WLP News No 28

Western Lands Update Western Lands Project Seattle, Washington Summer 2010 Research, Outreach, and Advocacy to Keep Public Lands Public Vol. 14, No. 1 S ince passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the federal government has been strongly promoting renewable energy projects on public land, including large-scale solar facilities in parts of California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. Companies are taking advantage of fast-track federal permitting and huge tax incentives that will come to those who can present substantial plans by the end of 2010. The Southwest could be especially hard hit, with hundreds of thousands of acres of fragile desert paved in mirrors, if the projects planned there go through. Intuitively , large solar energy projects strike most people as sensible, an unquestioned public good, even benign. For public lands advocates, however, it is much more complicated. The average proposed “Big Solar” project occupies 5,000 acres. Of the hundreds of projects lining up for permits, about 35 are currently on the fast track, and of those, 14 (planned on about 50,000 acres) are in critical habitat for the threatened desert tortoise. These facilities must also hook up to transmission lines, and hundreds of miles of new lines and extensions are planned. Where permits succeed, the projects will be built on public land rights- of-way , a temporary use. The solar plants have estimated project lives of only 30 years. Yet the Rethinking Big Solar on Public Lands scale, intensity , and irreversibility of the impacts these projects will bring to public land essentially render them permanent. In fact, we consider the projects to entail “virtual privatization,” because they completely alter their sites and preclude all other us es and public values. Some of the national environmental groups have called for large energy projects to be built on “already-degraded” public lands, or on private agricultural land that has gone out of use. But for the most part, they have acquiesced to the sacrice of large areas of public land they might otherwise defend to accommodate a non-fossil-fuel energy policy they also support. We were more sympathetic to the dilemma before we found copious (if largely unpublicized) evidence that better, far less damaging, and more efcient technology is available in the form of distributed solari.e., installations on rooftops and other areas of the built environment. The common “wisdom” has been that these technologies cannot compete in cost- The desert is perennially undervalued and too easily abused. Photo: Chris Clarke Continued next page

WLP News No 28

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