We were on the road to Las Vegas today. It was windy and a lot of dust was blowing making visibility poor. As we neared the border of California and Nevada we saw these bright lights clearly through the dust. It is the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility which uses reflected sunlight to run gigantic turbines to generate electricity. "What a wonderful idea," I hear you say. Pure sun energy generating electricity. How green can you get? What is left unsaid is that it takes 525,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas to get the thing started in the morning. That amount of gas could generate 124 GWh of electrical energy. That would also produce 46,084 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, twice the pollution threshold of other California plants and factories. As always, it ain't as green as they would like to have you think.