by Jessica Goad
The way that solar energy is sited and built on federal public lands just got simpler. Earlier today, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar signed into law a new plan outlining the best places for solar to be developed on public lands and incentives for avoiding places that are ecologically sensitive.
At the beginning of this administration, there were literally no solar energy projects on public lands, despite hundreds of applications lined up. Currently one project is operating while five others are under construction.
“Energy from sources like wind and solar have doubled since the President took office, and with today’s milestone, we are laying a sustainable foundation to keep expanding our nation’s domestic energy resources,” said Secretary Salazar in a statement.
Perhaps the most unique idea in the “Solar Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement” announced today is that of zones for solar development. These areas were screened for their high solar resource potential, transmission capacity, and lack of resource conflicts, the idea being that projects located within them will benefit from faster permitting and easier mitigation. Altogether, 17 zones covering approximately 285,000 acres were identified in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. Solar development is also allowable in 19 million acres outside of the zones, but will receive less agency attention and more environmental analyses.
“This historic initiative provides a roadmap for landscape-level planning that will lead to faster, smarter utility-scale solar development on public lands and reflects President Obama’s commitment to grow American made energy and create jobs,” said Salazar.
Importantly, this announcement reflects a major step forward in the philosophy about how our public lands are used for energy development. Up until now, the priority use of public lands for energy has been fossil fuels — oil, gas, and coal. Although a handful of wind and geothermal projects were up and running, it wasn’t until this year that any solar projects started generating electricity.
The solar decision follows an announcement earlier this week from the Department of the Interior that 10,000 megawatts of solar, wind, and geothermal energy have been authorized on public lands. This meets a goal for the agency laid out by Congress in 2005 of approving 10,000 megawatts of non-hydro renewable energy on public lands by 2015, which was echoed by President Obama in this year’s State of the Union address.
Now that federal land management agencies have met their megawatt goal and completed this seminal plan for solar energy, they will need to determine what the next steps in the process will be. It remains to be seen how well the new framework for solar energy development works, particularly whether or not it encourages more developers to look to federal lands for opportunities. In addition, the process for establishing new zones has yet to be tested.
The Center for American Progress has called on the agencies to institute a new goal of ensuring that 35 percent of the electricity from resources from public lands and waters is renewable by 2035. Currently, 66 percent of the resources from public lands used for electricity are from coal, while only 1 percent is from wind, solar, and geothermal combined. Establishing a “clean resources standard” will help bring coal and renewable energy sourced from public lands back into balance and continue to help us transition the use of our lands for energy development from fossil to clean.
Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Great news.
A side note. If the GOP get in power would they sell the solar sites cheep to the fossil industry?
Profits to the people not the polluters.
The environmental disaster of the Reagan lunacy was a real milestone on our road to destruction. Thirty years later, who will be the Stormin’ Mormon’s James Watt? And, as Karl Marx noted, it will be history repeating as deadly farce.
To relegate hundreds of thousands of acres of public land to industrial use and permanent transformation, when solar could be generated from rooftops, already-developed lands and degraded sites, is not a “paradigm shift.” It’s a 19th-century response to a 21st-century problem.
Janine, please re-read the article carefully.
The whole point of this plan is to prioritize and expedite deployment of solar and other renewable technologies on public lands where it will have the LEAST environmental impact, while discouraging such development on a much larger area of more environmentally sensitive lands.
The environmental impact of solar power plants will in any case be drastically less than that of the fossil fuel extraction that has in the past been emphasized (and is unfortunately still being encouraged by the Obama administration).
And it’s not as though this is an either/or question. There are already initiatives at the federal and in many states (e.g. New Jersey) to encourage solar installations on rooftops (both commercial and residential), landfill sites, brownfields, etc.
Having followed the PEIS process carefully since 2007, I must agree with Janine Blaeloch. The Solar PEIS caters to the same old energy interests that brought us global warming and the current, ongoing economic crisis (BP, Golden Sachs, Morgan Stanley, et. al). Remote, centralized industrial solar will drive us deeper into ecological chaos. The real paradigm shift is happening outside the US, in more than 40 forward looking countries that are rapidly converting to decentralized renewable energy. For example, Germany installed more solar generation capacity (80% + small scale, distributed) in a single month than the entire US has ever installed. I find it puzzling that TP and other “environmental” pundits defend large scale ecological destruction in the name of solar and wind while ignoring, or falsely discounting, proven point of use and EPA alternatives.
Ceal Smith, no one — especially ClimateProgress, and certainly not me (whose comment you replied to) — is “ignoring, or falsely discounting” distributed, on-site, point-of-use solar. That’s just rubbish.
Perhaps you are new to this site, but if you read the articles here, there is no way that claim can be justified. There are articles here all the time that discuss distributed solar, including frequent re-publication of articles from the Institute For Local Self-Reliance and other organizations that specifically promote distributed solar. The success of distributed solar in Germany is also frequently discussed here.
(And by the way, the reason that Germany has not also developed utility-scale solar on large tracts of desert land which have huge solar energy resources, is that THERE ARE NO LARGE TRACTS OF DESERT LAND in Germany.)
The rest of your comment is little more than a rant unsupported by facts or logic, with lots of hand-waving at “bad guys” like Wall Street firms that have nothing whatever to do with solar energy development.
Again, READ THE ARTICLE. Follow the links. The whole point of the Obama administration’s policy is to PROTECT environmentally sensitive areas from utility scale development, while facilitating and expediting solar development on less-sensitive, and often already degraded, sites.
We need both. Not every dwelling has enough roof space, or proper insolation. Cost per kwh of solar power plants is typically less than for homes. As for “industrialization” of the desert, most sites in the Mojave and Sonora are barren even by desert standards, with a few tons of biomass per acre. The sacrifice is well worth it.
The sacrifice need not, indeed must not, be permanent. If we muddle through the next fifty years, the absolute priority will be ecological restoration, economic downsizing (bye-bye capitalism) and humane reduction in numbers to a sustainable global population. Repairing the damage of the Anthropocene will take a wee while.
If we are going to make progress replacing fossil fuels, utility scale PV is going to be indispensable. Cost per watt for utility scale has been dropping at a 32% annual rate, residential rooftops have only been dropping at an annual rate of 8%. Commercial rooftops are in between. The only way we can reach a scale that makes a serious dent in the problem is to fully embrace commercial rooftops, and utility scale plants.
The solar thermal power plants that could be built in the southwest would help integrate some intermittent PV solar and wind energy into the grid. That’s assuming they are built with molten salt heat storage. They can provide base load power as well as dispatchable energy, able to follow the load.
This is progress, but out of sync with what we need to do. The goals that we hear from utilities and politicians of 35% renewables by 2035 or full conversion by 2060 will lead to 4C+ or more a lot sooner than we think. When we see what even 2C looks like we and the rest of the world will have to mobilize on an emergency basis.
That means international cooperation, and diversion of resources from consumer goods and energy intensive activities. It’s likely that this can only be done via nationalization of all fossil fuel companies. They will have brought it on themselves.
Look at what’s already happening at .8ºC: Arctic amplification and all its manifestations, droughts in the interiors of the continents, crazy weather, floods, etc., etc.
The climate appears to much more sensitive to “forcings” than previously understood. Getting even close to 4ºC probably means game over.
According to Prof. Kevin Anderson, 4ºC is likely not stable. It wasn’t long ago that James Lovelock said that the melting of the Arctic was a signal that it’s already too late – a statement he has since backed off from. Is it fair to ask whether or not 2ºC is stable? I believe Hansen has weighed in on this with a “no”. I’ve read somewhere that the US has said it will not be possible to level off at 2ºC (450ppm). Rather we should target a maximum at 3ºC. To quote another CP commenter on another thread, “We’re fooked”.
On a more hopeful note: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” -Margaret Mead
We don’t need to nationalize fossil fuel companies. We need to nationalize a new wind and solar industry, produce 100% of our national electrical needs from new, large installations, give the electricity away for free, and let the fossil fuel industry wither on the vine.
I don’t think it’s feasible to just leave the entrenched fuel companies alone.
Even if their subsidies and loopholes are completely done away with, they’re too big and profitable and have been playing the political manipulation game for too long.
I’m not for over-regulation but sometimes, to truly level the playing-field, you have to tip it in the other direction for a while.
I don’t disagree. The step being discussed here, which could accelerate the advance of solar, is a necessary, but not sufficient step. But, no single or even half a dozens steps will be sufficient by itself. Thats no reason not to take them with all the energy required. What you ask here is politically beyond the pale, and would only serve to create a strawman argument for our opponents. So I’m afraid we are stuck with incremental steps at this point in time. Carry on.
The build out on public lands will lower the cost to folks with solar exposure and also offer solar to all the apartment folks without roofs or sighting locations of the others. It all goes hand in hand. The important thing is to get started! Big time!
Hear, hear!
The most expensive part of rooftop solar is the installation costs. Large projects out in the desert would generate electricity for pennies on the dollar compared to rooftop solar because the installation costs would be a tiny fraction of rooftop. Plus, we would be paying for infrastructure where the sun actually shines all day, every day.
Rooftop, localized production is glamorous, but if we truly want to save the world, large nationalized installations will get the job done very very quickly and very very cheaply.
Absolutely! I’m glad you’ve said this. I keep getting knocked around for promoting centralized energy solutions (mostly desert-bases concentrated solar power) and not promoting distributed “power to the people” via rooftop solar, backyard wind farms, etc.
The trick is to achieve an economy of scale, which not only means wide availability of solar power, but also means less production of materials (less embodied energy in the system). Less production means less energy needed to produce the solar harvesting systems.
Also, storage of solar or wind energy is simply not feasible for most small scale solar or wind installations, whereas it can be achieved at an industrial scale (concentrated solar power with molten salts). Storage is critical of course, because it means solar can provide reliable baseload power 24/7.
Re: “storage of solar or wind energy is simply not feasible for most small scale solar or wind installations”.
This statement is simply not true. Like solar Pv, battery costs are plummeting while efficiencies are rising for residential and community scale storage.
Correct, correct, correct. Although I’d argue pennies on the dollar is a wee bit of the exaggeration. More likely it will be a half to a quarter on the dollar. And large commercial rooftops will come in inbetween.
One of the beautiful things about solar photovoltaics is precisely that the technology can be effectively and beneficially deployed at ALL SCALES — from huge, utility-scale power plants in the gigawatt range (comparable to coal or nuclear power plants or large wind farms), to commercial rooftop and municipal utility installations in the tens of kilowatts range, to residential rooftops in the 1-10 kilowatt range — right on down to hooking up a few panels and a battery to provide electricity to rural villages in Africa and India that have never had ANY access to electricity in their entire history, which has huge benefits for the people there.
According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s “Energy Self-Reliant States” blog (which I strongly recommend), of the currently installed 4 gigawatts of solar generating capacity in the USA, the average project size is 34 kilowatts. In Germany, the total installed capacity of 25 gigawatts consists mostly of rooftop installations of 100 kilowatts or less.
So, at present, most solar power installations are small, widely distributed systems, producing power at or close to the point of use. The construction of large, utility-scale systems like those that will be enabled by the policies discussed in this article, is really just getting started.
Both should be — MUST BE — encouraged. The Obama administration’s policies to facilitate and expedited development of utility-scale solar on public lands that have already been cleared for the SMALLEST environmental impact is definitely a good move in that direction. Another policy that should be adopted in the USA is a national feed-in tariff (like Germany already has) to encourage rapid, wide deployment of smaller-scale, distributed systems.
Because, of course, the OTHER beautiful thing about solar PV is that the technology is readily available, and it can be deployed in large amounts VERY, VERY QUICKLY. And I think every reader of this blog knows how important that is.
Good thinking, but please do take a look at my comment above, which addresses the issue of energy storage, the primary failing of photovoltaic systems. (When the sun goes down, you pull out the candles — or rely on a huge bank of batteries that has its own set of environmental issues.)
One balance that can be struck between distributed P.V. systems and “centralized” (desert based) CSP systems is that the P.V. systems can produce energy during the day, when we use it the most. Thus they can augment the CSP systems which, once installed, would produce the majority of the energy.
By the way: Germany is looking to develop a similar system. They are well on their way with distributed P.V. within their borders, but they need more energy. So they are going to the Desertec model — making deals in Spain and Africa — to get it from CSP installations in sunnier climates. (The Desertec concept originated in Germany and German corporations have made heavy investments in the projects.)
Philip, I agree with you — centralized CSP power plants with thermal storage and distributed PV are complementary. CSP for “baseload”, and distributed PV for peak demand (which occurs generally at the time of peak output for PV).
Having said that, affordable distributed storage is coming soon.
Just to take one example, IBM is developing a lithium-air battery, that will have approximately 10 times the energy density of today’s lithium-ion batteries, and significantly lower cost. They have already demonstrated the basic technology, and expect to go into actual production within eight years.
The intended application is batteries that will enable electric cars to travel 500 miles per charge.
Considering that for fixed applications, none of the size and weight challenges of mobile applications apply, imagine what these batteries could mean for distributed solar.
The time may not be far off when a residential rooftop PV system with advanced batteries, that can provide 100 percent of your electricity day and night, costs no more and is no more difficult to have installed than a typical HVAC system is today.
The higher costs of rooftop solar is mainly that it is retrofitting rather than inclusion. My view is that roof ‘top’ solar should become roof ‘built’ solar for new buildings.
Installation “costs” are then simply part of general building costs. Local authorities should look at which areas should make solar roofs obligatory in the same way as they now impose building and roof tie-down regulations depending on storm and hurricane prevalence.
Remember that rooftop solar doesn’t ‘just’ generate power for households, it relieves stress on grids on high power demand days. Grid upgrade costs are just as much a consideration as generation costs as we move to renewables.
I find it puzzling that TP and other “environmental” pundits defend the destruction of undisturbed and ecologically valuable desert lands while ignoring, or falsely discounting, proven point of use and EPA degraded land alternatives.
The real paradigm shift is happening outside the US, in countries that are rapidly converting to decentralized renewable energy and microgrids. For example, Germany installed more solar (80% + small scale, distributed) in a single month than the entire US has ever installed.
Ceal Smith, I see that you are copying and pasting the same nonsense repeatedly here.
That’s the sure sign of a troll.
NOBODY, including TP, is “ignoring or falsely discounting” the value of distributed solar, and NOBODY is “defending the destruction of undisturbed and ecologically valuable desert lands”.
As the article clearly shows, and as I have noted above, the whole POINT of the Obama administration’s policy is to PROTECT “undisturbed and ecologically valuable desert lands” while expediting the development of solar energy on already disturbed, and less ecologically sensitive sites. Only a tiny fraction of public desert lands, that have already been carefully studied and cleared for MINIMAL environmental impact, are being opened for expedited solar development.
As for Germany, yes — their policies to promote distributed solar, in particular the national feed-in tariff, are a model that the USA would do well to follow, especially since we have a vastly greater solar resource than Germany does.
But the reality is, that just as in Germany, most of the solar energy systems being deployed in the USA today are ALSO relatively small, distributed, rooftop PV systems (with an average size of 34 KW according to the SEIA), and there are state-level initiatives (as in New Jersey) specifically designed to site such systems on degraded lands, e.g. landfills and brownfields, and to avoid siting them on ecologically sensitive, undisturbed sites. Utility-scale solar is just getting started.
Likewise, Germany has not emphasized utility scale solar to take advantage of the huge solar resource of its large desert areas for the simple reason that IT HAS NONE.
With all due respect, what you sound like is a “concern troll” — who is mainly concerned with discouraging the development of utility scale renewables that directly compete with Koch Industries and the rest of the fossil fuel corporations, and their coal-reliant utility allies.
Ceal Smith
What will happen to that desert ecosystem if we don’t slow down the warming? It will become dryer and hotter,than it is now.
We need as many energy solutions as we can muster, as well as other solutions in terms of land use, energy efficiency, etc.
Check out Joe’s articles on Core Climate Solutions
some numbers from the NREL on solar thermal potential.
NREL defines premium solar resource as over 7 kWh/square meter
excellent as 6.5-7 kWh/square meter
good as 6-6.5 kWh/square meter
And here’s Arizona’ potential for CSP
Premium 172 GW 376,912 GWh
Excellent 89 GW 176,496 GWh
Good 23 GW 41,897 GWh
Total 285 GW 595,305 GWh
Using a tiny percentage of the desert would produce very large power supply.
Here are the numbers for other states. I don’t have the GWh for all the states.
California
Premium 61.6 GW 134,942 GWh
Excellent 14.8 GW 29,189 GWh
Good 21.7 GW 38,093 GWh
Total 98.1 GW 202,224 GWh
Nevada
Premium 81.9 GW
Excellent 46.1 GW
Good 37.6 GW
Total 165.8 GW
New Mexico
Premium 94.1 GW
Excellent 51.9 GW
Good 73.3 GW
Total 219.4 GW
Utah
Premium 28.9 GW 63,384 GWh
Excellent 24.9 GW 47,661 GWh
Good 21.2 GW 37,168 GWh
Total 74.3 GW 148,213 GWh
Indian Lands ( Hopi and Navaho reservations)
Premium 48 GW 105,337 GWh
Excellent 9 GW 18,039 GWh
Good 4.6 GW 8,209 GWh
Total 61.9 GW 131,585 GWh
Texas
Premium 38.8 GW
Excellent 50.7 GW
Good 38.2 GW
Total 127 GW
Oregon
Excellent 1.7 GW
Good 10.5 GW
Total 12.3 GW
Colorado
Premium 2.5 GW
Excellent 13.1 GW
Good 22.5 GW
Total 38.2 GW