The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project is a solar power plant with 110 megawatts running capacity and 1.1 gigawatt-hours storage, but – isn’t working. It is located northwest of Las Vegas and worth a billion dollars, started to operate in 2015 but had to stop already in 2016, and the reason was a leak in the molten salt tank. Later on, it worked but never with the total capacity until the firm behind the project filed bankruptcy in 2020. So although it was a promising concept, who could power all those Las Vegas casinos and lights and much more than that, now we can only wait and see what will happen. It was essential for the nearby region as power blackouts were are a big problem. In particular, Las Vegas itself, as it’s a 24-7 entertainment city, where casinos’ industry and providers like slots Canada would never perform successfully if something like that happens.
Futuristic Concept of 10,000 Mirrors
Solar energy is free, and in regions like Nevada, where there is so much sun during the year, it can offer efficient, reliable and renewable sources of power. Because of this, more than 10,000 mirrors of The Crescent Dunes seemed like a futuristic and promising project which will source the energy in a vast region, including the city that never sleeps – Las Vegas. The story started in 2008, they’ve used a lot of money on it, and also a new technology came into action – molten salt. What is molten salt, and why is it so crucial in The Crescent Dunes?
They used molten salt as a heat-transfer fluid. Energy collected by the mirrors gets concentrated in the central tower where the molten salt got heated to more than 1.000 Fahrenheit – this mixture gets used for boiling the water, which generated steam. This steam would power generators and produce electric energy. Because of the molten salt, water would boil up to 10 hours without sunlight (trust us – there are cloudy days in Nevada!) and produce energy!
From the Clean Energy to the Contaminated Ground
However, everything was working for only a couple of months. Soon after the grand opening, there were reports of many problems. Among them was molten salt leaking as the most significant one, not to mention the expenses of the power from The Crescent Dunes – while selling at about 135$/MWh, solar plant Eldorado Valley (also in Nevada) was trading at only 30$/MWh. The last nail in the coffin of the new solar plant came in the summer of 2019 when the reports came in about molten salt leaking, and significant contamination of the ground happened. All this required the removal of the solar tower and, in the end, bankruptcy.
The firm that stands behind this flop project is a startup owned by one Spanish infrastructure company. Also, US NV Energy agreed to buy power from The Crescent Dunes until 2040 but now will have to find another supplier.
How Much Is Clean Energy Really Clean?
Besides the fact that The Crescent Dunes is a major flop economically, we can’t neglect the question – how much is it a flop environmentally? The project lost a lot of money and also left the contaminated ground. Some environmentalists call for stopping making new solar and wind power plants because they do more harm than good and advise returning to or preserving nuclear plants. However, this is a new subject for a completely different article but until then – try to think about it.
