Tag: birds

One of America’s priciest green boondoggles likely going offline after sucking up subsidies and incinerating birds

Here’s something for DOGE to cut funding to. Not much bigger waste or boondoggle than this.

One of the most expensive green energy projects ever undertaken in American history looks like it is now on borrowed time after eating up massive amounts of taxpayer dollars and killing thousands of birds.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) — a major utility company — announced in January that it is terminating power purchase contracts with the owners of Southwestern California’s Ivanpah Solar Power facility, a massive and unique solar project that received hundreds of millions of subsidy dollars as it launched in 2014. Just over a decade after it started operations, the facility appears to be headed toward its demise after killing thousands of birds because it could not provide the utility sufficiently cheap energy.

“PG&E determined that ending the agreements at this time will save customers money,” the company said in its Jan. 17 statement on the plant. The original owners of the plant — which cost about $2.2 billion to build — included Google and NRG Energy, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The Los Angeles Times reported in 2016 that the Ivanpah project killed an average of 6,000 birds each year, with some of the unlucky creatures colliding with the development’s 40-story towers and others being incinerated instantly upon flying through concentrated sunlight while chasing prey. The project received tax breaks, a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Obama Department of Energy (DOE) and a further $535 million subsidy from the Obama Department of Transportation (DOT), but it failed to reach advertised power output levels, according to analysis by Benjamin Zycher, an energy-focused senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

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New Pet Update

This is the male guarding the nest a couple of feet below him. The hen is on the nest now, so there must be eggs. He sits there all day now.

I found out that they are Song Sparrow’s. I’ve left them food and stopped gardening near it for a while. There is nothing that can’t wait, but at the rate of growth up here (Spring just started and we still have 50 degree days in the Blue Ridge Mountains), I’ll have to hack through the weeds as everything plant and animal is exploding to life.

I hope he fights off the cowbirds, who are also here. They lay eggs in other birds nests and are way bigger than the sparrows, so that chick would get all the food. I let nature do it’s thing.

Oh, the Hummingbirds have migrated here also.