The Ivanpah solar plant saw an energy generating tower shut down during May after a fire broke out as a result of misaligned mirrors.

The Nevada based solar power plant is the world’s largest and uses a series of enormous mirrors to reflect sunlight onto boilers located atop towers (sometimes referred to aspower tower concentrators). These boilers create steam to power turbines which then generate energy. Each of the 173,500 sets of mirrors uses computer powered motors to track the movements of the sun. The fire was caused by mirrors which did not track the sun correctly, thus focusing sunlight onto the wrong part of the tower and burning electrical cables and metal.

Workers were able to control the fire themselves until Firefighters were called to scene, where they had to climb 300 feet up the boiler tower where the fire had broken out. The plant had to temporarily shut down, but was then able to run at a third of its usual capacity.

This isn’t the first challenge the Ivanpah solar plant has faced. There have also been recent incidents in the press regarding the safety of birds around Ivanpah after hundreds of scorched birds were found at the plant.

Wired.com listed economics as the plants biggest problem explaining that ‘When the plant was just a proposal in 2007, the cost of electricity made using Ivanpah’s concentrated solar power was roughly the same as that from photovoltaic solar panels. Since then, the cost of electricity from photovoltaic solar panels has plummeted to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour (compared to 15 to 20 cents for concentrated solar power) as materials have gotten cheaper.’

在最近的新闻报道中，Gizmodo强调了火是植物的另一个挫折。解释“过去几个月，工厂已无法满足其电力购买协议规定的产出水平，并在2016年7月31日之前获得了延期，以提高性能。