- Hey guys, this is the
bird-killing death ray.
Now, that may sound incredibly
sensational, but it's true.
Recently, I was driving from
here in L.A. to Las Vegas.
So right before I got
to the Nevada border,
I saw something a little bit unusual,
and by unusual I mean three
incredibly bright towers
being lit by thousands and thousands
of mirrors in the desert.
But what exactly is going on?
The wonderfully named
Ivanpah Solar Electric
Generating System is a
392 megawatt power plant
which is spread across 3,500
acres or five square miles.
This provides power to 140,000
homes across California
and with a price tag of $2.2 billion,
partially funded by Google,
this was a massive endeavor to build.
Well at first glance, it might look like
a traditional solar farm,
but instead of having solar panels,
it has thousands and thousands of mirrors
which harvest the sun's energy
in a very different way.
I'll give you a hint,
it involves a death ray.
A traditional solar panel
will use what is known as a
photovoltaic cell to turn
the energy from the sun
into actual electricity which
then can be fed into the grid
and used to watch YouTube videos.
What Ivanpah really is
is what's known as a
concentrated solar power plant.
Even though it does look like
a solar farm at first glance,
it's actually much closer to
a traditional power plant.
The way it works is that
tens of thousands of mirrors
are placed in a concentric
circle to focus sunlight
onto a receiver which is on
top of a 40-story-tall tower.
All that sunlight focused on the receiver
is enough to bring the
temperature to between
500 to 1000 degrees fahrenheit.
One of the advantages of a CSP array
over traditional solar panels,
is that it will continue
to work even after the sun goes down.
Because this thing gets so hot,
the actual generator itself
is able to continue to make electricity
for about ten hours or so
after the sun goes down.
While it might look crazy to
have thousands and thousands
of mirrors in the middle of the desert
trying to catch some towers on fire,
but at least on paper
the science backs it up.
It combines a lot of the best aspects
from various different
types of power plants
and puts into a nice
environmentally-friendly package.
Unless you count the birds.
A lot of birds die because
it's a solar death ray,
but if you can look past
the whole death ray thing,
it's not crazy.
Okay, who am I kidding?
It's actually kinda crazy, but it's cool.
At Ivanpah alone, an
estimated 6,000 birds die
every single year thanks to immolation,
aka they're caught on fire as they fly
through the giant death ray.
Look, okay look, I'm done.
I'm done with the nerd talk.
This thing is crazy.
It's a death ray in the
middle of the desert.
If you played Fallout, you
know what I'm talking about.
A bunch of bird are getting lit on fire
as they fly through the sky.
That's what you clicked on,
not to hear a bunch of specs
about how the Ivanpah plant generates
1.21 gigawatts of bird-killing power.
To give you an idea of
just how crazy this is,
lava will typically flow at
around 850 degrees fahrenheit.
The air around the actual towers
where it's most concentrated can reach
1000 degrees fahrenheit.
So you can imagine what happens
when a bird flies through that.
It's not exactly pretty.
All this means is that the Ivanpah team
has had to get really
creative with how they try
to minimize all the birds dying
on their giant solar death ray.
So some of the things they've done
is switch out all the
light bulbs in the facility
for LEDs to attract fewer bugs.
They've also recalibrated the HELIOs
to make the lightbeams
slightly more concentrated
so that hopefully fewer birds fly
through the death ray path.
I'm just gonna keep saying death ray
'cause it's a death ray.
Death ray.
They've even installed speakers
which blast high-pitched screeching noises
to keep birds away, but
still, they keep coming.
(sighs)
This just sounds like
something out of, like,
a really bad spy movie.
Now to be fair, this actually doesn't kill
that many more birds than a
lot of other types of energy
such as natural gas as well as wind.
What it does do, is kill a lot of birds
by lighting them on fire in the air
as opposed to them dying of,
like, cancer or something,
which is equally sad,
but much less dramatic.
With all of this in mind,
is this even something worth pursuing?
Well, there are a lot of cons to CSPs.
Not only do you have a ton of moving parts
with all these mirrors which
have to attract the sun,
but there have also been some issues,
like for example, the
Ivanpah plant back in 2016,
some of the mirrors weren't
quite properly aligned
and caught one of the towers on fire.
The biggest issues with
CSPs though is that
they actually just don't
generate that much electricity.
Sure, it is going to
power quite a few homes,
but compared to a lot of other sources,
such as say a dam, it's
not even going to be close.
The Ivanpah plant doesn't even qualify
in the top 50 biggest power
plants in the United States.
So you know, if you wanna
go build a solar death ray
in the desert, by all means, be my guest.
If you wanna actually
generate a lot of electricity,
go buy some solar panels
or, you know, a windmill,
or, I don't know, something else
that doesn't kill a
bunch of birds every day.
