Climate Casino Craps
‘A Study of technological history shows the perils of forecasting technological advances-as difficult as predicting the stock market.’
The Climate Casino, William Nordhaus
Currently owned and operated by NRG, the solar / natural gas hybrid plant known as Ivanpah in California’s Mojave Desert is scheduled to be decommissioned. We’re not going to lie, if you thought the Mojave was a kind of ugly moonscape, it’s nothing compared to the dystopian visual catastrophe that is Ivanpah – count them, not one, not two, but three gigantic 459-foot Eyes of Sauron being worshiped by an enormous array of 173,500 software-controlled Orcs – aka mirrors. Oh well, nobody wants to go to Primm Nevada anyway except maybe truckers trying to save hundreds by avoiding the high price of Diesel in San Bernadino.
The US Department of Energy front loaded $1.6B back in 2011 in the form of three loan guarantees during the Obama years. That’s of course small change by today’s inflationary standards. Truth be told, the French Physicist Edmond Becquerel discovered the photovoltaic effect in 1839. Like Nordhaus posits, it can take a long time for new technologies to pan out. Perhaps it will take another 186 years to get it right. Of course, one must keep trying – to toil is human.
Despite all of these ‘losses’ on the Ivanpah crapshoot, we can take away some critical learnings. Our recent interviews with tech leaders across the globe (more on that in another installment) reveal insightful concerns. It turns out the number one issue for tech leaders in terms of sustainable data center buildout is access to affordable energy.
Ivanpah was an ambitious undertaking, perhaps too big of a vision, combining solar, natural gas, and steam turbine technologies. It’s a classic case of you can’t please all the people all the time. The Climate crew doesn’t like it because of the incorporation of Natural Gas into the design, the Energy Industrial Complex doesn’t want it because the operations costs are enormous, and nobody, as in the Consumer crowd, wants an energy alternative that is more than six times as expensive as what we currently have available.
One thing that we do know, is that the system as it stands today could be significantly improved. At CloudNineDate, our belief is that virtually all the energy sources we have in place today need to be on-line to meet the growth demands of the planet’s ambitions. NRG should reconsider the plan to decommission Ivanpah and instead create an investment opportunity for the Department of Energy and other private sector R&D participants for a large-scale energy initiative. If for no other reason, it could act as a testing ground for domestically sourced energy storage and photovoltaic technologies that are desperately needed across our US markets.
Like Nordhaus concludes, not ‘throwing out all of the groceries because the milk is sour.’
NRG, DOE, are you listening?