It's a solar energy plant! Before we left, I made a list of solar energy plants to check out near Mojave from the current Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) Exhibit. It turns out this one, the Ivanpah Solar Project, wasn’t on CLUI’s site but I found an article describing its grand opening in February (an interesting read). This highly controversial clean energy plant is situated in a scenic location that also happens to be prime desert tortoise habitat. It’s the world’s largest solar thermal project where thousands of mirrors are focused on a boiler tower (making it white hot and this is what we saw in the distance) creating steam used to generate electricity. We drove down a dirt road to get a closer look and then walked through the desert to get right up to the fence and Rob caught a glimpse of a tortoise on our way back to the car. So what do you think? Should we be building large solar plants like this or should we be focusing on solar rooftops in our cities?