by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News October 14, 2025
The largest solar project in the U.S. has been cancelled by the Trump Administration.
Known as the Esmerelda 7, the project was approved by the Biden Administration to be constructed on 118,000 acres of federal land in rural Nevada.
“We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social in August, calling renewables “the scam of the century.”
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management changed the project’s status to “canceled” on its federal permitting webpage last week.
An Interior Department spokesperson said the status change was unrelated to the ongoing government shutdown and that project developers and the federal government had agreed to “change their approach” as part of “routine discussions” about the project.
The Interior spokesperson said developers “will now have the option to submit individual project proposals” to the Bureau of Land Management for approval, which will involve months or years of environmental impact analyses for projects that could again be canceled.
Conservation groups and residents of Nevada were against the project due to the size of the planned solar arrays and how they would impact critical desert wildlife habitat.
Desert tortoises and Joshua trees live in the area that would be developed for the solar array, said Erik Molvar, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project.
“It doesn’t make sense to trade off gains in climate while sacrificing biodiversity,” Molvar said.
Meanwhile, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert will be shut down next year.
The facility received $1.6 billion in taxpayer-backed loans from the Obama Administration in 2011 and was hailed by then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, as “an example of how America is becoming a world leader in solar energy.”
Bonner Russell Cohen, a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, wrote for The Daily Caller News Foundation on Oct. 9 that Ivanpah “has become yet another example of central planners squandering taxpayer money on an ill-conceived green-energy boondoggle.”
The facility covers five square miles of the Mojave Desert, 65 miles southwest of Las Vegas. It features three 459-foot towers and 173,500 computer-controlled mirrors known as heliostats.
“The mirrors reflect heat from the sun to a receiver mounted on top of the tower,” energy consultant Edward Smeloff told the New York Post. “That heats a fluid. It creates steam [that spins] a conventional steam turbine. It is complicated.”
The facility “ran with breathtaking inefficiency,” Cohen noted. “Since going into operation in 2014, Ivanpah, built at a cost of $2.2 billion, never came close to meeting its boosters’ lofty expectations. In the world of solar energy, Ivanpah found itself unable to compete with conventional photovoltaic installations, which themselves are unable to meet the soaring demands of electricity-hungry artificial intelligence (AI).”
The light generated from the mirrors’ reflection of the sun can reach temperatures of 1,000 degrees. Birds unfortunate enough to fly over the “clean-energy” facility could be burned alive in the intense heat. According to the Association of Avian Veterinarians, Ivanpah is believed to be responsible for at least 6,000 bird deaths each year,” the Post reported.
In his recent address to the United Nations, Trump lambasted green energy: “We are getting rid of the falsely named renewables. The primary effect of brutal green energy policies has not been to help the environment, but to redistribute manufacturing from developed countries … to polluting countries that are making a fortune.
“The entire globalist concept of asking successful industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely.”
Trump Administration cancels nation’s largest solar project; Mojave plant set to shutter next year added by Editor Two on
View all posts by Editor Two →