After attending Heartland’s 9th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC9) in Las Vegas, we drove into the Ivanpah solar generating facility near the Mojave Desert in southern California.

Here’s a Google Earth view, with the location I drove to for a couple of photos:

Ivanpah solar generating plant as depicted by Google Earth, and the location where I took photos from.

With over 170,000 mirror assemblies reflecting sunlight onto 3 steam generating units, the plant is advertised to generate a peak power level of 390 MW.

There were storms in the area, and some of the surrounding land was actually flooded. Only one of the 3 solar arrays was illuminated through a break in the clouds when I was there, seen in this zoom photo:

Northernmost Ivanpah generating tower, surrounded by partly sunlit mirrors.

This wider-angle photo now shows better solar illumination of the far tower, which is accompanied by concentrated sunlight scattered by aerosols in the air around the tower:

Two of the 3 Ivanpah units, with the far unit being illuminated by the sun.

The facility cost $2.2 billion, and Google was even a partial supporter early in the project. It would be interesting to hear how much energy the facility actually generated after a year of operation.