4 ms·

Nevada Ivanpah Solar Plant Accidentally Incinerates Up to 6k Birds a Year (2016)

36 points by walterbell 2y ago

mjmas 2y ago
> The plant installed a large fence to keep out endangered desert tortoises, but the knock-on effect is that this has made it way easier for coyotes to kill roadrunners. Acme, but better.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
BirAdam 2y ago
More recent article, this plant is starting to shutdown: https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-birds-tortoises-mojave-6d91c36a1ff608861d5620e715e1141c https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-b...
- rcdemski 2y ago
  Oddly bummed to see it fail. It was pretty fascinating to see during the day, how insanely bright the top of the tower was. It had lots of flaws (environmental impact and animal life). Ultimately technology moved ahead of its capabilities. I’m glad we tried an idea. Not all will make it, and that’s ok!
morninglight 2y ago
US highway system accidentally kills over 40k people a year.
- NoPicklez 2y ago
  True, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about deaths of other species on the planet of which birds are completely without fault.
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Sure it does. Or it should, anyway. Unfortunately the internet has spawned a couple generations of individuals that will gleefully take any form of bait that's laid in front of them and now here we are.
    - malfist 2y ago
      We can care about more than one thing at a time. We can be concerned about traffic deaths and about bird fatalities in a solar thermal plant
      - forgetfreeman 2y ago
        Demonstrably untrue. "We" make performative mutterings online while taking literally no concrete action at a personal or professional level to advance solutions to any of the myriad things we claim to care about. Conclusion: what people actually care about is online optics.
        NoPicklez 2y ago
        We doesn't always mean "me" it can mean others. We are allowed to talk about concepts, topics and news worthy articles and not take any action to change it. Conversation around topics isn't limited only to those that advance solutions to such things. I never claimed to care enough about the article to take any personal or professional level of interest to change the outcome. I am simply here for discussion on the article, not to change those outcomes and I am sure neither are you.
    - NoPicklez 2y ago
      Well no, the world is large enough that we can focus on multiple problems at a time no matter the size. With your logic, the 40k road deaths aren't important for discussion either because 700k American's die of heart disease each year. But hey, let's not allow people to have other conservation efforts.
NoPicklez 2y ago
I've heard of this being a problem at other solar plants, this one existing in the path of a pacific migratory path. However these migration paths exist all over the US and are fairly wide, therefore it would be difficult to build a plant that isn't somewhere near or in a migration path. It seems to be a design issue that impacts most of these solar thermal plants without much of a solution.
Terr_ 2y ago
Trying some fun with napkin math to compare it versus coal. 1. That plant produces ~392 megawatts in^h^ while ~6000 bird deaths occur, meaning ~65 kilowatts provided per dead bird. 2. One ton of coal can give you ~21 gigajoules in a coal plant, or ~665 watts over the course of a year. 3. So the same output for a coal plant means burning ~98 tons of coal per bird. 4. Unknown: Does mining and burning ~98 tons of coal will lead to >1 bird deaths? If the answer is yes, then the solar thermal plant is--on average--killing fewer birds. (Specific sub-populations near it are another story.)
- mlyle 2y ago
  > 1. That plant produces ~392 megawatts in a year. It produces 640 gigawatt-hours in a year. Power in a year doesn't make sense, and it doesn't make its nameplate power all day long.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    Updated to make it clear that it occurs alongside the year-unit for scaling bird deaths and then coal-usage, rather than per year.
    - amluto 2y ago
      You might want to try reading the whole post and further editing. And you should consider avoiding all the weird scaling and working in units of energy. For example: > ~65 kilowatts provided per dead bird. This is incoherent. BTW, Wikipedia says the annual net output is 856 GWh, so it’s 143 MWh per bird killed. You’ve forgotten about capacity factor.
      - foxglacier 2y ago
        It's mind-boggling how consistently almost everyone is confused about energy and power units and makes meaningless calculations and claims. People make this kind of mistake pretty much every time there's an energy story. Journalists too. It is confusing but a little red flag appears in my head whenever I try to do this kind of math. It would be nice if we used energy as the main unit and energy/time for power like in SI. Rates seem to be more intuitive than integrals.
solardev 2y ago
6000 sounds like a lot, right? But in context, crashing into glass buildings kills about 600 million birds a year. Cats? About 2.4 BILLION bird kills a year. https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds
- spicyusername 2y ago
  To be fair that is all glass buildings everywhere compared to a single place. Not quite a fair comparison.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Divide by the 111 million buildings in the US of which 90% are single family homes. So it’s what ~1,000x as bad as the average structure but we’re talking about something several times the size of the average single family home. Plop down a housing development on those same 3,500 acres and it’s likely to kill far more birds.
    - smogcutter 2y ago
      > Plop down a housing development on those same 3,500 acres and it’s likely to kill far more birds. Do you actually believe that? It seems obvious that single family homes don’t kill birds en masse. Plop down 3500 acres of glass office towers and we’ll talk.
      - Retric 2y ago
        I’ve personally witnessed many birds die flying into windows in a detached single family homes. Multiply that by ~3000 homes and 6k per year would be a massive underestimate IMO. It’s uncommon with small windows, but a glass sliding door or big picture window regularly gets a thump. Some get back up, but many don’t. I do live in an area with a lot of birds so that may be a major factor.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  Context is always important. Part of why this gets attention is that the plant is killing protected species, including many that don't fall victim to cats. More than that, the solar plant itself is an entirely unnecessary addition. Photovoltaic cells were already viable in 2014. Other net-zero CO2 power options are also available, though wind turbines frequently suffer the same problem. This plant exists to feel good about the energy it produces, and being able to sit around and watch it immolate protected species every day cuts against that goal.
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
Not a very timely article, since that facility seems about to be shut down. It uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight to drive a turbine (& cook birds), but isn't as efficient as modern photovoltaic solar, and the electric companies with contracts with them are trying to get out of them.
saagarjha 2y ago
I was wondering what kind of plant purposefully incinerates 6k birds a year but then I realized I just described KFC.
tintor 2y ago
scarecrows?
mhardcastle 2y ago
I found myself accidentally behind the secured area of this solar installation while driving in the Mojave National Preserve. It is truly bizarre to see up close - the glow that you see around the towers in the photo on the article is quite bright in person. I wondered when I saw it - is that glow the air turning into plasma? Are otherwise-invisible dust particles reflecting the absurd amount of light hitting them? Is the heat enough for the air to start scattering light? It's no surprise that it would incinerate birds, in any case.
Magi604 2y ago
It would be interesting to see video of the birds getting incinerated in mid flight. I presume there is video of the aftermath ("workers have nicknamed the smouldering birds "streamers", because they leave tiny wisps of white smoke behind as they burn up in the sky.") of the incinerated birds here: https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-deaths-20160831-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-de...
walterbell 2y ago
Jan 2025 article, https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-birds-tortoises-mojave-6d91c36a1ff608861d5620e715e1141c https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-b... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42913376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42913376 > What was once the world’s largest solar power plant of its type appears headed for closure just 11 years after opening... “The Ivanpah plant was a financial boondoggle and environmental disaster,” Julia Dowell of the Sierra Club said in an email. “Along with killing thousands of birds and tortoises, the project’s construction destroyed irreplaceable pristine desert habitat along with numerous rare plant species,” Dowell said. “While the Sierra Club strongly supports innovative clean energy solutions.. Ivanpah demonstrated that not all renewable technologies are created equal.”
throwaway290 2y ago
> To make matters worse, some of the deterrent systems in place to keep other animals out of the facility have caused unforeseen repercussions. The plant installed a large fence to keep out endangered desert tortoises, but the knock-on effect is that this has made it way easier for coyotes to kill roadrunners. > The good news for the roadrunners is that the Ivanpah team says it plans on adding 'roadrunner doors' to the fences so they can easily hop through, instead of getting trapped. Trying not to laugh. They should just paint the door on... > Birds in the sky, on the other hand, are a little more complicated, because how do you stop a bird from flying wherever it wants? They better pray no eagle wanted to take a break over there in these 10+ years or they might be criminal in US law :)
baseline-shift 2y ago
That article from 2016 is not about the CSP project in Nevada (Crescent Dunes) but the one across the border in California (Ivanpah) that had the bird kills because it had no thermal energy storage and thus had to keep heliostats focused near the solar receiver, creating a hot spot nearby. Crescent Dunes invented the algorithm for focus that prevents birdkills. And it had thermal energy storage, the first tower CSP at utility scale to do so, which removes the need to keep the heliostats always on standby focused together on one spot. Ivanpah was the last CSP built with no storage, and since then no bird kills. All 30 projects in China have been required to include storage. Crescent Dunes (100 MW) had other problems as the first ever Tower CSP with storage at utility scale (Gemasolar had been built with storage a few years earlier in Spain, at 50 MW. Crescent Dunes had a major outage because a tank leaked, bankrupting the startup that developed it, but now its owned by a big Spanish outfit and has been back online for several years, supplying night solar to Las Vegas: https://www.solarpaces.org/what-happened-with-crescent-dunes/ https://www.solarpaces.org/what-happened-with-crescent-dunes...
- hakonjdjohnsen 2y ago
  So the birdkill is actually from a separate focal spot near the absorber where standby heliostats are focused? Interesting, I did not know that! Makes me wonder why standby heliostats would need to be focused at all? Couldn't their aimpoints be randomized over a much larger volume near the receiver, while still being standby and able to quickly move back onto the receiver when needed? By the way, I’m happy to find someone with CSP knowledge on HN. Are you working in the field?
readyplayernull 2y ago
The envy of cats.
addicted 2y ago
Relevantly, the plant is about to close down because photovoltaics have become so much cheaper than concentrated solar. https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/11-years-after-celebrated-opening-massive-solar-plant-118290949 https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/11-years-after-celebrate...

36 points by walterbell 2y ago

> The plant installed a large fence to keep out endangered desert tortoises, but the knock-on effect is that this has made it way easier for coyotes to kill roadrunners. Acme, but better.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

BirAdam 2y ago

More recent article, this plant is starting to shutdown: https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-birds-tortoises-mojave-6d91c36a1ff608861d5620e715e1141c https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-b...

rcdemski 2y ago
Oddly bummed to see it fail. It was pretty fascinating to see during the day, how insanely bright the top of the tower was. It had lots of flaws (environmental impact and animal life). Ultimately technology moved ahead of its capabilities. I’m glad we tried an idea. Not all will make it, and that’s ok!

morninglight 2y ago

US highway system accidentally kills over 40k people a year.

NoPicklez 2y ago
True, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about deaths of other species on the planet of which birds are completely without fault.
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Sure it does. Or it should, anyway. Unfortunately the internet has spawned a couple generations of individuals that will gleefully take any form of bait that's laid in front of them and now here we are.
  - malfist 2y ago
    We can care about more than one thing at a time. We can be concerned about traffic deaths and about bird fatalities in a solar thermal plant
    - forgetfreeman 2y ago
      Demonstrably untrue. "We" make performative mutterings online while taking literally no concrete action at a personal or professional level to advance solutions to any of the myriad things we claim to care about. Conclusion: what people actually care about is online optics.
      - NoPicklez 2y ago
        We doesn't always mean "me" it can mean others. We are allowed to talk about concepts, topics and news worthy articles and not take any action to change it. Conversation around topics isn't limited only to those that advance solutions to such things. I never claimed to care enough about the article to take any personal or professional level of interest to change the outcome. I am simply here for discussion on the article, not to change those outcomes and I am sure neither are you.
  - NoPicklez 2y ago
    Well no, the world is large enough that we can focus on multiple problems at a time no matter the size. With your logic, the 40k road deaths aren't important for discussion either because 700k American's die of heart disease each year. But hey, let's not allow people to have other conservation efforts.

NoPicklez 2y ago

I've heard of this being a problem at other solar plants, this one existing in the path of a pacific migratory path. However these migration paths exist all over the US and are fairly wide, therefore it would be difficult to build a plant that isn't somewhere near or in a migration path. It seems to be a design issue that impacts most of these solar thermal plants without much of a solution.

Terr_ 2y ago

Trying some fun with napkin math to compare it versus coal. 1. That plant produces ~392 megawatts in^h^ while ~6000 bird deaths occur, meaning ~65 kilowatts provided per dead bird. 2. One ton of coal can give you ~21 gigajoules in a coal plant, or ~665 watts over the course of a year. 3. So the same output for a coal plant means burning ~98 tons of coal per bird. 4. Unknown: Does mining and burning ~98 tons of coal will lead to >1 bird deaths? If the answer is yes, then the solar thermal plant is--on average--killing fewer birds. (Specific sub-populations near it are another story.)

mlyle 2y ago
> 1. That plant produces ~392 megawatts in a year. It produces 640 gigawatt-hours in a year. Power in a year doesn't make sense, and it doesn't make its nameplate power all day long.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Updated to make it clear that it occurs alongside the year-unit for scaling bird deaths and then coal-usage, rather than per year.
  - amluto 2y ago
    You might want to try reading the whole post and further editing. And you should consider avoiding all the weird scaling and working in units of energy. For example: > ~65 kilowatts provided per dead bird. This is incoherent. BTW, Wikipedia says the annual net output is 856 GWh, so it’s 143 MWh per bird killed. You’ve forgotten about capacity factor.
    - foxglacier 2y ago
      It's mind-boggling how consistently almost everyone is confused about energy and power units and makes meaningless calculations and claims. People make this kind of mistake pretty much every time there's an energy story. Journalists too. It is confusing but a little red flag appears in my head whenever I try to do this kind of math. It would be nice if we used energy as the main unit and energy/time for power like in SI. Rates seem to be more intuitive than integrals.

solardev 2y ago

6000 sounds like a lot, right? But in context, crashing into glass buildings kills about 600 million birds a year. Cats? About 2.4 BILLION bird kills a year. https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds

spicyusername 2y ago
To be fair that is all glass buildings everywhere compared to a single place. Not quite a fair comparison.
- Retric 2y ago
  Divide by the 111 million buildings in the US of which 90% are single family homes. So it’s what ~1,000x as bad as the average structure but we’re talking about something several times the size of the average single family home. Plop down a housing development on those same 3,500 acres and it’s likely to kill far more birds.
  - smogcutter 2y ago
    > Plop down a housing development on those same 3,500 acres and it’s likely to kill far more birds. Do you actually believe that? It seems obvious that single family homes don’t kill birds en masse. Plop down 3500 acres of glass office towers and we’ll talk.
    - Retric 2y ago
      I’ve personally witnessed many birds die flying into windows in a detached single family homes. Multiply that by ~3000 homes and 6k per year would be a massive underestimate IMO. It’s uncommon with small windows, but a glass sliding door or big picture window regularly gets a thump. Some get back up, but many don’t. I do live in an area with a lot of birds so that may be a major factor.
zdragnar 2y ago
Context is always important. Part of why this gets attention is that the plant is killing protected species, including many that don't fall victim to cats. More than that, the solar plant itself is an entirely unnecessary addition. Photovoltaic cells were already viable in 2014. Other net-zero CO2 power options are also available, though wind turbines frequently suffer the same problem. This plant exists to feel good about the energy it produces, and being able to sit around and watch it immolate protected species every day cuts against that goal.

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago

Not a very timely article, since that facility seems about to be shut down. It uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight to drive a turbine (& cook birds), but isn't as efficient as modern photovoltaic solar, and the electric companies with contracts with them are trying to get out of them.

saagarjha 2y ago

I was wondering what kind of plant purposefully incinerates 6k birds a year but then I realized I just described KFC.

tintor 2y ago

scarecrows?

mhardcastle 2y ago

I found myself accidentally behind the secured area of this solar installation while driving in the Mojave National Preserve. It is truly bizarre to see up close - the glow that you see around the towers in the photo on the article is quite bright in person. I wondered when I saw it - is that glow the air turning into plasma? Are otherwise-invisible dust particles reflecting the absurd amount of light hitting them? Is the heat enough for the air to start scattering light? It's no surprise that it would incinerate birds, in any case.

Magi604 2y ago

It would be interesting to see video of the birds getting incinerated in mid flight. I presume there is video of the aftermath ("workers have nicknamed the smouldering birds "streamers", because they leave tiny wisps of white smoke behind as they burn up in the sky.") of the incinerated birds here: https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-deaths-20160831-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-de...

walterbell 2y ago

Jan 2025 article, https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-birds-tortoises-mojave-6d91c36a1ff608861d5620e715e1141c https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-b... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42913376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42913376 > What was once the world’s largest solar power plant of its type appears headed for closure just 11 years after opening... “The Ivanpah plant was a financial boondoggle and environmental disaster,” Julia Dowell of the Sierra Club said in an email. “Along with killing thousands of birds and tortoises, the project’s construction destroyed irreplaceable pristine desert habitat along with numerous rare plant species,” Dowell said. “While the Sierra Club strongly supports innovative clean energy solutions.. Ivanpah demonstrated that not all renewable technologies are created equal.”

throwaway290 2y ago

> To make matters worse, some of the deterrent systems in place to keep other animals out of the facility have caused unforeseen repercussions. The plant installed a large fence to keep out endangered desert tortoises, but the knock-on effect is that this has made it way easier for coyotes to kill roadrunners. > The good news for the roadrunners is that the Ivanpah team says it plans on adding 'roadrunner doors' to the fences so they can easily hop through, instead of getting trapped. Trying not to laugh. They should just paint the door on... > Birds in the sky, on the other hand, are a little more complicated, because how do you stop a bird from flying wherever it wants? They better pray no eagle wanted to take a break over there in these 10+ years or they might be criminal in US law :)

baseline-shift 2y ago

That article from 2016 is not about the CSP project in Nevada (Crescent Dunes) but the one across the border in California (Ivanpah) that had the bird kills because it had no thermal energy storage and thus had to keep heliostats focused near the solar receiver, creating a hot spot nearby. Crescent Dunes invented the algorithm for focus that prevents birdkills. And it had thermal energy storage, the first tower CSP at utility scale to do so, which removes the need to keep the heliostats always on standby focused together on one spot. Ivanpah was the last CSP built with no storage, and since then no bird kills. All 30 projects in China have been required to include storage. Crescent Dunes (100 MW) had other problems as the first ever Tower CSP with storage at utility scale (Gemasolar had been built with storage a few years earlier in Spain, at 50 MW. Crescent Dunes had a major outage because a tank leaked, bankrupting the startup that developed it, but now its owned by a big Spanish outfit and has been back online for several years, supplying night solar to Las Vegas: https://www.solarpaces.org/what-happened-with-crescent-dunes/ https://www.solarpaces.org/what-happened-with-crescent-dunes...

hakonjdjohnsen 2y ago
So the birdkill is actually from a separate focal spot near the absorber where standby heliostats are focused? Interesting, I did not know that! Makes me wonder why standby heliostats would need to be focused at all? Couldn't their aimpoints be randomized over a much larger volume near the receiver, while still being standby and able to quickly move back onto the receiver when needed? By the way, I’m happy to find someone with CSP knowledge on HN. Are you working in the field?

readyplayernull 2y ago

The envy of cats.

addicted 2y ago

Relevantly, the plant is about to close down because photovoltaics have become so much cheaper than concentrated solar. https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/11-years-after-celebrated-opening-massive-solar-plant-118290949 https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/11-years-after-celebrate...