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?