Here’s a great deal from the government for you to build a new powerplant:

  1. We’ll give you a $1.6 billion loan guarantee, and without the usual “credit subsidy cost” (which is the the expected default liability).
  2. A bit later on we’ll grant you another $535 million to pay back part of the original loan ( the one already guaranteed at no charge).
  3. We’ll give you a 30% investment tax credit.
  4. We’ll also cut you an accelerated depreciation with an assumed plant life of five years, even though it’s expected to last 25 years.
  5. We’ll actually add to that with a depreciation bonus of 50% in the first year.
  6. Finally we’ll guarantee you get a share of the market by forcing utility companies to buy your power.

Do you think you could make a profit from this deal?

Well you would be wrong:

The owners and energy companies drawing ‘clean energy’ from Ivanpah have agreed to shut it down. The plant was supposed to run for 25 years, but it’s being shut down 13 years ahead of schedule.

Even in the world of solar power Ivanpah was a geeky concept: located in California’s Mojave Desert it used 173,500 heliostats, with two mirrors each, focusing solar energy on boilers located on three 459-foot-high towers.

It’s not as famous as the Solyndra company which filed for a gigantic $570 million bankruptcy in 2011, but that’s because it collapsed just two years after President Obama had praised the boondoggle, one of his many prophecies that failed but which was buried by his MSM mates in the lead up to the 2012 election:

The Department of Energy also has issued conditional commitments for BrightSource Energy to build a 377 MW solar power plant in Ivanpah, California.  Together, Solyndra and BrightSource estimate that these projects will lead to over 4,000 construction jobs and over 1,000 ongoing manufacturing and operations jobs. – President Obama.
…
Obama’s Interior Secretary Ken Salazar described it among the projects that were “milestones in our energy future. They show what great strides we are making through innovation and technology. And they reflect President Obama’s focus and commitment to standing up America’s renewable energy economy. The Department of the Interior is resolute and determined to secure a safer, more sustainable energy future for our nation.”

Now it’s dead, having done nothing but lose money for everybody concerned, although the American taxpayers bear the brunt, having squeezed out only 70% of its 1 million MWh annual capacity over its pitifully short decade of life.

To be fair that’s better than most solar power farms and better even than the 30% (of nameplate capacity) average power output managed by wind power farms, although they last about 20-25 years before having to be demolished and replaced.

I don’t think our hydro-electric schemes would have got very far if we’d had to blow up the dams every 25 years and re-build them.