Obama-era 'clean energy' solar power plant still uses fossil fuels -- and kills thousands of birds annually

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! This is part 2 of a series on California's troubled Ivanpah Solar Power Plant in the Mojave Desert. More than a decade after it opened, an Obama-era taxpayer-backed "clean energy" solar plant in California still burns fossil fuels and kills thousands of birds each year.The Ivanpah Solar Power Plant, a massive facility in the Mojave Desert near the California–Nevada border, uses hundreds of thousands of mirrors to reflect sunlight into three towering structures, generating intense heat to produce electricity.But those same beams have proven deadly. A composite image shows a tower at the Ivanpah Solar Power Plant alongside a bird found with burn injuries linked to concentrated solar heat exposure, according to federal wildlife research. (Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)OBAMA-BACKED $2.2B GREEN ENERGY 'BOONDOGGLE' LEAVES TAXPAYERS ON THE HOOKFederal researchers and monitoring reports have documented thousands of birds being killed after flying through the plant’s concentrated solar rays — a phenomenon known as "solar flux."The plant also relies on natural gas to start up each day -- producing tens of thousands of metric tons of carbon dioxide annually -- an amount comparable to the