Obama-Era Mojave Desert Solar Plant Once Hailed as a Marvel Will Close as a glowing Relic
30th September 2025
It is a familiar sight for revelers traveling Interstate 15 from Southern California to Las Vegas: In the final stretches of the Californian Mojave Desert, just before the Nevada border, there is little else interrupting the vast, Martian expanse aside from a near-abandoned border town and this glittering relic of California’s renewable energy boom.
A little more than a decade ago, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System opened to great fanfare, with a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)—part of the Obama administration’s push to install green energy production on public lands—and a promise to help California meet its increasingly ambitious decarbonization goals.
At the time, it was the world’s largest solar plant, its nearly 4,000 acres covered in a blinding array of high-tech mirrors, arranged in supplication around three 450-foot towers. It nearly doubled the amount of solar thermal energy then produced in the United States, according to the DOE.
Originally, the project had an estimated operational life of 50 years, according to the final environmental impact statement. Its two buyers, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), had purchase agreements through 2039.
Now, Edison has pulled out of its contract, and Ivanpah is set to close. The facility’s concentrating solar power (CSP) technology will likely be converted to a photovoltaic (PV) installation, a technology that experts say has outpaced CSP in terms of cost, efficiency, and versatility.
”To save money for our customers, Southern California Edison has agreed to stop buying electricity from the Ivanpah Solar Power Plant,” Jeff Monford, a spokesperson for the utility, told The Epoch Times. The decision, he said, has been an “ongoing negotiation among a few parties, including the owners of the plant and the Department of Energy.”