A $2.2 billion solar power plant in the Mojave Desert, built with massive federal backing during the Obama administration, continues to burn through taxpayer and ratepayer money more than a decade after it opened, even as both the Trump and Biden administrations, the plant's own utility buyer, and energy experts across the political spectrum have called for shutting it down. California regulators won't let it close.

The Ivanpah Solar Power Plant, a sprawling 4,000-acre facility near the California-Nevada border, opened in 2014 as a showcase for concentrated solar technology. It uses roughly 350,000 mirrors arranged across more than 170,000 heliostats to focus sunlight onto boilers atop nearly 460-foot towers, generating steam to drive turbines. The concept was supposed to prove that solar thermal power could compete at scale. It hasn't.

Instead, as Fox News Digital reported, the plant underperforms, produces electricity far more expensive than newer alternatives, and has left hundreds of millions of dollars in federal loan obligations outstanding, all while California's Public Utilities Commission blocks attempts to terminate its contracts.

The numbers behind the failure

The federal investment in Ivanpah was staggering. The project received a $1.6 billion federally backed loan, of which roughly $730 million to $780 million remains outstanding, according to federal data. On top of that, the U.S. Department of the Treasury provided a $539 million grant covering about 30 percent of construction costs. The project also received tax credits, accelerated depreciation, and other federal incentives.

All of that money bought a facility that has never lived up to its billing. The plant has a nameplate capacity of nearly 400 megawatts, but in 2023 it operated at roughly a 17 percent capacity factor, well below the 25 to 30 percent levels originally expected, according to data from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Some analysts estimate Ivanpah's electricity costs customers roughly $100 million more per year than power from newer solar alternatives. Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility that buys the plant's output, has sought to end its contracts, describing them in regulatory filings as part of an effort to reduce "uneconomic resources" in its energy portfolio.

PG&E's position is blunt. AP News reported that PG&E agreed with Ivanpah's owners to terminate contracts early, which could shut down two of the plant's three units starting in 2026, instead of operating through 2039. "PG&E determined that ending the agreements at this time will save customers money," the utility said.

Regulators say no

But the California Public Utilities Commission rejected those efforts. Regulators cited concerns about grid reliability as electricity demand rises, including increased demand from data centers. In their decision, regulators warned that shutting down Ivanpah could strand more than $300 million in ratepayer-funded transmission and infrastructure tied to the project.

Read that again: the regulators' own argument for keeping the plant open is that so much ratepayer money has already been sunk into supporting it that walking away would be too costly. That is not a case for the plant's value. It is an admission of how deep the hole already is.

A 2025 audit by California regulators identified recurring forced outages and equipment issues that could affect reliability, raising the question of whether the plant can even deliver the grid stability regulators claim to need.

NRG Energy, which operates the facility, told Fox News Digital it "remains committed to running the plant under existing agreements and providing renewable energy to California." Pat Hogan, president of CMB Ivanpah Asset Holdings, argued the plant remains a viable energy source, saying it generated about 726,000 megawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, enough to power roughly 120,000 homes in California.

Those figures sound reasonable in isolation. But they do not address the central problem: the electricity Ivanpah produces costs far more than what the same money could buy elsewhere. The technology has been overtaken. Newsmax reported that NRG Energy itself acknowledged the shift, stating that "Ivanpah has been surpassed by solar photovoltaics (PV) due to much lower capital and operating costs in producing clean energy." The plant also reportedly never generated more than 75 percent of its planned annual output and continued to rely on natural gas to operate.

Experts on both sides agree the economics don't work

What makes Ivanpah's story particularly damning is that the criticism is not limited to conservative energy advocates. Even academics sympathetic to renewable energy concede the project is an economic failure.

Severin Borenstein, an energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Fox News Digital:

"The technology used at Ivanpah is no longer really competitive with a new solar farm that uses conventional solar panels. When this plant was planned, solar thermal looked like a promising approach. But photovoltaic costs fell much faster than anyone anticipated, and that changed the economics entirely."

Borenstein added that the plant "fell into the latter category" of projects that no longer make economic sense, but cautioned that long-lived assets with long-term contracts can't easily be abandoned. "Even if they no longer make economic sense, you can't easily just walk away," he said.

Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University energy systems expert, was equally direct: "There's no role for a concentrated solar plant without storage." He noted that because the plant is already built, the real question is "whether it's cheaper to keep it running than to replace it." That question, of course, is exactly what PG&E tried to answer, and the utility's own conclusion was that termination would save customers money.

The Obama administration's green energy portfolio has a long track record of projects that sounded good in press conferences but failed in practice.

Daniel Turner, founder of the energy advocacy group Power The Future, did not mince words:

"This project makes no economic sense to keep afloat, and the market itself has shown that. This is a boondoggle, like most of California's large projects are a boondoggle. At some point, you have to stop throwing good money after bad."

Birds, desert habitat, and environmental costs

The financial failure is only part of the story. The plant has killed thousands of birds that flew through its concentrated solar beams. AP News reported the facility also drew criticism for harming tortoises and desert habitat. Julia Dowell of the Sierra Club called Ivanpah "a financial boondoggle and environmental disaster."

When even the Sierra Club is calling your green energy project an environmental disaster, the narrative has collapsed entirely.

The broader pattern is familiar. Just The News noted that energy analyst David Blackmon described the scale of federal green-energy subsidies in stark terms: "What we're doing in our country with these trillion-dollar subsidies and tax breaks out of the IRA is probably the most enormous government cost misallocation of capital in world history."

Ivanpah fits that pattern. So did Solyndra, the solar company that collapsed in 2011 after receiving $535 million in federal loan guarantees. The difference is that Solyndra at least had the decency to fail quickly. Ivanpah lingers, kept alive by regulatory fiat, draining ratepayers year after year.

The people who pay the price

The costs don't stay abstract. They land on real people. Lazarus Dabour, who owns the Mad Greek restaurant in Baker, the nearest California town, about 50 miles from the plant, described electricity bills that devour his margins:

"During the summer it can be anywhere from $10,000 to $12,000... in the winter anywhere from $6,000 to $8,000. It still restricts your bottom line when your overhead from more electricity goes up. It's a big factor."

Eddie Bravo, a local store worker, said his personal electricity bills reach between $650 and $750 in the summer. "Our electricity is too high here in Baker," he said. He added that he doesn't know much about the plant itself, a reminder that the people who bear the costs of elite energy policy rarely get a say in it.

California's renewable energy mandates required utilities to purchase power under long-term contracts, locking ratepayers into decades of above-market prices. The mandates created the contracts. The contracts created the trap. And now regulators cite the trap as the reason to keep the plant running.

The progressive policy priorities that drive California's energy landscape rarely account for the working families and small-business owners stuck with the bill.

A familiar cycle

The Ivanpah saga follows a pattern that taxpayers have seen before: a politically favored technology receives massive public subsidies, gets fast-tracked through approvals, underperforms from the start, and then becomes too expensive to maintain and too politically entangled to shut down. The original promise, clean, affordable power, gives way to a grim arithmetic of sunk costs, stranded infrastructure, and regulatory inertia.

Officials under both the Trump and Biden administrations supported shutting the plant down. PG&E wanted out. The market moved on. But California's regulators, operating under the state's aggressive renewable mandates, decided the grid needed Ivanpah, even as their own 2025 audit flagged recurring outages and equipment failures.

Jason Isaac of the American Energy Institute told Fox News that "Ivanpah is yet another failed green energy boondoggle, much like Solyndra." The comparison is apt, though Ivanpah may ultimately prove more expensive. The federal loan alone still carries $730 million to $780 million in outstanding obligations. If the plant closes, taxpayers could face hundreds of millions in losses.

The pattern of Democratic leadership refusing to learn from failure extends well beyond energy policy, but few examples are as concrete, or as costly, as a $2.2 billion power plant that can't compete with the technology it was supposed to champion.

Gregory Simons, a truck driver from Rancho Cucamonga who stopped at a gas station near the Nevada state line, looked at the towers and said, "It seems like it's doing its job... it's definitely working." From a distance, maybe it looks that way. Up close, the ledger tells a different story.

When the government picks winners, taxpayers always seem to lose. Ivanpah just keeps proving it, one overpriced megawatt at a time.