The Desert Sunlight & Topaz Solar Farms, located in the Mojave Desert east of Palm Springs, came online in early 2015. At 550 MW each, they are the two largest PV solar power plants in the world.
The 377 MW Ivanpah Concentrating Solar-Thermal plant, located in the Mojave Desert, officially opened in mid-Feb, 2014. Ivanpah uses a “power-tower” design. It does not currently include thermal storage. It’s a hybrid design which requires the use of natural gas to get things started every morning. By late spring of 2016, Ivanpah had still not met its performance targets, and its owners, which include Google, were forced to pay penalties because the terms of the project’s ​​power purchase agreement were not being met. Google has since “lost interest” in large scale solar thermal projects in favor of PV. Ivanpah is working, but not well enough to encourage replication.
San Francisco has just passed an ordinance requiring solar PV on all new buildings.