World’s largest solar power plant may be life threatening

A study a few years back has confirmed that birds flying through a solar field meet sudden death upon accidental contact with a solar panel or suffers a slow death when their feathers are singed or burned off.

The question now is: How dangerous would the world’s largest solar power plant currently being built in the Mojave Desert be to humans and wildlife?

The plant is being equipped with 170,000 garage-door size solar mirrors and a specialized GPS device that will align the plants giant mirrors to track the sun across the desert sky, bouncing radiation to the tops of three 45-story towers which will then heat the water inside the towers to 1,000 degrees, creating steam power for electricity creation.

Because of the enormousness of the Ivanpah plant, and the fact that this type of technology has never before been used, researchers are worried about the dire consequences the massive mirrors would have on public safety especially that, for now, they are just relying mostly on computer modeling to provide answers.

Critics of the project, which includes the Defense Department, say no one can specify the dangers because no solar plant has been built on this scale—but it might vaporize birds, blind drivers miles away, flip small airplanes, or even attract Air Force heat-seeking missiles.

Even if the proponents of this huge project find the skeptics wrong, still threatening issues lie present, one way or another, since the federal government is said to be planning more than 100 solar projects in the Mojave Desert.