It was the future. It would demonstrate how to save the planet. It would produce electricity clean and cheap and immune to the vagaries of international shifts in prices, interest rates, currency exchange values, and the caprice of foreign governments. It was a demonstration of the massive achievements possible from public/private “partnerships,” that is, central planning American style.

“It” was the Ivanpah solar power project in the California Mojave Desert, and it was none of those things. Beginning operations in early 2014 to thunderous applause from all of the usual suspects—left-wing environmentalists, ideologues opposed to fossil fuels and modern economies, crony capitalists, federal bureaucrats, journalists credulous and lazy, and politicians eager to cut ribbons—it was a monstrosity combining huge costs, huge subsidies, huge environmental damage, and justifications hugely spurious. It never achieved its advertised electricity production goals even remotely, even as the excuses flowed like wine, as did the taxpayer bailouts.

And now, despite all the subventions, it is shutting down about 15 years early as a monument to green fantasies financed with Other People’s Money, inflicted upon electricity ratepayers in California denied options to escape the madness engendered by “climate” hysteria supported by no actual evidence.

Ivanpah sits on 3471 acres of the Mojave Desert, with 347,000 mirrors controlled by computers, delivering concentrated sunlight into three towers. When fully operational, it was supposed to generate about 1 million megawatt-hours of power annually; for 2015–2023, actual annual output has averaged 702,322 MWh.

This poor performance has obtained despite a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, for which the plant owners did not have to pay even the usual credit subsidy cost (the expected default liability for the federal government), under the DoE section 1705 loan program. The plant owners then applied for and received a grant of $535 million from the Treasury Department under the section 1603 program to pay back part of the loan already guaranteed at no charge by the DoE. There also was the 30 percent investment tax credit, the accelerated depreciation (an assumed plant life of five years), and a depreciation bonus of 50 percent in the first year. And there is the guaranteed market share for wind and solar power—the “renewable portfolio standard”—which meant that the major California utilities were forced to buy the power produced by Ivanpah. (Pacific Gas & Electric buys the power from towers 1 and 3, while Southern California Edison buys the power from tower 2.)

The plant has experienced one problem after another notwithstanding the confident promises made by the owners and by DoE at the outset. (The plant set itself on fire once due to a misalignment of the mirrors, an event that proved to be minor.) Performance has proven so poor that PG&E has exercised its right to terminate the contract, about which negotiations have been completed; there is no doubt that towers 1 and 3 will cease operations within roughly a year. And it appears to be the case that Edison too wants out: “the utility is in ‘ongoing discussions’ with the project’s owners and the federal government over ending the utility’s contract.”

And so after 10 years of high costs and poor performance—the plant was supposed to operate for 25 years—Ivanpah will shut down entirely. For the supporters of efficient, free-market energy (the Association of Climate Deniers Assembled, or ACDC), this is a tragedy, in that Ivanpah was a source of endless dark amusement. My friend Dan Kish of the Institute for Energy Research suggests that President Trump designate the shuttered Ivanpah facility as the “Green Madness National Monument.” Moreover, the massive costs, problems, and environmental damage caused by green ideology and central planning are likely to result in a wave of such failures across the country, a national archipelago, as it were, of green elephants. Kish: “We could have a whole string of them and use them for backdrops for the next crop of Planet of the Apes movies.”

Mirth aside, Ivanpah has served to demonstrate the ugly truth of modern environmentalism. Requiescat In Pace.