Birds Fry Every Two Minutes

It took 10 years, and hundreds-of-thousands of dead birds, before the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California would meet its fate.

The Wall Street Journal explains in 'A Prolific Executioner of Wildlife'

An Obama-era monument to green delusions finally faces extinction.

Longtime readers may recall a 2014 Journal editorial about California's "bird-fryer" solar plant, a taxpayer-backed venture that was hell on local animals. Turns out it was also hell on electricity ratepayers. But as with so many politically favored green ventures, waiting for official acknowledgment of failure can feel like an eternity.

Now finally here in 2025 it seems the reckoning has begun. The Las Vegas Review-Journal notes in an editorial that "a major California utility —  Pacific Gas & Electric — announced that it will no longer buy power from the Ivanpah solar plant off Interstate 15 near the Nevada-California border. As a result, two of the plant's three towers will shut down next year — and the third will probably follow."

The plant might have functioned merely as the world's most expensive backyard bug zapper. But it was just too lethal. The Review-Journal's Emerson Drewes reported last month:

Federal wildlife officials said Ivanpah might act as a "mega-trap" for wildlife, with the bright light of the plant attracting insects, which in turn attract insect-eating birds that fly to their deaths in the intensely focused light rays.

So many birds have been victims of the plant's concentrated sun rays that workers referred to them as "streamers," for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. When federal wildlife investigators visited the plant around 10 years ago, they reported an average of one "streamer" every two minutes.