Nevada Ivanpah Solar Plant Accidentally Incinerates Up to 6k Birds a Year (2016)
58 comments
·February 2, 2025solardev
perihelions
It's a bit of a tangent, but this is basically the question behind one of the classic cognitive bias studies on "scope neglect",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_neglect
- "In one study, respondents were asked how much they were willing to pay to prevent migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds by covering the oil ponds with protective nets. Subjects were told that either 2,000, or 20,000, or 200,000 migrating birds were affected annually, for which subjects reported they were willing to pay $80, $78 and $88 respectively.[2] Other studies of willingness-to-pay to prevent harm have found a logarithmic relationship or no relationship to scope size.[3]"
spicyusername
To be fair that is all glass buildings everywhere compared to a single place.
Not quite a fair comparison.
Retric
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
> 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.
ldbooth
Yet this doesn't account for the type of birds they are killing. I view milling a swallow different from killing some kind of large raptor or large bird. Those arent your window hitters. In fairness windmills also kill a lot of large birds. No tech is perfect.
kcplate
I do my part to heat up probably 75 birds a year on my grill if you are keeping count.
chneu
A ton of birds also die from power lines and getting hit by cars.
~30mil/year from power lines.
~300mil/year from cars/trucks hitting them.
6000 is nothing.
Whenever someone talks about how alternative energy kills a bunch of birds, you know they're a pretty dumb person who can't be bothered with context.
zdragnar
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.
mlyle
> More than that, the solar plant itself is an entirely unnecessary addition.
The interesting thing about Ivanpah is that it's both generation and storage. It's probably a technological dead end, but that is not an absolutely sure thing now and it certainly wasn't obvious a decade ago. Batteries have come a long way in that time.
walterbell
Jan 2025 article, https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-b... via 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.”
Terr_
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.)
bbarnett
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D6QI58zZBc
This thing probably kills 600 a week. Or at least monthly.
mlyle
> 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_
> It produces 640 gigawatt-hours in a year.
While it's true that my napkin-math uses it's planned max output, this correction is not accurate either: That figure seems to refer to only a portion of the generators running on the site, and it also involves contracts rather than what was delivered.
Instead let's look at Wikipedia's the "Production" > "Ivanpah total" for the year 2022, which is 769,164 MWh across that year. Convert to joules, divide by the seconds in a year, and that's an average output of 87.74 megawatts.
That's down by a factor of ~4.47x from my original napkin-math, so we can just apply it to the coal-amount, giving us a revised "Is mining and burning ~21.9 tons of coal gonna kill a bird?"
Terr_
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
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.
api
Not sure about birds per se but coal mining is pretty awful. Look up mountaintop removal and spills of mine tailings.
roenxi
> Does mining and burning ~98 tons of coal will lead to >1 bird deaths?
Very unlikely. 100 tonnes of coal is order of magnitude one excavator scoop.
marcosdumay
That's a really big scoop...
roenxi
It is like all those different knives you get at fancy dinners. Small scoop for ice cream, big scoop for running an efficient industrial society. I'm not clear on what the medium scoop does.
gottorf
Mining rigs can be big! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288
baseline-shift
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...
hakonjdjohnsen
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?
HarHarVeryFunny
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.
Magi604
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-de...
mhardcastle
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.
NoPicklez
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.
addicted
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-celebrate...
BirAdam
More recent article, this plant is starting to shutdown:
https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-b...
rcdemski
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!
throwaway290
> 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 :)
mjmas
> 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.
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