TIME photo essay

The Ivanpah Solar Project: Generating Energy Through Fields of Mirrors

LightBox presents Jamey Stillings' epic black-and-white images of Ivanpah, a solar field of mirrors generating energy in the Mojave Desert.



Heat becomes steam becomes electricity—in the most basic sense, Ivanpah is no different than any fossil fuel plant burning coal or natural gas to generate electricity. But there are no emissions aside from the drift of water vapor, and where a power plant is all hard edges and forbidding steel, Ivanpah seems almost soft, integrated into the desert, as Stillings’ photos show. Even if it didn’t generate enough electricity to power 140,000 homes, Ivanpah would be one hell of a piece of landscape art.

But Ivanpah’s construction was not without controversy. The desert may seem lifeless from afar, but the Mojave is home to countless species, including a threatened desert tortoise that nearly scuttled the entire project. (In the end, the tortoises were painstakingly—and expensively—moved away from the footprint of the plant.) As Stillings writes, Ivanpah “raises challenging questions about land and resource use.” Environmentalism is supposed to have a preference for the small and the simple—and Ivanpah is neither, sprawling across 4,000 acres of public land that had once been largely undisturbed. Stillings’ pictures show the story—what was once nature has been forever changed.

Yet if the alternative energy movement is to ever make a true mark, Ivanpah may provide exactly what it needs: scale. As Stillings’ images illustrate, Ivanpah is nothing if not big, a dream of a different way of powering society that is suddenly, radically here. We may look back upon the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System as the beginning of a new era, one where industrial projects that rival the Hoover Dam for scale are integrated with the Earth, not a blight on it. And Jamey Stillings will be there to document it.

Jamey Stillings is a photographer based in Santa Fe.




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