the ivanpar solar thermal power plant has some very serious issues of collateral environmental damage again massive amount of real estate this location the ivanpah valley in eastern california it's a long valley there's this part of it here and it continues on to the south to the southeast the ivan parr valley is home to very significant percentage of the federally endangered california desert tortoise how do desert tortoises survive in their harsh desert environment in particular how do they get water there is no water to drink in the desert they are well adapted they burrow into the sand when it's too hot they come out they walk to their feeding place they eat vegetation there is growing healthy vegetation even flowering in the desert even in the hottest times of the year tortoise knows where his food is he heads over there he eats the vegetation and gets his water from the vegetation then he heads back to his hiding spot have you ever seen the desert tortoise in the wild out there in the ivanpah valley they're actually quite calm if you're driving down one of the roads there are a couple of roads not the interstate in the ovenpower valley you're driving down one of these roads on a july morning temperature is heading up for 100 degrees you might see ahead of you far down the road what looks like a rock it isn't it's a desert tortoise now desert tortoises are fully protected by law it's even illegal to touch one wow many people when they drive down a road see one of these tortoises figure that they need to pick it up and carefully move it off the road it's going to get run over poor thing well first of all it isn't going to get run over if you're driving down the road and you see what looks a bit like a rock in the road ahead of you do you drive over it or do you go around it you want to save yourself a thousand dollar repair bill for your car so you go around it so no people don't drive over them when you carefully pick that tortoise up you scare him and when you scare him he pees now he's lost more water than to be made up from vegetation he's gonna die i don't know how they managed to get the permission to build this thing because it has disrupted the lives of many many desert tortoises which is a violation of the endangered species act i'm assuming that large sums of money changed hands in order to make this possible i don't know but it did it's being built another important environmental problem with solar thermal power plants specifically with power tower power plants is depicted in this cartoon you're all familiar probably with angry birds and how you lob them through the air at targets why are they exploding in flight this is a very real problem everywhere out in the desert there's a normal amount of sunshine but that sunshine is being collected here and reflected back up at the tower and so the closer you get to the tower the more sunlight intensity there is in the air so by the time you reach somewhere here the intensity of the sunlight is 100 or more times what is natural so birds just flying along through the air when they reach this hot zone they burst into flames and fall to the ground as fried chicken and yes this um ivan power plant is killing a large number of passing birds it's becoming questionable if more power power plants like ivanpar will ever be built photovoltaics are getting cheaper and when we take a look at the surrounding area today here it is the three units of the ivan power station we see photovoltaic power plants popping up nearby this one is well over a square mile across the border into nevada look at all these additional power plants photovoltaics are becoming more common everywhere if we zoom out from here from here and head west across the mojave desert there's barstow into the antelope valley here west of palmdale lancaster and mojave and take a look here look at the percentage of the desert that's now covered by solar power plants all of these all of these the ones here group down here more of them over the here in the west all the way out to there for scale by the way this is one square mile many of these solar power plants both the ones that start by collecting heat and the ones using huge arrays of photovoltaic panels are out in the desert one reason for that is it's sunny more of the time you can create more electricity more hours in the year but placing these huge installations in the desert is based on the premise that the desert is a useless barren wasteland and so we should use it to do something productive is that a valid assumption no it's not the desert is a thriving ecosystem part of nature's biodiversity which is vital to our continuing health and well-being and we are destroying bulldozing covering over huge amounts of that environment with our solar power systems i have very mixed feelings about these obviously the solar power is good for the environment but the wholesale destruction of ecosystems is not i'm all for photovoltaic panels on the roofs of buildings covering over parking lots in other words when we're providing another use for land we've already destroyed i do not think it's a good idea to go out there and destroy natural environment destroy ecosystems for solar power solar power is a perpetual or inexhaustible resource consider right now we only capture a tiny percentage of the sun's energy that's coming to the earth and converted into electricity if we keep on going if we capture more and more and more of the sun's energy could we capture so much of the sun's energy that the sun doesn't shine so brightly tomorrow no that's absurd nothing we do here can affect what the sun does that's why it is inappropriate to call the sun a renewable resource it doesn't renew it doesn't replace itself we don't have to maintain it take care of it it's there and it will always be there perpetual we cannot run out it's inexhaustible but we can't use it on its own it has to be part of a package with other energy resources remember there's only sunlight for up to half of any 24-hour period