By Belén Gallego 

Strictly speaking if you look at the pipeline, the numbers still look comforting. The data in the CSP Today Global Tracker shows a clear upward trend for tower plants. The further in time you look, the more the pipelines for tower projects are intensifying.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, tower lovers, but your job just became a lot harder. On Friday 26th September we received the news that Palen, the largest project proposed in the U.S., had been withdrawn by Palen Solar Holdings, the consortium formed by BrightSource Energy and Abengoa to develop the project.

There are plenty of good reasons why the project might have been withdrawn. The permitting was taking very long, leaving a very tight deadline for the development and construction phases, as the plant needed to be connected to the grid by 2016 to qualify for the Income Tax Credit incentive. The developers might have also realized that the costs for environmental risk mitigation were too high.

BrightSource Energy and Abengoa know the CSP industry well. And since they together have more than 600MW of CSP operational in the U.S., they also have a pretty good idea of what it takes to develop a project there. If they have chosen to withdraw is probably for a good reason.

Project development in the U.S. tends to be very slow and difficult. BrightSource Energy and Abengoa have already fought valiantly against several challenges in this project before. From the environmental point of view, towers have –rather unfairly- a bad reputation. You only have to consider the negative publicity the Ivanpah project attracted after certain avian mortality figures were published.

These environmental concerns have been taken out of context. More birds are killed by cats, planes and military operations; but public opinion is hard to shift. And this announcement is going to be a considerable setback for tower development worldwide.

The question, however, is whether the fact that this project isn´t going ahead is a matter of common sense – and all of us need to be happy if this is the case – or simply a result of the fact that the playing field isn’t leveled when it comes to this type of project. A good example is that the three Ivanpah towers are using as much water in a year as two holes of a nearby golf course uses in a month. Furthermore, Ivanpah was forced to dry cool in order to save water, a precious commodity in Las Vegas. But how fair is it to not expect other projects – such as the golf course – to do the same?

Even if in reality the reasons for the project’s withdrawal are completely different and totally reasonable, the consequence is that tower developers worldwide need to start working on their bird death risk mitigation plans, because given the publicity surrounding the Palen and other CSP projects, they will be asked for them. I urge them to start as soon as possible, so that we can put this sad chapter behind us.