of thousands of mirrors aimed at the sky, likely indistinguishable from the wild blue yonder other than being in the wrong direction.
0:10:38 - (Chris Clarke): Others may well have suffered less dramatic but still deadly injuries from concentrated sunlight blinding, perhaps, or denaturing of the feathers past the point where they could work. In the following month, according to fish and Wildlife, 141 dead birds were found on the site, 47 of which showed injuries clearly attributable to the concentrated sunlight. The following April, Fish and Wildlife's Wildlife Forensics Lab, armed with the accumulation of dead birds found on the Ivanpah site, released a report suggesting the Ivanpah was functioning as a so called ecological trap for the birds.
0:11:15 - (Chris Clarke): The bright light of the plant's concentrated solar energy attracted insects, which attracted insectivorous birds, which were then injured as they flew into areas of extreme heat focused by the heliostats. That was when the world's press took notice. Ivanpah and its nasty habit of incinerating birds graced the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the New York Times papers in China and Japan, and most of the world's syndicated news services.
0:11:49 - (Chris Clarke): That's not to say that this was all exactly breaking news. In my job as environment editor at KCET TV in Los Angeles, I'd been reporting on the threat of bird deaths from Ivanpah and similar plants for a year and a half, actually based in part on historic data from the decommissioned Daggett solar power plant near Barstow, where the issue of avian mortality and solar power towers was first exposed.
0:12:18 - (Chris Clarke): Others shared that concern as well, including some regulatory agencies. As early as August 2012, not long after BrightSource canceled its planned IPO due to what the company called adverse market conditions, the division chief of U.S. fish and Wildlife's Palm Springs office was suggesting that agencies put a hold on new power tower solar plants until more data on bird mortality could be collected before Ivanpau went online.
0:12:48 - (Chris Clarke): This was all kind of an academic argument, which BrightSource tried to defuse. At one point, the company conducted tests at a 6 megawatt solar facility in Israel. In these tests, euthanized birds were subjected to 30 seconds worth of that facility's concentrated solar. BrightSource was likely hoping to dispel concerns about injuries to birds, but the results of this test were so graphic that the company refused to release photos of the resulting damage to the birds, including roasted flesh and carbonized feathers.
0:13:22 - (Chris Clarke): And 6 megawatts was far smaller than Ivanpaw would be once constructed. There were larger BrightSource projects, something like half a dozen of them in the pipeline across the California desert. As we learned more about the threat that Ivanpaw's five square miles of focused mirrors posed to flying wildlife, I reported on each new release of data at kcet, each subsequent prevarication by the company.
0:13:50 - (Chris Clarke): The C suite at BrightSource objected to my reporting and eventually insisted on meeting me and my editor over lunch so that they could point out all the errors in my reporting. By the end of that meeting, they conceded that none of the passages that bothered them were actually errors. Meanwhile, KCET's web server log showed that my articles were being forwarded from government email accounts to any number of agency listservs, generating thousands of page views.
0:14:18 - (Chris Clarke): Desert protection activists began making copies of my articles and introducing them into formal proceedings of state and federal agencies. I also began to see hit pieces in the renewable energy trade press criticizing my work. One assumption I made that bothered the trade writers most seemed to be my belief that the desert deserved better than being harmed in the name of climate mitigation. Another assumption that bothered them was that birds mattered.
0:14:48 - (Chris Clarke): Cats kill more birds than renewable energy was a common trope, which assertion was technically accurate and nonetheless irrelevant. More people die of cancer than of lightning strikes. That doesn't mean we get cavalier about lightning strikes. The bird deaths mounted. BrightSource hired a consulting biologist firm, H.T. harvey, to assess bird deaths at Ivanpah, and they estimated 3,500 birds and change killed at Ivanpod during the year beginning in October 2013, roughly 10 bird deaths per day.
0:15:24 - (Chris Clarke): The Consultants arrived at that estimate by counting the number of dead birds they'd found themselves 703 and extrapolating from that figure to account for, first off, parts of the facility not monitored and secondly, loss of carcasses due to activity by kit foxes and other scavengers. Many of the birds were likely eaten before they got counted. H.T. harvey's total included individuals of 83 different bird species, 19 of which accounted for more than 10 mortalities.
0:15:59 - (Chris Clarke): And those 19 species were, and I'll take a deep breath here mourning doves, yellow rumped warblers, tree swallows, black throated sparrows, yellow warblers, white crowned sparrows, horned larks, Costa's hummingbirds, house finches, Anna's hummingbirds, barn swallows, roadrunners, American kestrels, Rufous hummingbirds, brown headed cowbirds, lesser nighthawks, faux swifts, cliff swallows, and lazuli buntings.
0:16:29 - (Chris Clarke): That seems pretty damning, but H.T. harvey's estimate of 3,500 bird deaths in a year was lauded by the solar companies because it sounded a whole lot better than an admittedly informal estimate that had been getting a lot of attention. Earlier than that. Sean Smallwood, a biologist, was no stranger to the impact of renewable energy generation on bird mortality, having studied the eagle killing Altamonte Pass wind turbine area for quite some time.
0:16:55 - (Chris Clarke): And Smallwood made an estimate based on recovery of carcasses from Ivanpah that Brightsworth and its partners really did not like. In June 2014, Smallwood offered testimony to the California Energy Commission on how he would estimate avian mortality at Ivanpah based on recorded deaths at that facility in the previous April and May. During those two months, 183 birds were recovered from Ivanpaw's mirrored heliostat fields.
0:17:23 - (Chris Clarke): Smallwood pointed out that many of the birds recovered were small, as H.D. harvey's list indicates, warblers, hummingbirds, et cetera. If the prevalence of small species was representative of all birds killed at Ivanpaw and not just the ones surveyors found, ravens and kit foxes would likely have been able to remove many of the carcasses before they could be counted. That is a phenomenon called scavenger bias.
0:17:49 - (Chris Clarke): During his testimony for the California Energy Commission, Smallwood suggested the scavenger bias for the April and May mortality might be 20%, meaning that scavengers ate four carcasses for everyone found by biologists. If that was true, said Smallwood, the actual number of dead birds in the area surveyed for carcasses would run somewhere around 473 birds per month. In other words, five times the number of dead birds that were actually found by biologists.
0:18:20 - (Chris Clarke): And here's another important factor. Ivanpaw's consulting biologists had only surveyed one fifth of the plant's heliostat fields, which means that Smallwood's estimate of 473 birds per month would need to be multiplied by five again, which would give you a figure of just under 2,400 birds per month across the entire range of heliostat fields. You multiply that by 12 and you get a figure of 28,380 birds potentially killed at Ivanpah in each year of operation. And that's ignoring the possibility that a significant number of birds killed by Ivanpah landed outside of the chain link fence.
0:19:02 - (Chris Clarke): That's a lot of birds. And to be fair, Smallwood said in his testimony that his calculations were based on a couple of assumptions that he couldn't completely verify, mainly because of the paucity of real data coming out of Ivanpah. BrightSource reacted to Smallwood's estimate of 28,000 annual bird deaths, give or take, by putting up a blog post on its website that claimed that the reported bird deaths were the only bird deaths.
0:19:28 - (Chris Clarke): Despite the fact that only a fifth of the heliostat fields were surveyed. Despite the fact that no area outside the facility was surveyed, despite the fact that surveys were conducted seldom enough that losing four out of five bird carcasses was completely within the realm of possibility. And Smallwood himself said it was a back of the envelope calculation. But in order for those reported bird deaths to be the total avian mortality in Ivanpah in the first half of 2014, one would have to assume that surveyors collected every single bird that died at Ivanpah.
0:19:59 - (Chris Clarke): Which would mean that ravens and desert kit foxes and other scavengers politely left the carcasses alone, and that all the birds killed at Ivanpah thoughtfully made sure to land in the 1/5 of the heliostat field that was being searched and nowhere else. Despite the bird deaths and the controversy over them, which Brightsource and NRG and their partners consistently minimized, there wasn't much by the end of 2014 that opponents of the plant could do.
0:20:31 - (Chris Clarke): This project had $2.2 billion in loan guarantees on 6 square miles of public land. They had contracts to buy power signed by California's two largest electrical utilities. It seemed like Eiffenpau was here to stay. LA Times reporter Louis Sahagan wrote an article on Ivanpah in September 2016, that was entitled, this Mojave Desert Solar Plant Kills 6,000 Birds a Year. Here's why that won't change anytime soon.
0:21:02 - (Chris Clarke): There were some continuing issues at the Ivanpah solar power plant. In the first year of operation, Ivanpah didn't produce anywhere near the power that it had promised, causing some folks to speculate that the power purchase agreements it had signed would be declared null and void by the utilities. That BrightSource and NRG would have failed to live up to the terms of the contract for the power purchase agreements.
0:21:24 - (Chris Clarke): That was resolved, at least temporarily in part by the operators of the plant claiming that their output was less than expected because of clouds and jet contrails. But they started producing more power and the scandal went away. And for a long time, along with a bunch of other people I know who love the desert, I did not return to the Ivanpah Valley. It was a good five years before I made my way back to that place I call home.
0:21:58 - (Chris Clarke): I never got used to seeing that power plant across the valley from my old house. I think we all got resigned and now the utilities themselves are pulling out. News broke last week that PG&E was working to cancel both of its power purchase agreements and that nrg, the manager of the Ivanpah plant, would decommission the two units that were providing electrical power to pge. And this week, Sammy Roth of the Los Angeles Times reports that Southern California Edison is in ongoing discussions with the project's owners and the federal government over ending the utilities contract with Ivanpah.
0:22:38 - (Chris Clarke): The federal government's involved because there is a significant amount of that loan that has not yet been paid off. It's uncertain whether Ivanpah's owners will be able to pay it off. So it looks like the three power towers on the west side of Interstate 15 surrounded by five square miles of mirrors in between the Mojave National Preserve and a Vicome National Monument. And any number of wilderness and protected areas might get scrapped a good 10 or 20 years before we expected the project to be scrapped.
0:23:06 - (Chris Clarke): So it's a victory of sorts. One of those victories that personally, I can't bring myself to be happy about. The Ivan Pa plant should never have been built. The US Fish and Wildlife Service should never have allowed the builders to kill more tortoises. State and federal governments should have paid much closer attention to the plant's violations of the Endangered Species act and the Migratory Bird Treaty act, some of the most biologically diverse land in a desert.
0:23:34 - (Chris Clarke): And the Ivanpah Valley up above the shores of the dry lake was permanently destroyed. Permanently, as far as us humans are concerned anyway. And all this for a technology that was really never more than hype, and for which ratepayers will continue to pay for decommissioning My work to expose the problems with Ivanpah and the work of several other journalists on story like Pete Danko and David Danielski, as well as the work of conservation activists who took the work journalists had done and used it to augment their own campaigns.
0:24:11 - (Chris Clarke): Collectively, we prevented a lot of much worse power tower plants from being built at Hidden Hills near Pahrump in the Amargosa Palin next to Joshua Tree, Rio Mesa, Sonoran, West Siberia. These projects, which would have been at least one and a half times the size of Ivanpah, could have dotted the desert, building essentially a gauntlet of giant bug zappers that migrating birds and resident birds would have had to suddenly learn how to avoid against all of their evolutionary programming.
0:24:46 - (Chris Clarke): But as for Ivanpah itself, it's not journalists or ecological campaigners who are forcing Ivanpa to shut down. It was market forces. It was Chinese subsidy of solar panels. It was ever rising costs for thermal generation of power of long distance transmission. Photovoltaics are just cheaper. That's essentially what will force Ivanpah to shut down. In February of 2010, I wrote comments on my own behalf as part of the NEPA process of examining the environmental impact of the Ivanpah plant, and there's a passage in those comments that strikes me as still valid in my heart today, at least. I'll share that with you here.
0:25:25 - (Chris Clarke): After some introductory text and talking about my own personal experience of the Ivanpah Valley and its beauty, I wrote. Are we really so bereft of wisdom that we see this beleaguered but beautiful stretch of ancient desert as nothing more than a blank spot on the map? Are we really so callous that we can consider the improbably old creosote Mojave yuccas and barrel cacti on the Ivanpah site less valuable than being able to leave our closet lights on when the door is closed?
0:25:58 - (Chris Clarke): Many of the plants growing there are older than this nation. Some predate European presence on the continent. We may as well raze the Parthenon to build a strip mall. Knock down Stonehenge for use as highway berms. There is something very wrong in us if we value this place not for its beauty but for its square footage. There's something broken in us if we look at the Ivan Valley and see not peace, but merely a way to increase our power and the profit we derive from it.
0:26:32 - (Chris Clarke): In 2008, while I was living in the Ivanpah Valley, a friend came to visit and just before sunset, after a day of scattered small rainstorms, she and I got out of her car near the abandoned railroad siding called Ivanpah in the southern Ivanpah Valley within Mojave National Preserve. We had a clear and unobstructed view of the whole valley. There, at the end of the paved section of Ivanpah Road, a desert tortoise stood at roadside.
0:27:02 - (Chris Clarke): We had stopped to make sure no passing cars hit her as she tried to cross, but there were no passing cars and she had no apparent intent to cross. Unperturbed by our presence, she fell asleep. As we watched, a band of coyotes began singing somewhere off to the west toward Morningstar Mine Road. It was hard not to feel very small. Ivanpah Valley held an immensity of space and of time as well, both of them humbling in the sense of personal insignificance they conveyed and in the realization of our frightening capacity to do unintended harm.
0:27:41 - (Chris Clarke): It was one of those moments that I found surprisingly common in the Ivanpah Valley, a place that, though radically altered by the hands of industry, is still precious, still alive, well worth being defended from further unnecessary and destructive change. Foreign and that wraps up another episode of 90 Miles from Needles. The Desert Protection podcast got this out a little bit later than I wanted to due to having spent the weekend up in the Amargosa.
0:29:01 - (Chris Clarke): I usually spend some of the weekend working on each episode, but we had an in person board meeting of the Amargosa Conservancy up at China Ranch in Tacopa. Definitely time well spent. This is the same reason we didn't put out Desert News this week. In case you're a subscriber who's wondering what was going on, we do put out that newsletter almost every Monday@desvertnews.substack.com it's free and it's a compendium of environmental news from around the American deserts that we extract from around 60 publications at this point that we check out every week. Check it out.
0:29:37 - (Chris Clarke): We'll put a subscribe link in the show notes and I want to thank providers of the clips that we used in fair use mode to augment this episode. Namely from AFP which featured our friend Lisa Balenke of the center for Biological Diversity Kcal, which had that quote from David Lamp from in there Swedish Public Radio, which interviewed me out on the Ivanpa site before construction started in September of 2010 and CBS this Morning.
0:30:10 - (Chris Clarke): Also want to thank Joshua Stoltz and Kay St. Peter's for joining the ever growing ranks of people who are supporting this podcast financially. As I mentioned last week, we're putting together a way for listeners and supporters of the Desert Advocacy Media Network and just desert advocates in general, to hang out now that social media is increasingly tweaked and suspect. If you want to be invited into our online socializing thing, whatever it turns out to be, when we get it ready to Launch, go to 90miles from needles.com
0:30:44 - (Chris Clarke): Patreon which will take you to our Patreon page where you can sign up on that list for free and we will reach out to you and give you an invite when we get our enclave set up. There's no need to donate to us there. We certainly would appreciate it if you did, but we're happy to collect names and email addresses so we can invite you to our special little place once we get it set up. I also want to thank our voiceover guy, Joe Geoffrey, our podcast artist Martin Mancha.
0:31:14 - (Chris Clarke): Our theme song, Moody Western is by Bright side Studio. Other music in this episode by Jafafa Hots. we are still working on that other podcast we recommend episode Putting that Together. We've had news pop up the last couple of weeks that has forced us to shove that back a little bit. It just gives us more time to work on the episode, which should be fun. If you know of a podcast that you think might be interesting to 90 Miles from Needles listeners, by all means let us know.
0:31:39 - (Chris Clarke): You can email me with tips at Chris@90Milesfromneedles.com. We got a little bit of rain in this part of the desert over the last couple days. Smelled really, really good. There was three inches of snow in the upper elevations of Joshua Tree National Park. We might actually get a handful of wildflowers this spring, despite the incredibly dry winter we've had so far. We'll keep you posted and you know we're going to be bringing everything to you that reminds us that life is basically good through the next four years just to remind us what we're all fighting for.
0:32:15 - (Chris Clarke): So please take care of yourselves. Might not be a bad time to mask up. Flu and Covid and RSV are all starting to gain in numbers and we need you healthy for the long run. So please be good to yourself and I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.