re: California to shutdown $2.2 billion solar plant that never lived up to its promises

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PG&E may, at its option, declare an event of default,” and that it was “exploring options to mitigate this risk or its consequences.” Neither PG&E nor NRG would answer questions about what a default might mean.

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Thats referring to a contract default, not a loan default. They weren't going to be able to supply the amount of electricity they contracted to provide.

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Kind of hard to beat the 44 quadrillion watts the earth gets blasted with every day from the sun.

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Super easy actually

Barely an inconvenience

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There are plenty of negatives to solar and wind farms that have more merit than the bird thing.
It's the hypocrisy. We can't build desalination plants because some fish will die. We can't reclaim freshwater for human consumption or agricultural needs because a certain species of fish might have their habitat disturbed. We can't do controlled burns on forest land because wildlife might have their natural habitat disturbed. I don't understand why the sanctity of precious wildlife is suddenly ignored when you build solar panels or windmills.

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we can't divert river water because it will kill oysters

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Except we certainly can't capture or even utilize even a tiny fraction of that power, especially when the absolute best that reaches this planet's surface is about 1kw/m^2, and that's for only a limited amount of time per day near the equatorial belt. Nuclear fission offers about 3 orders of magnitude greater power density, probably a much better investment while we figure out fusion reactors and make our own little suns.

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Sure but why not try and use some of that energy to power the a/c we use to hide from it? It’s not an all or nothing thing. We can have all of them together.

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If they didn’t get nearly $2 billion of our money I wouldn’t give a shite. But they did. And what you’re suggesting is akin to someone but a new car with a loan and then getting rid of the car and trying to get out of the loan because a new model came out.

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Ok that’s not how this works.

A private lender provided a loan to a devco. NRG is party to that devco and is the asset manager, meaning they’re in 1st chair if losses hit. The DOE under the loan program inked a deal with the private lender to backstop them to a certain point in the event of a full default. The terms of those are always favorable to the DOE which is reflected in the portfolio performance of the program even with notable bks like Solyndra.

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It’s not producing anywhere near what it was supposed to or what was

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That's just a dumb statement. It did produce what it was projected to produce. After the first couple of years
It was producing over 90% of projected capacity . But power produced by newer solar farms using PV Panels is more efficient and thus cheaper.

Lots of ideas and very little knowledge of how to implement and sustain them

Cali is a dumpster fire

How can anybody expect their governor to run for president and keep this country going if he can’t even manage a fricking solar farm?

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Yet they still blew $2 billion of our money.

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They would blow it on something else. This was just the vehicle to get it into politicians pockets

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It's an older solar farm that can't compete with newer solar panels being used by newer solar farms which are more efficient. It's likely the property will eventually be a solar farm again with new technology being used. Meanwhile PG&E will buy more power from the newer solar farms resulting in cheaper prices for users.

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What does it say about solar that you can spend $2.2 billion to build a plant and in a decade it’s so obsolete it’s better to just shut it down.

Meanwhile, a coal plant costs roughly the same and can operate upwards of 50 years before needing to be refurbished and put back into service.