Anyone driving from LA to Las Vegas or flying into Vegas airport can usually glimpse one of the largest concentrated solar power (CSP) plants in the world.

It has run for the past 11 years using a vast array of mirrors that focus the sun’s energy onto three large towers.

Owner NRG Energy received massive help in getting this project off the ground including $1.6 billion in Department of Energy loan guarantees, and long-term power purchase agreements from utilities Pacific Gas & Electric Company and Southern California Edison.

But the agreed price for CSP in those deals was Ivanpah’s downfall. The utilities have bailed on contracts that would have run till 2039 citing the high cost of power from the facility compared to solar photovoltaic (PV) and other generation sources.

Thus, NRG Energy has applied to close the entire facility by early 2026. It is likely to be repurposed for solar PV.

The hundreds of thousands of computer-controlled heliostat mirrors covering about five square miles were used to turn water into steam to drive a turbine to generate power as part of standard CSP operations.

This isn’t the first failure of large-scale CSP in the US. The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project absorbed close to a billion dollars in loans and grants as a 110 MW (1.1 gigawatt-hour) energy storage facility in Nevada.

It reached nowhere near that capacity and failed in 2019. It supplies a limited amount of stored solar energy at night.