A Year After Launch, Major Solar Plant Apparently Running at Half Capacity

More than a year after the formal launch of the nation’s largest existing solar tower power plant, its operators seem to be having trouble keeping it all the way online. According to records provided by California’s grid operator, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is running at around half its capacity so far in 2015.

The information comes in the form of reports generated by the California Independent System Operator (CaISO), the independent agency that manages most of the state’s power grid, as a daily snapshot of which of the state’s more than 1,000 power plants are offline, or in CaISO’s terminology, “curtailed.”