Investigators Charge Google Department Of Energy Project With Fraud. Say it is not possible for it to have cost $2.2 Billion
“A bunch of mass-produced curved metal reflectors and a few water towers in the desert could not possibly have cost over $400M” say investigators.. “Where did the other one billion dollars go!?…”
By Dale Winton – LA Digital News
Los Angeles – The Department of Energy Cleantech Crash funds, from the ill-fated reign of Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy, have long been rumored to have been part of an epic campaign financing payola scheme.
Google is now known to have staffed a large portion of the Obama Administration, particularly the White House. Google is the big player behind the, now under-scrutiny, Ivanpah Solar company.
Funds from the disastrous and sketchy Department of Energy programs brought the public the $523M taxpayer loss of FBI-raided Solyndra Solar Company.
The concept is simple and based on burning ants to death with a magnifying glass. Ivanpah pitched the idea of focusing the sun on a tank to make the tank hot.
While the concept is known to every elementary school child, the engineering for Ivanpah seems to have been done by elementary school engineers. A proper review of Ivanpah would have shown that it never would have worked. Very simple computer models, before Ivanpah even broke ground, proved that it had no possibility of properly generating efficient electricity, yet it was still funded and built while missing every milestone along the way. While the Department of Energy PR office has long held that “complete due diligence was conducted on the Ivanpah project”, it appears that the only “due diligence” that the Department of Energy conducted was to diligently make certain that only campaign financiers got the taxpayer payola cash.
Former workers from the Ivanpah project, turned whistle-blowers, say they are now embarrassed to have been a part of the failed scheme.
Ivanpah did not launch on time and never hit its production milestones. Outside standard generators have had to be hauled in to Ivanpah to fake up the energy output. Numerous staff have quit. The only thing that Ivanpah does well is kill birds and tortoises and blind pilots and satellites.
Investigators now believe that the missing billion dollars was forwarded to a certain political campaign for the 2016 Presidency.
Investigators believe that padded receipts, “NO-BID CONTRACTS AND TRUMPED-UP COSTS WERE USED TO INFLATE THE STATED COST WHILE SKIMMING FUNDS OFF TO SPECIAL PARTIES…”
“…AN “ON-PUBLIC-RECORD” COMPLETE FORENSIC AUDIT OF THE ENTIRE PROJECT IS CALLED FOR, IN ADVANCE OF THE…” November Elections.
Google’s Ivanpah Crony-Funded Project Seeks Ways To Fake Energy Output After Already Faking Output with Outside Generators
Obama-Backed Solar Plant Could Be Shut Down For Not Producing Enough Energy
By Michael Bastasch
California regulators may force a massive solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert to shut down after years of under-producing electricity — not to mention the plant was blinding pilots flying over the area and incinerating birds.
The Ivanpah solar plant could be shut down if state regulators don’t give it more time to meet electricity production promises it made as part of its power purchase agreements with utilities, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Ivanpah, which got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Obama administration, only produced a fraction of the power state regulators expected it would. The plant only generated 45 percent of expected power in 2014 and only 68 percent in 2015, according to government data.
And it does all this at a cost of $200 per megawatt hour — nearly six times the cost of electricity from natural gas-fired power plants. Interestingly enough, Ivanpah uses natural gas to supplement its solar production.
FROM AROUND THE WEB
These disappointing results at high prices could be the solar plant’s undoing. California Energy Commission regulators hoped the plant would help the state get 33 percent of its electricity from green sources, but now the plant could be shut down for not meeting its production promises.
Ivanpah — which is owned by BrightSource Energy, NRG Energy and Google — uses more than 170,000 large mirrors, or heliostats, to reflect sunlight towards water boilers set atop 450-foot towers that create steam to turn giant turbines and generate electricity.
The plant was financed by $1.6 billion in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy in 2011. When the solar plant opened in 2014, it was hailed as a great achievement by Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
“This project speaks for itself,” Moniz said when the project went online in early 2014. “Just look at the 170,000 shining heliostat mirrors and the three towers that would dwarf the Statue of Liberty.”
“Ivanpah is the largest solar thermal energy facility in the world with 392 MW of capacity — meaning it can produce enough renewable electricity to power nearly 100,000 homes,” Moniz said.
Moniz’s optimism aside, the project faced huge problems from the beginning. NRG Energy asked the federal government for a $539 million federal grant to help pay off the $1.6 billion loan it got from the Energy Department.
NRG Energy said the plant had only produced about one-quarter of its expected output in the months after it opened. The company needed an infusion of cash to help keep the project afloat.
That was only the beginning of the company’s problems. Environmentalists quickly attacked the project for killing thousands of birds since it opened. Many birds were incinerated by the intense heat being reflected off Ivanpah’s heliostats.
The Associated Press cited statistics presented by environmentalists in 2014 that “about a thousand… to 28,000” birds are incinerated by Ivanpah’s heliostats every year.
“Forensic Lab staff observed a falcon or falcon-like bird with a plume of smoke arising from the tail as it passed through the flux field,” according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report from 2014.
“Immediately after encountering the flux, the bird exhibited a controlled loss of stability and altitude but was able to cross the perimeter fence before landing,” FWS reported.
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Pilots have also reported seeing a “nearly blinding” glare emanating from Ivanpah while flying over the solar plant. The Sandia National Laboratory reported in 2014 Ivanpah was “sufficient to cause significant ocular impact (potential for after-image) up to a distance of ~6 miles.”
“At distances greater than ~6 miles (10 km), a low potential for after-image exists from the heliostat glare as a result of the reduced retinal irradiance and subtended angles,” Sandia reported. “It should be noted that two of the authors who were in the helicopter qualitatively confirmed these results after observing the glare. The pilot acknowledged that the glare was very bright, but he also stated that it did not impair his flying ability since he was aware of the glare and avoided looking in that direction when flying over [Ivanpah].”
Update: California regulators announced Thursday that Ivanpah would have until the end of July to produce more power or face shut down.
IVANPAH SOLAR SOLYNDRA-LIKE PROJECT IN CALIFORNIA FOUND TO BE CRONY KICK-BACK SCAM.
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ENERGY DEPT. BEGS THEM NOT TO GO OUT OF BUSINESS WHILE THEIR BENEFACTOR OBAMA IS STILL IN OFFICE
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TECHNOLOGY FAILED SO BAD THAT OUTSIDE OLD-SCHOOL GENERATORS HAD TO BE TRUCKED IN TO FAKE THE ENERGY OUTPUT
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MISSED EVERY MILESTONE
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THOUGHT TO BE A MATERIALS AND STOCK MARKET SKIM SCAM
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GOOGLE, AS BOTH OBAMA FINANCIER AND PAYOLA RECIPIENT DEEP IN THE MIX
As warned by this paper and many others, years before Ivanpah broke ground or fried any birds, the technical numbers for Ivanpah make no sense and could not have passed Department of Energy “Due Diligence” unless a kick-back scheme was underway. The technical facts showed, back then, that Ivanpah could never succeed.
The “give us some more time” plea by Ivanpah is actually a plea from the Obama offices to “Please not go belly up on my watch.”
Cloudy days for solar thermal
by Drew Thornley
“$2.2 billion California project generates 40% of expected electricity” This past weekend’s Wall Street Journal has some unsurprising news about solar-thermal technology. Excerpts to follow, but, in short: It’s very expensive to build, it doesn’t deliver nearly the amount of projected power, and it kills birds: The $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar power project in California’s Mojave Desert is supposed to be generating more than a million megawatt-hours of electricity each year. But 15 months after starting up, the plant is producing just 40% of that, according to data from the U.S. Energy Department.
Built by BrightSource Energy Inc. and operated by NRG Energy Inc., Ivanpah has been advertised as more reliable than a traditional solar panel farm, in part, because it more closely resembles conventional power plants that burn coal or natural gas. NRG co-owns the plant with Google Inc. and other investors. Turns out, there is a lot more to go wrong with the new technology. Replacing broken equipment and learning better ways to operate the complex assortment of machinery has stalled Ivanpah’s ability to reach full potential, said Randy Hickok, a senior vice president at NRG. One big miscalculation was that the power plant requires far more steam to run smoothly and efficiently than originally thought, according to a document filed with the California Energy Commission. Instead of ramping up the plant each day before sunrise by burning one hour’s worth of natural gas to generate steam, Ivanpah needs more than four times that much help from fossil fuels to get the plant humming every morning. Another “unexpected” problem: not enough sun. Weather predictions for the area underestimated the amount of cloud cover that has blanketed Ivanpah since it went into service in 2013. Ivanpah isn’t the only new solar-thermal project struggling to energize the grid. A large mirror-powered plant built in Arizona almost two years ago by Abengoa SA of Spain has also had its share of hiccups. Designed to deliver a million megawatt hours of power annually, the plant is putting out roughly half that, federal data show. Solar-thermal developers including Abengoa and BrightSource continue to build new plants in South Africa, Chile and China.
But Lucas Davis, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says it is unlikely more U.S. projects will gain traction as utilities opt for cheaper solar farms that use panels. “I don’t expect a lot of solar thermal to get built. It’s just too expensive,” he said. American solar farms generate nearly 16 million megawatt-hours of electricity each year. That satisfies less than 1% of U.S. electricity demand, but six times the amount of power that solar-thermal plants currently produce. And the vast arrays of solar panels that blanket the ground cost roughly half as much to build as new mirror-powered plants, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Electricity prices from new solar farms average around 5 cents a kilowatt-hour, according to GTM Research, which tracks renewable energy markets. That compares with between 12 and 25 cents a kilowatt-hour for electricity generated by the Ivanpah power plant, state and federal data show. The Ivanpah plant was delayed several months and had millions of dollars in cost overruns because of wildlife protections for the endangered Desert Tortoise. Once built, U.S. government biologists found the plant’s superheated mirrors were killing birds. In April, biologists working for the state estimated that 3,500 birds died at Ivanpah in the span of a year, many of them burned alive while flying through a part of the solar installment where air temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore
Obama-Backed Solar Plant Could Be Shut Down … – The Daily Caller
11 hours ago … The Ivanpah solar plant could be shut down if state regulators don’t give it … agreements with utilities, according to The Wall Street Journal.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/03/17/obam[…]-down-for-not-producing-enough-energy/
More Problems for CSP: Ivanpah Solar Plant Falling Short of …
30 Oct 2014 … Ivanpah is the largest solar thermal energy facility in the world with 392 MW … percent of the plant’s cost (news first reported in the Wall Street Journal). …. If anti -nukes would stop crippling nuclear power, we could have a 1000 …
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles[…]ort-of-expected-electricity-production
A birds-eye view of the bird scorching Ivanpah solar …
Aug 17, 2014 · At the start of the weekend, and quite by accident, I found myself aloft and looking directly into the glare of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/18/[…]d-scorching-ivanpah-solar-power-plant/
Ivanpah Solar Plant May Be Forced to Shut Down | 17.03.16 …
vor 1 Tag … Ivanpah Solar Plant May Be Forced to Shut Down … Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei “The Wall Street Journal Deutschland”. Anzeige …
http://www.finanzen.at/nachrichten/akt[…]ant-May-Be-Forced-to-Shut-Down-4784350
FAIL: Ivanpah solar power plant not producing enough electricity …
11 hours ago … Of course What could the solar plant may be forced to shut down if it ….. Another article on same (http://www.wsj.com/articles/ivanpah-solar- …
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/03/17/[…]may-be-forced-to-close/comment-page-1/
Ivanpah Solar Compliance – Basin and Range Watch
^Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System – tower two – solar flux, September, 2015. … June 16, 2015 – A recent Wall Street Journal article highlighted issues some ….. So the operator shuts the plant down before the cloud shadows move over.
http://www.basinandrangewatch.org/Ivanpah-Updates-3.html
Tags: Barack Obama, Brightsource Energy, California, Department of Energy, Energy, Ernest Moniz, Google, Ivanpah, NRG Energy, California CPUC, CPUC,
