SAN FRANCISCO -- The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is trying to figure out how to regulate solar development on public lands, giving industries and other participants the opportunity to debate both the ranking of large-scale solar power in the nation's energy priorities and the role of the federal government in controlling such development.
Developers have filed 125 applications for permits covering nearly 1 million acres, according to BLM, which manages 120 million acres in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah (Land Letter, June 5).
BLM held its first public forums last week in California as part of its rulemaking process for its programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) -- a document intended to smooth the way for future solar power siting and production by outlining environmental impacts and potential mitigation measures. (BLM has already done an environmental impact statement for wind power and is working on one for geothermal.)
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| 'Nevada Solar One,' built by Acciona Solar, a Spanish company, went online in June 2007. It generates 64 megawatts, and the company plans to make it 10 times bigger. Photo courtesy of Solar Energy Industries Association. |
The meetings in Riverside and Barstow were filled to capacity with environmentalists and renewable energy developers -- a fairly even mix, with a few community members, according to BLM spokesman David Quick. Topics of discussion included water use, the impact of transmission corridors on endangered species like the desert tortoise and the importance of smaller-scale power generators.
"There were a lot of pleas for 'Hey, listen, even we development folks are on your side in this, too; the alternatives are things like coal or whatever,'" Quick said.
The issues are of primary importance to the U.S. solar industry, according to Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association. The "concentrating solar power" (CSP) plants represent a variety of technologies, some of which use mirrors and other devices to concentrate the heat from sunlight and use it to boil a liquid that creates steam to make electricity. While the United States helped develop the technology in the 1970s, he noted, Spain is currently the leader in developing big solar projects.
"What's beautiful about these plants is not only do they produce carbon-free electricity, but they generate firm, dispatchable peak power," Resch said, explaining that they are capable of meeting power demands at peak times of use, such as early afternoons on hot summer days when air conditioners are fully on. Wind-generated electricity, on the other hand, usually peaks at night, when demands for power are relatively low, and there is often no way to store it for the next day.
What is causing the land rush is that each large CSP plant may require as much as a 2-square-mile area for its solar arrays. "It would occupy the same area as a nuclear power plant, when you take into consideration its buffer zones," explained Resch. Desert land in the Southwest, he added, is prized by project developers because it amounts to some of the "best solar resources in the entire world."
"You can take land that has no intrinsic value and put it to use creating carbon free energy," Resch said, but he added that probably not more than a third of the 125 applications before BLM are serious solar energy proposals. The remaining projects involve "names unfamiliar to us in the solar energy" and may represent "land grabs by smart entrepreneurs."
Environmental groups are also leery of what appears to be a land grab. Jim Harvey, founding member of the Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy, testified in Riverside on the significance of BLM's undertaking. "The desert area of California is basically up for grabs right now," he said in an interview. "There's a gold rush to exploit it, particularly the Mojave."
But rather than by opening up hundreds of thousands of acres of potentially environmentally sensitive public land, Harvey said, state and federal renewable energy goals can be met through smaller-scale generation in areas that are already developed. "There's no need to destroy the desert under a false banner of saving the environment," he added.
If BLM opens its lands to solar, the alliance wants the agency to exclude areas of "critical environmental concern." This is a public lands designation second only to wilderness in terms of protection. The wind PEIS, which came out in 2004, does exclude such areas from development.
BrightSource Energy, a solar company backed by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Chevron Technology Ventures and others, did not testify at either of the public meetings, but has several applications already filed for BLM lands in California, including its Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave, which is scheduled to begin construction next year. "We have applications already filed for many, many plants, so I would not expect that would have any detrimental effect on us," said BrightSource spokesman Charles Ricker, citing ongoing discussions with BLM.
As for the issue of water use, BrightSource says its plants use air, not water, to cool and condense the steam from the solar boilers. The main water use comes from washing off the solar panels to maximize sun capture.
Solar companies that testified at Riverside and Barstow include Ausra, OptiSolar, enXco and Solar Millennium.
The significance of large-scale renewables development varies by state, according to Michael Neary, president of the Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association. Arizona's renewable energy standard of 15 percent by 2025 includes a requirement that 30 percent of the total come from distributed generation or from small-scale sources like rooftop panels. That makes utility-scale solar projects on public lands less important proportionally, he explained.
The extension of federal renewable energy tax credits is paramount to these developments, Neary said. His trade group counts several member companies that have doubled in size in the past year, but their continued expansion depends on incentives being extended for energy production and investment, he said.
Congress is still stymied over the issue, with a $55 billion tax package most recently failing last week in the Senate (E&ENews PM, June 17).
"It always concerns me when a bureaucratic process begins to take place," Neary said, but "frankly, there's just so many other issues from Arizona's perspective. We have legislation, a RES [renewable energy standard] in the implementation process and an election coming up for the state Corporation Commission, so our plate is full."
And no matter what BLM decides to do, it will likely leave much of the siting and other environmental decisions to the individual project and existing regulations, said Center for Biological Diversity staff attorney Lisa Belenky. In California, for example, the Desert Conservation Area Plan is tailored to specific desert areas, and projects are also subject to existing federal protections like Desert Wildlife Management Areas and critical habitat designations.
"It's not something we were particularly asking for," Belenky said. "We think they do adequately account for these issues." BLM's environmental plan for wind installations, which came out several years ago, is "pretty general," she said. "You still need to go through the EIS for each one, anyway. There's only so much you can do on the scale that they're looking at."
BLM will hold several more meetings this month, in Las Vegas; Denver; Sacramento, Calif.; Phoenix; Salt Lake City; and Albuquerque, N.M., with an additional forum in California to be held sometime next month, Quick said. Comments will be accepted through July 15.
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