The Solar nightmare

[XCR1250]

How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’

647

 

Oliver Wainwright in Desert Center, California

Sun, May 21, 2023 at 5:00 AM CDT

 

 

 

Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

Deep in the Mojave desert, about halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix, a sparkling blue sea shimmers on the horizon. Visible from the I-10 highway, amid the parched plains and sun-baked mountains, it is an improbable sight: a deep blue slick stretching for miles across the Chuckwalla Valley, forming an endless glistening mirror.

But something’s not quite right. Closer up, the water’s edge appears blocky and pixelated, with the look of a low-res computer rendering, while its surface is sculpted in orderly geometric ridges, like frozen waves.

“We had a guy pull in the other day towing a big boat,” says Don Sneddon, a local resident. “He asked us how to get to the launch ramp to the lake. I don’t think he realised he was looking at a lake of solar panels.”

Over the last few years, this swathe of desert has been steadily carpeted with one of the world’s largest concentrations of solar power plants, forming a sprawling photovoltaic sea. On the ground, the scale is almost incomprehensible. The Riverside East Solar Energy Zone – the ground zero of California’s solar energy boom – stretches for 150,000 acres, making it 10 times the size of Manhattan.

It is a crucial component of the United States’ green energy revolution. Solar makes up about 3% of the US electricity supply, but the Biden administration hopes it will reach 45% by 2050, primarily by building more huge plants like this across the country’s flat, empty plains.

But there’s one thing that the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – the agency tasked with facilitating these projects on public land – doesn’t seem to have fully taken into account: the desert isn’t quite as empty as it thought. It might look like a barren wilderness, but this stretch of the Mojave is a rich and fragile habitat for endangered species and home to thousand-year-old carbon-capturing woodlands, ancient Indigenous cultural sites – and hundreds of people’s homes.

Residents have watched ruefully for years as solar plants crept over the horizon, bringing noise and pollution that’s eroding a way of life in their desert refuge.

“We feel like we’ve been sacrificed,” says Mark Carrington, who, like Sneddon, lives in the Lake Tamarisk resort, a community for over-55s near Desert Center, which is increasingly surrounded by solar farms. “We’re a senior community, and half of us now have breathing difficulties because of all the dust churned up by the construction. I moved here for the clean air, but some days I have to go outside wearing goggles. What was an oasis has become a little island in a dead solar sea.”

Concerns have intensified following the recent news of a project, called Easley, that would see the panels come just 200 metres from their backyards. Residents claim that excessive water use by solar plants has contributed to the drying up of two local wells, while their property values have been hit hard, with several now struggling to sell their homes.

 

A large array of solar panels one hour north of Los Angeles in Kern county, near Mojave, California. Photograph: George Rose/Getty Images

“It has been psychologically gruelling,” says Teresa Pierce, who moved here six years ago. “From the constant pounding of the metal posts to the endless dust storms. I now have allergies that I’d never had before – my arms burn all day long and my nose is always running. I feel like a prisoner in my own home.”

Elizabeth Knowles, director of community engagement for Intersect Power, the company behind the Easley project, said it knew of residents’ concerns and was exploring how to move the project further from the community. “Since being made aware of their concerns, we have been in regular contact with residents to listen to their concerns and incorporate their feedback into our planning efforts.”

‘90% of the story is underground’

The mostly flat expanse south-east of Joshua Tree national park was originally identified as a prime site for industrial-scale solar power under the Obama administration, which fast-tracked the first project, Desert Sunlight, in 2011. It was the largest solar plant in the world at the time of completion, in 2015, covering an area of almost 4,000 acres, and it opened the floodgates for more. Since then, 15 projects have been completed or are under construction, with momentous mythological names like Athos and Oberon. Ultimately, if built to full capacity, this shimmering patchwork quilt could generate 24 gigawatts annually, enough energy to power 7m homes.

But as the pace of construction has ramped up, so have voices questioning the cumulative impact of these projects on the desert’s populations – both human and non-human.

Kevin Emmerich worked for the National Park Service for over 20 years before setting up Basin & Range Watch in 2008, a non-profit that campaigns to conserve desert life. He says solar plants create myriad environmental problems, including habitat destruction and “lethal death traps” for birds, which dive at the panels, mistaking them for water.

He says one project bulldozed 600 acres of designated critical habitat for the endangered desert tortoise, while populations of Mojave fringe-toed lizards and bighorn sheep have also been afflicted. “We’re trying to solve one environmental problem by creating so many others.”

 

Heliostats at the Ivanpah solar thermal power plant in the Mojave desert. Photograph: Ashley Cooper/Alamy

Such adverse impacts are supposed to be prevented by the desert renewable energy conservation plan (DRECP), which was approved in 2016 after years of consultation and covers almost 11m acres of California. But Emmerich and others think the process is flawed, allowing streamlined environmental reviews and continual amendments that they say trample conservationists’ concerns.

“The plan talks about the importance of making sure there’s enough room between the solar projects to preserve wildlife routes,” says Chris Clarke of the National Parks Conservation Association. “But the individual assessments for each project do not take into account the cumulative impact. The solar plants are blocking endangered species’ natural transport corridors across the desert.”

 

A Mojave desert tortoise under the desert sun. Photograph: Scott Trageser/Alamy

Much of the critical habitat in question is dry wash woodland, made up of “microphyll” shrubs and trees like palo verde, ironwood, catclaw and honey mesquite, which grow in a network of green veins across the desert. But, compared with old-growth forests of giant redwoods, or expanses of venerable Joshua trees, the significance of these small desert shrubs can be hard for the untrained eye to appreciate.

“When people look across the desert, they just see scrubby little plants that look dead half the time,” says Robin Kobaly, a botanist who worked at the BLM for over 20 years as a wildlife biologist before founding the Summertree Institute, an environmental education non-profit. “But they are missing 90% of the story – which is underground.”

Her book, The Desert Underground, features illustrated cross-sections that reveal the hidden universe of roots extended up to 150ft below the surface, supported by branching networks of fungal mycelium. “This is how we need to look at the desert,” she says, turning a diagram from her book upside-down. “It’s an underground forest – just as majestic and important as a giant redwood forest, but we can’t see it.”

The reason this root network is so valuable, she argues, because it operates as an enormous “carbon sink” where plants breath in carbon dioxide at the surface and out underground, forming layers of sedimentary rock known as caliche. “If left undisturbed, the carbon can remain stored for thousands of years,’” she says.

Desert plants are some of the oldest carbon-capturers around: Mojave yuccas can be up to 2,500 years old, while the humble creosote bush can live for over 10,000 years. These plants also sequester carbon in the form of glomalin, a protein secreted around the fungal threads connected to the plants’ roots, thought to store a third of the world’s soil carbon. “By digging these plants up,” says Kobaly, “we are removing the most efficient carbon sequestration units on the planet – and releasing millennia of stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the solar panels we are replacing them with have a lifespan of around 25 years.”

 

Mirrors sprawl across the desert at the Ivanpah solar electric generating system near Nipton, California. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

For Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, the unstoppable march of desert solar represents an existential threat of a different kind. As a descendant of the Chemehuevi and Yaqui nations, he has watched as what he says are numerous sacred Indigenous sites have been bulldozed.

“The history of the world is told by these sites,” he says, “by geoglyphs, petroglyphs, and pictographs. Yet the government has chosen to ignore and push aside the creation story in the name of progress.”

His organisation, La Cuna de Aztlan, acts as custodian of over 300 hundred such sites in the Lower Colorado River Basin, many of which, he says, have already been damaged beyond repair. He claims that a 200ft-long geoglyph of Kokopelli, a flute-playing god, was destroyed by a new road to one of the solar plants, while an image of Cicimitl, an Aztec spirit said to guide souls to the afterlife, is also threatened. “The solar projects cannot destroy just one sacred site without destroying the sacredness of the entire area,” he adds. “They are all connected.”

Related: Satellite images show California’s ‘ghost lake’ reappearing after sodden winter

He cites a 2010 report by the California Energy Commission, which includes testimony from the heritage experts Dr Elizabeth Bagwell and Beverly E Bastian stating that “more than 800 sites within the I-10 Corridor and 17,000 sites within the Southern California Desert Region will potentially be destroyed”, and that “mitigation can reduce the impact of the destruction, but not to a less-than-significant level”.

The Bureau of Land Management declined a request for an interview. In an emailed statement, its public affairs officer, Michelle Van Der Linden, did not directly address questions about solar plants’ water use, health issues, or ecological and archeological impacts, but said the agency operated within the applicable laws and acts. “The DRECP effort was a multiple-year collaborative discussion resulting in an agreement reached between the BLM, numerous environmental groups, partners and stakeholders, in regards to the application and decision process related to renewable energy projects. Project issues were and continue to be identified and addressed through the National Environmental Policy Act process, which includes the opportunity for public engagement and input and also addresses many of the cumulative impacts and additional environmental, social and economic concerns mentioned.”

 

 

Wild burros near the Ivanpah solar electric generating system. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

But a more fundamental question remains: why build in the desert, when thousands of acres of rooftops in urban areas lie empty across California?

“There are so many other places we should be putting solar,” says Clarke, of the National Parks Conservation Association, from homes to warehouses to parking lots and industrial zones. He describes the current model of large-scale, centralised power generation, hundreds of miles from where the power is actually needed, as “a 20th-century business plan for a 21st-century problem”.

“The conversion of intact wildlife habitat should be the absolute last resort, but it’s become our first resort – just because it’s the easy fix.”

Vincent Battaglia, founder of Renova Energy, a rooftop solar company based in Palm Desert, agrees. “We’ve been led to believe that all solar is good solar,” he says. “But it’s not when it molests pristine land, requires hundreds of millions of dollars to transmit to city centres, and loses so much power along the way. It is simply preserving the monopoly of the big energy companies.”

California recently reduced the incentive for homeowners to install rooftop solar panels after it slashed the amount that they can earn from feeding power back into the grid by about 75%. Forecasters suggest that, after doubling in size from 2020 to 2022, the market for residential solar installations is expected to decrease by nearly 40% by 2024 as a result.

Battaglia is optimistic that home energy storage is the answer. “Batteries are the future,” he says. “With solar panels on rooftops and batteries in homes, we’ll finally be able to cut the cord from the big utility companies. Soon, those fields of desert solar farms will be defunct – left as rusting relics of another age.”

Back in Lake Tamarisk, the residents are preparing for the long battle ahead. “They picked on a little town and thought they could wipe us out,” says Sneddon. “But they can’t just mow us over like they did the desert tortoises.

“They thought we were a bunch of uneducated redneck hicks living out here in the desert,” says Pierce. “We’re going to show them they were wrong.”

[Rigid1]

They are planting solar farms in every open field around here, I had 3 fields around my house I could go fool around in during the winter, in the off season they were filled with deer and turkey, now fence in with chain link 6 foot tall and filled with solar panels..I guess "saving the planet" results in leveling what mother nature has produced.. WTF 

[Mainecat]

Coal mining never looked like that.

 

 

or these beautiful California abandoned oil wells?

 

Edited May 21, 2023 by Mainecat

[SkisNH]

1 minute ago, Mainecat said:

Coal mining never looked like that.

 

Ever ridden the Hatfield McCoy trail system...beautiful country. You dont reclaim the solar fields. They just become heat islands. By trying to save the planet these lunatics are ruining the environment. 

[Rigid1]

18 minutes ago, Mainecat said:

Coal mining never looked like that.

 

 

or these beautiful California abandoned oil wells?

 

Oh I'd be pissed if they made 3 coal mines within 3000ft surrounding my house too.. But they don't that.

But let's stay on topic sport, this is about solar, not coal. Start a thread about that if you want..

 

[spin_dry]

There’s a time and place for solar. The one in Nevada was really Ill-conceived. On the other hand, the solar on the top of my van allows me to cook, shower with hot water, run the refrigerator heat pump and air conditioning. All for free. 

[X2700]

Environment impacts are going to be great with these solar farms!!

they also are sticking them everywhere around here!!

I think one’s on homes are great.hopefully someday they will be integrated into most new homes.but these large scale farms taking up waterways have to have impact on wildlife?and yes some great mines in northern mn that have been converted to recreational areas!!

looking forward to check it them out!!

 

[BOHICA]

Glad I don’t live next to any large corporate energy production be it wind, solar, or any fossil fuels.  Totally dig my $5 monthly electric bill though even when plugging in a couple vehicles.

 

[Doug]

Price you pay for $5.00 monthly electric bills

Edited May 22, 2023 by Doug

[hayward]

2 hours ago, Rigid1 said:

They are planting solar farms in every open field around here, I had 3 fields around my house I could go fool around in during the winter, in the off season they were filled with deer and turkey, now fence in with chain link 6 foot tall and filled with solar panels..I guess "saving the planet" results in leveling what mother nature has produced.. WTF 

They're destroying farmland that was before used to produce food to feed human beings. 

Very fucking pro-environment, huh?

[BOHICA]

6 minutes ago, hayward said:

They're destroying farmland that was before used to produce food to feed human beings. 

Very fucking pro-environment, huh?

Did the many dollar buy that farm land from the farmer?  If it was eminent domain taking a farmers land for that project that would be one thing but a farmers land as far as I’m concern is for that farm to do with as he pleases.  My house and neighbors houses are built on old farm land.  Farmer sold his land for huge money as has many farmers.

Edited May 22, 2023 by BOHICA

[spin_dry]

16 minutes ago, hayward said:

They're destroying farmland that was before used to produce food to feed human beings. 

Very fucking pro-environment, huh?

Given all the fancy chemicals and genetically modified Frankenstein seeds, less farmland is required. The mega size corporate farms also require occasional crop shortage to drive up prices. 

[hayward]

18 minutes ago, spin_dry said:

Given all the fancy chemicals and genetically modified Frankenstein seeds, less farmland is required. The mega size corporate farms also require occasional crop shortage to drive up prices. 

True, ain't it fucking swell, eh?

[hayward]

31 minutes ago, BOHICA said:

Did the many dollar buy that farm land from the farmer?  If it was eminent domain taking a farmers land for that project that would be one thing but a farmers land as far as I’m concern is for that farm to do with as he pleases.  My house and neighbors houses are built on old farm land.  Farmer sold his land for huge money as has many farmers.

piss poor stewardship of the land.

nothing a d8 wouldn't fix.

[BOHICA]

4 minutes ago, hayward said:

piss poor stewardship of the land.

nothing a d8 wouldn't fix.

Private land I’m sure.  I’m not the one to dictate what others do with their land or property.  If they discovered oil under the land and a petroleum company wants to drill would you be opposed to the farmer exploiting his resource and making money.  Very little of any of the US government owned land is exploited for wind or solar.

best stewardship of land isn’t farming.  Best steward ship of land is to turn land back into natural preserves vs farming it 

 

most wind and solar are all on privately owned land.  Are you one to desire to limit what people do with there own property?

Edited May 22, 2023 by BOHICA

[Mainecat]

3 hours ago, Rigid1 said:

Oh I'd be pissed if they made 3 coal mines within 3000ft surrounding my house too.. But they don't that.

But let's stay on topic sport, this is about solar, not coal. Start a thread about that if you want..

 

It’s about energy generation dumb ass. 

[$poorsledder$]

5 minutes ago, Mainecat said:

It’s about energy generation dumb ass. 

I read the title as “ The solar Nightmare”, not “I’m Mainecat and let me chime in this post like I do every post and ruin the content”.

 

[Plissken]

5 hours ago, XCR1250 said:

How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’

647

 

Oliver Wainwright in Desert Center, California

Sun, May 21, 2023 at 5:00 AM CDT

 

 

 

Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

Deep in the Mojave desert, about halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix, a sparkling blue sea shimmers on the horizon. Visible from the I-10 highway, amid the parched plains and sun-baked mountains, it is an improbable sight: a deep blue slick stretching for miles across the Chuckwalla Valley, forming an endless glistening mirror.

But something’s not quite right. Closer up, the water’s edge appears blocky and pixelated, with the look of a low-res computer rendering, while its surface is sculpted in orderly geometric ridges, like frozen waves.

“We had a guy pull in the other day towing a big boat,” says Don Sneddon, a local resident. “He asked us how to get to the launch ramp to the lake. I don’t think he realised he was looking at a lake of solar panels.”

Over the last few years, this swathe of desert has been steadily carpeted with one of the world’s largest concentrations of solar power plants, forming a sprawling photovoltaic sea. On the ground, the scale is almost incomprehensible. The Riverside East Solar Energy Zone – the ground zero of California’s solar energy boom – stretches for 150,000 acres, making it 10 times the size of Manhattan.

It is a crucial component of the United States’ green energy revolution. Solar makes up about 3% of the US electricity supply, but the Biden administration hopes it will reach 45% by 2050, primarily by building more huge plants like this across the country’s flat, empty plains.

But there’s one thing that the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – the agency tasked with facilitating these projects on public land – doesn’t seem to have fully taken into account: the desert isn’t quite as empty as it thought. It might look like a barren wilderness, but this stretch of the Mojave is a rich and fragile habitat for endangered species and home to thousand-year-old carbon-capturing woodlands, ancient Indigenous cultural sites – and hundreds of people’s homes.

Residents have watched ruefully for years as solar plants crept over the horizon, bringing noise and pollution that’s eroding a way of life in their desert refuge.

“We feel like we’ve been sacrificed,” says Mark Carrington, who, like Sneddon, lives in the Lake Tamarisk resort, a community for over-55s near Desert Center, which is increasingly surrounded by solar farms. “We’re a senior community, and half of us now have breathing difficulties because of all the dust churned up by the construction. I moved here for the clean air, but some days I have to go outside wearing goggles. What was an oasis has become a little island in a dead solar sea.”

Concerns have intensified following the recent news of a project, called Easley, that would see the panels come just 200 metres from their backyards. Residents claim that excessive water use by solar plants has contributed to the drying up of two local wells, while their property values have been hit hard, with several now struggling to sell their homes.

 

A large array of solar panels one hour north of Los Angeles in Kern county, near Mojave, California. Photograph: George Rose/Getty Images

“It has been psychologically gruelling,” says Teresa Pierce, who moved here six years ago. “From the constant pounding of the metal posts to the endless dust storms. I now have allergies that I’d never had before – my arms burn all day long and my nose is always running. I feel like a prisoner in my own home.”

Elizabeth Knowles, director of community engagement for Intersect Power, the company behind the Easley project, said it knew of residents’ concerns and was exploring how to move the project further from the community. “Since being made aware of their concerns, we have been in regular contact with residents to listen to their concerns and incorporate their feedback into our planning efforts.”

‘90% of the story is underground’

The mostly flat expanse south-east of Joshua Tree national park was originally identified as a prime site for industrial-scale solar power under the Obama administration, which fast-tracked the first project, Desert Sunlight, in 2011. It was the largest solar plant in the world at the time of completion, in 2015, covering an area of almost 4,000 acres, and it opened the floodgates for more. Since then, 15 projects have been completed or are under construction, with momentous mythological names like Athos and Oberon. Ultimately, if built to full capacity, this shimmering patchwork quilt could generate 24 gigawatts annually, enough energy to power 7m homes.

But as the pace of construction has ramped up, so have voices questioning the cumulative impact of these projects on the desert’s populations – both human and non-human.

Kevin Emmerich worked for the National Park Service for over 20 years before setting up Basin & Range Watch in 2008, a non-profit that campaigns to conserve desert life. He says solar plants create myriad environmental problems, including habitat destruction and “lethal death traps” for birds, which dive at the panels, mistaking them for water.

He says one project bulldozed 600 acres of designated critical habitat for the endangered desert tortoise, while populations of Mojave fringe-toed lizards and bighorn sheep have also been afflicted. “We’re trying to solve one environmental problem by creating so many others.”

 

Heliostats at the Ivanpah solar thermal power plant in the Mojave desert. Photograph: Ashley Cooper/Alamy

Such adverse impacts are supposed to be prevented by the desert renewable energy conservation plan (DRECP), which was approved in 2016 after years of consultation and covers almost 11m acres of California. But Emmerich and others think the process is flawed, allowing streamlined environmental reviews and continual amendments that they say trample conservationists’ concerns.

“The plan talks about the importance of making sure there’s enough room between the solar projects to preserve wildlife routes,” says Chris Clarke of the National Parks Conservation Association. “But the individual assessments for each project do not take into account the cumulative impact. The solar plants are blocking endangered species’ natural transport corridors across the desert.”

 

A Mojave desert tortoise under the desert sun. Photograph: Scott Trageser/Alamy

Much of the critical habitat in question is dry wash woodland, made up of “microphyll” shrubs and trees like palo verde, ironwood, catclaw and honey mesquite, which grow in a network of green veins across the desert. But, compared with old-growth forests of giant redwoods, or expanses of venerable Joshua trees, the significance of these small desert shrubs can be hard for the untrained eye to appreciate.

“When people look across the desert, they just see scrubby little plants that look dead half the time,” says Robin Kobaly, a botanist who worked at the BLM for over 20 years as a wildlife biologist before founding the Summertree Institute, an environmental education non-profit. “But they are missing 90% of the story – which is underground.”

Her book, The Desert Underground, features illustrated cross-sections that reveal the hidden universe of roots extended up to 150ft below the surface, supported by branching networks of fungal mycelium. “This is how we need to look at the desert,” she says, turning a diagram from her book upside-down. “It’s an underground forest – just as majestic and important as a giant redwood forest, but we can’t see it.”

The reason this root network is so valuable, she argues, because it operates as an enormous “carbon sink” where plants breath in carbon dioxide at the surface and out underground, forming layers of sedimentary rock known as caliche. “If left undisturbed, the carbon can remain stored for thousands of years,’” she says.

Desert plants are some of the oldest carbon-capturers around: Mojave yuccas can be up to 2,500 years old, while the humble creosote bush can live for over 10,000 years. These plants also sequester carbon in the form of glomalin, a protein secreted around the fungal threads connected to the plants’ roots, thought to store a third of the world’s soil carbon. “By digging these plants up,” says Kobaly, “we are removing the most efficient carbon sequestration units on the planet – and releasing millennia of stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the solar panels we are replacing them with have a lifespan of around 25 years.”

 

Mirrors sprawl across the desert at the Ivanpah solar electric generating system near Nipton, California. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

For Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, the unstoppable march of desert solar represents an existential threat of a different kind. As a descendant of the Chemehuevi and Yaqui nations, he has watched as what he says are numerous sacred Indigenous sites have been bulldozed.

“The history of the world is told by these sites,” he says, “by geoglyphs, petroglyphs, and pictographs. Yet the government has chosen to ignore and push aside the creation story in the name of progress.”

His organisation, La Cuna de Aztlan, acts as custodian of over 300 hundred such sites in the Lower Colorado River Basin, many of which, he says, have already been damaged beyond repair. He claims that a 200ft-long geoglyph of Kokopelli, a flute-playing god, was destroyed by a new road to one of the solar plants, while an image of Cicimitl, an Aztec spirit said to guide souls to the afterlife, is also threatened. “The solar projects cannot destroy just one sacred site without destroying the sacredness of the entire area,” he adds. “They are all connected.”

Related: Satellite images show California’s ‘ghost lake’ reappearing after sodden winter

He cites a 2010 report by the California Energy Commission, which includes testimony from the heritage experts Dr Elizabeth Bagwell and Beverly E Bastian stating that “more than 800 sites within the I-10 Corridor and 17,000 sites within the Southern California Desert Region will potentially be destroyed”, and that “mitigation can reduce the impact of the destruction, but not to a less-than-significant level”.

The Bureau of Land Management declined a request for an interview. In an emailed statement, its public affairs officer, Michelle Van Der Linden, did not directly address questions about solar plants’ water use, health issues, or ecological and archeological impacts, but said the agency operated within the applicable laws and acts. “The DRECP effort was a multiple-year collaborative discussion resulting in an agreement reached between the BLM, numerous environmental groups, partners and stakeholders, in regards to the application and decision process related to renewable energy projects. Project issues were and continue to be identified and addressed through the National Environmental Policy Act process, which includes the opportunity for public engagement and input and also addresses many of the cumulative impacts and additional environmental, social and economic concerns mentioned.”

 

 

Wild burros near the Ivanpah solar electric generating system. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

But a more fundamental question remains: why build in the desert, when thousands of acres of rooftops in urban areas lie empty across California?

“There are so many other places we should be putting solar,” says Clarke, of the National Parks Conservation Association, from homes to warehouses to parking lots and industrial zones. He describes the current model of large-scale, centralised power generation, hundreds of miles from where the power is actually needed, as “a 20th-century business plan for a 21st-century problem”.

“The conversion of intact wildlife habitat should be the absolute last resort, but it’s become our first resort – just because it’s the easy fix.”

Vincent Battaglia, founder of Renova Energy, a rooftop solar company based in Palm Desert, agrees. “We’ve been led to believe that all solar is good solar,” he says. “But it’s not when it molests pristine land, requires hundreds of millions of dollars to transmit to city centres, and loses so much power along the way. It is simply preserving the monopoly of the big energy companies.”

California recently reduced the incentive for homeowners to install rooftop solar panels after it slashed the amount that they can earn from feeding power back into the grid by about 75%. Forecasters suggest that, after doubling in size from 2020 to 2022, the market for residential solar installations is expected to decrease by nearly 40% by 2024 as a result.

Battaglia is optimistic that home energy storage is the answer. “Batteries are the future,” he says. “With solar panels on rooftops and batteries in homes, we’ll finally be able to cut the cord from the big utility companies. Soon, those fields of desert solar farms will be defunct – left as rusting relics of another age.”

Back in Lake Tamarisk, the residents are preparing for the long battle ahead. “They picked on a little town and thought they could wipe us out,” says Sneddon. “But they can’t just mow us over like they did the desert tortoises.

“They thought we were a bunch of uneducated redneck hicks living out here in the desert,” says Pierce. “We’re going to show them they were wrong.”

I get the concern but it’s worth putting the scale of the project in context.  The article says this project is 150,000 acres which sounds like a lot but the Mojave is 20 million acres. So this project covers less than 1% of it so I probably won’t lose sleep over it.  

[Plissken]

2 hours ago, hayward said:

piss poor stewardship of the land.

nothing a d8 wouldn't fix.

It seems you don’t have to choose one or the other, plants vs solar.  They can coexist in concert.

 

[racinfarmer]

13 minutes ago, Plissken said:

It seems you don’t have to choose one or the other, plants vs solar.  They can coexist in concert.

 

Of the hundreds of solar farms they have built in MN in the last decade, I haven't seen a single one that is raised like that to allow farming to happen under it.

That would cost money, which I sure the solar farm developers will be more then happy to ram down the farmer's throat, with a healthy mark-up of course.  

[Not greg b]

1 hour ago, racinfarmer said:

Of the hundreds of solar farms they have built in MN in the last decade, I haven't seen a single one that is raised like that to allow farming to happen under it.

That would cost money, which I sure the solar farm developers will be more than happy to ram down the farmer's throat, with a healthy mark-up of course.  

In Mn you are better off doing windmills and farming around them. The lease payments on those stupid fucking things are worth it 

[steve from amherst]

10 hours ago, spin_dry said:

There’s a time and place for solar. The one in Nevada was really Ill-conceived. On the other hand, the solar on the top of my van allows me to cook, shower with hot water, run the refrigerator heat pump and air conditioning. All for free. 

This, solar does belong on every rooftop of flat industrial building in warm climates.  ALso closed landfills make great solar farms.

[hayward]

8 hours ago, BOHICA said:

Private land I’m sure.  I’m not the one to dictate what others do with their land or property.  If they discovered oil under the land and a petroleum company wants to drill would you be opposed to the farmer exploiting his resource and making money.  Very little of any of the US government owned land is exploited for wind or solar.

best stewardship of land isn’t farming.  Best steward ship of land is to turn land back into natural preserves vs farming it 

 

most wind and solar are all on privately owned land.  Are you one to desire to limit what people do with there own property?

no, actually people ought to know better.

[Mainecat]

8 hours ago, $poorsledder$ said:

I read the title as “ The solar Nightmare”, not “I’m Mainecat and let me chime in this post like I do every post and ruin the content”.

 

You both should start a thread about being fuckin whiney bitches.

[XCR1250]

America’s big shift to green energy has a woolly mammoth problem

 

 

Oliver Milman

Mon, May 22, 2023 at 6:00 AM CDT

 

 

 

Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA

America’s renewable energy drive needs more than a million miles of new transition lines but emerging resistance includes opponents worried about building them in one of the country’s richest areas of ice-age fossils.

The Greenlink West project would build a 470-mile-long transmission line bringing clean electricity north to Reno in Nevada, but it cuts through an area containing everything from woolly mammoth tusks to giant sloths to ancient camels.

The pushback has highlighted a major, and growing, challenge to Joe Biden’s attempts to expand clean energy in order to tackle the climate crisis – how to quickly build vast new networks of electricity transmission across America without falling afoul of local communities and green groups.

 

If the US is to eliminate planet-heating emissions by 2050 it will need to increase the capacity of its current 700,000 circuit-mile network of poles and wires by threefold, researchers have estimated, in order to electrify key components of everyday life and shift intermittent wind and solar energy to areas where the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing.

The nascent stages of this gargantuan effort, the scale of which hasn’t been seen since the US built out its highway system in the 1950s, is already facing opposition from various conservation groups, locals and fossil fuel interests from New England to the Arizona desert.

“Transmission is contentious because it’s long, it’s linear, so it affects a lot of people,” said Jessica Wilkinson, North America renewable energy team lead at the Nature Conservancy. “We are seeing local concerns being raised and they are growing as these projects increase in size. It’s all new to people.”

 

Suddenly, as lawmakers jostle over ways to speed up new projects, local opposition seems likely to grow. “It’s only been energy nerds like me into this, most people haven’t really thought about it,” said Tim Latimer, chief executive of Fervo Energy, a developer of geothermal projects.

“But this is the next big barrier to renewables. There really is no transition without transmission.”

Those committed to preventing the defilement of valued landscapes are now placed in a conundrum where an unprecedented amount of infrastructure development is needed to protect those landscapes, as well as people, from global heating.

Sherri Grotheer, president of the Protectors of Tule Springs Fossil Beds, said that she is “very concerned” about climate crisis but that she wanted federal authorities to come up with an alternative route for Greenlink than slicing through the Nevada monument, which could disturb fossils that are hundreds of thousands of years old.

“Sometimes knee-jerk reactions can cause unintended consequences and we know there are innumerable fossils left here, there is evidence of fossils everywhere just under the surface,” she said of Tule Springs, a 23,000-acre monument situated north of Las Vegas protected for its fossils under the auspices of the National Park Service since 2014.

“It’s one of the most significant fossil sites in the continental US and maybe beyond,” said Grotheer. “It’s just very cool. I just want them to look at alternative routes. There is also the concern of putting projects like this in national parks, because then you think ‘where does this end?’”

For developers of renewable energy projects, however, the lack of transmission capacity is a major headache. Even as clean energy projects have gathered pace, turbocharged by last year’s $370bn in climate spending via the Inflation Reduction Act, they face frustrating waits to be connected to a fragmented, congested electricity grid.

I can’t tell you how many places we’ve seen and thought, ‘Wow, the geology is excellent for geothermal, but we just can’t get the transmission'

Tim Latimer

The typical wait is now nearly four years, with much longer delays than this experienced by some companies. While the tap of new funding for renewables is now gushing, it risks being wasted due to the lack of a a metaphorical hosepipe.

The US Department of Energy has said there is a “pressing need” for new infrastructure, with California alone needing to add more than $9bn-worth of new transmission to avoid rolling power blackouts as wildfires and other climate-driven disruptions mount.

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“We need to solve this problem if we are going to deal with climate change,” said Latimer. Fervo has been able to establish geothermal projects in Utah and Nevada – tapping into the steam from underground heat to spin turbines – but Latimer said other opportunities have been hampered by the lack of grid opportunities.

“I can’t tell you how many places we’ve seen and thought, ‘Wow, the geology is excellent for geothermal, but we just can’t get the transmission,’” he said.

“It’s difficult to get private finance for something where you can’t get revenues for nine more years, so you just give up. The system is gummed up but that is just the tip of the iceberg because many people don’t even try to get a spot in the line.”

Wilkinson said that smart planning can avoid disturbing valued landscapes and help reduce this tension. A recent report she co-authored found that while an area the size of Texas is needed for new renewable projects and their power lines in the US, this can be shrunk by more than half if sited in an efficient way, avoiding sensitive habitats and prized cropland.

“We have the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss and there is an assumption we will need to trade off a lot on the nature side to fix climate change, but that’s not the case,” she said. “Time is of the essence, we need to transition to renewables quickly, but there is a way to do it smartly that can balance conservation and development.”

Congress is now grappling with how to speed up the permitting of new transmission projects, as part of the negotiations over the debt ceiling.

Republicans and Joe Manchin, the centrist Democrat senator, want to weaken environmental impact reviews of new developments, a prospect that environmental groups are wary of as an avenue for fossil fuel projects such as the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a gas project championed by Manchin that gained a key approval from the Biden administration earlier this month.

The White House, meanwhile, has indicated it supports expedited permitting, but not a wholesale watering down of environmental laws. “Right now, the permitting process for clean energy infrastructure, including transmission, is plagued by delays and bottlenecks,” admitted John Podesta, a senior Biden climate adviser, in a speech last week.