Projects to generate sustainable electricity are the order of the day, optimizing known technologies that offer greater efficiency. But this was not always the case, considering that there are several examples of colossal ventures that were never successful and were forgotten. This is the case of the biggest failure in history with energy in an American desert.
What happened to the project that ended in the biggest failure in history?
Like all companies that start with great expectations of success in search of investments that make the initial forecasts come true, this project had all the necessary condiments to go down in history as a producer of sustainable energy for a large portion of the planet.
These were the premises when the installation of Crescent Dunes, a solar power plant that was to become the world’s first 110 MW solar thermal power plant (CSP) with a storage capacity of up to 1.1 GWh, took place.
Located near Tonopah, about 310 km northwest of Las Vegas, in the state of Nevada, the project became a reality thanks to the private companies Tonopah Solar Energy and SolarReserve, one of the leading companies of the moment in the development of renewable energies.
Today the obsolete image of a solar park stopped in time marks the biggest failure in history, considering that it had an investment of close to $1 billion between government and private collaborations and was unable to achieve its objectives.
Crescent Dunes: an ambitious project forgotten in the desert
It was in the early 2010s when the world was beginning to take action on the issue of the finite energy resources and the climate crisis and the first ideas of renewable generation from sunlight were beginning to appear.
This structure was built with the technology of the time and consisted of the installation of 10,347 mirrors (heliostats), each one made up of 35 1.8 meter mirror plates located in a spiral shape occupying a width of about 3 km in the desert.
The colossal 115.7-square-meter structure enveloped a central tower that would collect and store the solar energy captured by the thousands of mirrors. But this was not the end of the complex undertaking that would later become the biggest failure in history.
The next stage consisted of heating a quantity of molten salt incorporated in the tower that would circulate to a storage tank producing steam and electricity by means of the collected solar energy. The end result would generate more than 10 hours of power, even during nighttime hours.
Why didn’t the Crescent Dunes project work out?
Just like the title of a television series, a series of unfortunate events turned this ambitious project into the biggest failure in American history. One of them was that SolarReserve sealed an exclusive contract with NV Energy for 25 years.
During that time, the latter company would manage the solar power while keeping the price frozen at about $355 per MWh, which was the cost at the time. However, the cost was dropping drastically until it reached $50 in 2019, which made the company rethink the unfreezing.
On the other hand, early in the commissioning of the largest failure in history, one of the molten salt tanks sprung a leak, which halted the structure’s operation for two years. However, upon its return it never delivered the expected results, averaging 20% power.
In 2018 it had a peak energy efficiency of 40% but this milestone was not enough for the contracts to be terminated the colossal solar power venture became obsolete and abandoned as the biggest failure in history. Today it is in the hands of the Department of Energy and there are open lawsuits for non-payment of state loans.