Solar panels in the Mojave Desert?

What is the price of renewable energy?  Most of us agree that clean, green power to get us off of fossil-fuels is the way to go.  But there is a growing discontent over solar power plants in the California desert regions.  In fact, its a downright solar power clash in the Mojave Desert.

Utility scale solar plants could generate solar electricity to power millions of homes with reliable, emissions-free energy.  However, not all environmentalists are excited about the prospect.  Development of untouched lands in the Mojave Desert has some people seeing red instead of green!

Recently, the Mojave has become the poster child for the inevitable conflicts of green vs. green as we look to balance the need to develop renewable resources against the preservation of shrinking pristine areas.  When drawing battle lines, its best to know the players:

• Sierra Club
• Environmental Defense Fund
• Natural Resources Defense Council
• Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E)
• FLP Group

These groups have been supportive of cap and trade and other climate initiatives to promote development of alternative energy, and investment groups/utilities have worked to file applications to build the solar power plants in regions across the desert Southwest.

Utility scale solar concerns

On the opposite side of the debate is, among other groups, the Wildlands Conservancy, a small powerful group that convinced Senator Dianne Feinstein to introduce legislation to ban solar power plants in the desert on more than a million acres of land in the Mojave Desert.  The areas affected include the land on which PG&E and other utilities had planned utility scale solar plants – most of the areas are prime land from a development standpoint – close to transmission lines and Southern California utility customers.

When it comes to green vs. green, what are the issues?

To start, environmentalists that are concerned about solar panels in the desert cite potential impacts on water resources and the habitat of the desert tortoise, along with other animals and plants of the fragile arid ecosystem.  Others consider the fact that the area is undeveloped and should remain that way.

According to David Myers, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy, who supports Sen. Feinstein’s efforts to preserve the desert lands from renewable energy development:

“Al Gore called these lands out here some of the most pristine and scenic desert lands in the world.  You have this incredible landscape of these bighorn sheep corridors back and forth across the valley.  You couldn’t put a project in a worse area from a landscape connectivity point of view… It’s a philosophic non-sequitur that you can destroy hundreds of thousands of acres to save the Earth from global warming.”

Solar panels in California: the debate rages on

Myers is not 100% against utility scale solar plants in California, however.  He prefers that solar development take place in other parts of the Mojave or on degraded farmland.  To help assure these goals, new federal legislation would classify certain areas of the Mojave Dsert as a National Monument.  That alone chased off investors and utilities that had been considering projects that could have resulted in the generation of many megawatts of solar electricity.

According to a recent article:

PG&E, FPL, and Iberdrola Renewables, the Spanish renewable energy giant, say they are either cautiously proceeding or re-evaluating their Mojave projects in light of the legislation. Most developers have staked multiple land claims elsewhere in the Southwest. (That, of course, doesn’t mean they’re happy about the situation. “Iberdrola Renewables believes the environmental community is taking away one of the few places in the U.S. suitable for utility-scale solar development,” Jan Johnson, a company spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail.)

From my perspective, the battle is just heating up.  Sure, there have been rumblings for the past few years, but after the Copenhagen Climate Summit and as people wonder about peak oil and are more and more worried about global climate change, pressure continues to mount for us to find viable renewable energy resources.  The big question is: at what cost?

The desert southwest in the United States is a hugely untapped solar power market.  Can we develop the resource carefully and in a sustainable manner?  That there will be some difficult decisions to be made, after much more debate is certain.

Green vs. green could result in some groups seeing red.

Where do you stand on the Mojave Desert debate?

Solar Power Collector Satellite

Regardless of the debate over solar panels in the Mojave Desert, California soon could be powered by solar energy from a unique source.  That’s right, the Golden State is reaching for solar energy from space.

Led by the San Francisco-based utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, residents of California may soon be benefiting from the efforts of Solaren Corporation, a solar start-up, to tap into the vast solar resources just beyond the atmosphere.  The proposed project would require the launch of a huge array of solar power collectors into orbit about 23,000 miles above the surface of Earth.

With the California proposal, solar energy would be beamed down from the satellite.  A contract between PG&E and Solaren requires the new technology to work, of course!  Hopefully, it will be a huge success as the goal is to power over 150,000 homes with the space-based solar energy.

Space-based solar power on the horizon

You may be wondering about the cost for such an ambitious project?  Currently, ballpark figures are over $2 billion.  However, with the advancing technology, solar power from space is expected to be comparable with Earth-based energy, but much cleaner.

This technology is not yet here, but is expected by the year 2016.  It is hoped that the project will bring the state a step closer to the goal of 20% renewable energy by 2012, which rises to 30% by 2030.

Whether you think this is “pie in the sky” or achievable, you can at least look to the fact that space-based solar power has been the energy source for commercial satellites for 30-40 years.

Let’s beam that power back down to Earth, don’t you agree?