On the recordJune 20, 2018
I am grateful to my Republican friends for pointing out the advantages of natural gas. I might add that we had, in the last Congress, a hearing about what was the world's largest solar plant. This wasn't a plant that had solar panels. It had thousands of mirrors pointing to three different towers that would superheat the water, which would turn to steam and would drive turbines to produce electricity. I have one article here. This was from February 2014. It talked about the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, sprawling across roughly 5 square miles of Federal land; that is Mojave Desert area near the California-Nevada border. It had opened, and it was glorified. There was $1.6 billion in Federal loans, $600-some-odd million in grants to help them make their payments. Years later they paid 7 million--well, 2 years ago, they had paid back, I think they said, $7 million of the $2.2 billion. Anyway, this article was about the world's largest solar plant scorching birds in the Nevada desert. From testimony we heard, apparently this solar plant, as birds would fly through the superheated sunlight, it would cause them to explode in flames, which is why the locals called them flamers. Originally, they were not expecting to have to spend a lot of money cleaning mirrors with water. They thought it would just be dust. They didn't anticipate all the flaming bird debris--some of them endangered species, I am quite sure.…
