Tech

Gov’t Report Confirms That Southwest Solar Plant Blinds Airline Pilots

Daily Caller News Foundation logo
Michael Bastasch DCNF Managing Editor
Font Size:

A government-backed report has confirmed complaints made by pilots flying to Southern California, that a “nearly blinding” glare can be seen emanating from a massive solar thermal facility in the Mojave Desert.

According to a report by researchers at the Sandia National Laboratory, the Ivanpah solar thermal plant is “sufficient to cause significant ocular impact (potential for after-image) up to a distance of ~6 miles,” adding the glare was not enough to cause permanent eye damage.

The Ivanpah solar plant went online late last year. The facility, however, is not your typical solar plant — it uses 173,500 large mirrors to reflect sunlight onto boilers on three 459-foot towers to generate power. These large mirrors, or heliostats, are responsible for creating a glare that can be seen by pilots.

According to Sandia’s report, the results “showed that the intense glare viewed from the airspace above [Ivanpah] was caused by heliostats in standby mode that were aimed to the side of the receiver.”

Sandia’s report provided aerial photos from 30,000 feet in the air that clearly show a bright light coming from Ivanpah’s heliostats.

“At distances greater than ~6 miles (10 km), a low potential for after-image exists from the heliostat glare as a result of the reduced retinal irradiance and subtended angles,” Sandia reported. “It should be noted that two of the authors who were in the helicopter qualitatively confirmed these results after observing the glare. The pilot acknowledged that the glare was very bright, but he also stated that it did not impair his flying ability since he was aware of the glare and avoided looking in that direction when flying over [Ivanpah].”

The government-funded solar facility has caught the eye of pilots for months now, who have been sending complaints to the Federal Aviation Administration. The Daily Caller News Foundation documented the complaints last March.

“At its brightest neither the pilot nor co-pilot could look in that direction due to the intense brightness,” complained one pilot who was flying southwest from the Boulder City, Nevada airport.

“From the pilot’s seat of my aircraft the brightness was like looking into the sun and it filled about 1/3 of the co-pilots front windshield,” the pilot added. “In my opinion the reflection from these mirrors was a hazard to flight because for a brief time I could not scan the sky in that direction to look for other aircraft.”

An air-traffic controller told the FAA last year that “during the late morning and early afternoon hours we get complaints from pilots of aircraft flying from the northeast to the southwest about the brightness of this solar farm.”

The FAA has been aware of the problem since last November, and has since sent out a letter to airmen, warning them of the glare over the Ivanpah facility. Invanpah’s co-owner, NRG Energy, has also been notified of the blinding glares.

Airmen expressed concerns over Ivanpah’s reflective heliostats during the project’s environmental review process. Ivanpah’s environmental review said the solar plant could temporarily blind pilots flying within 3,300 feet of the heliostats. The plant’s developers even had to develop heliostat positioning that would best mitigate such worries.

Sandia reported that “new strategies for positioning heliostats in standby mode are being developed and implemented to reduce the potential impacts of glare.”

Follow Michael on Twitter and Facebook

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel