Western Lands Update Western Lands ProjectSeattle, Washington Summer 2010 Research, Outreach, and Advocacy to Keep Public Lands Public Vol. 14, No. 1 S ince passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the federal government has been stronglypromoting renewable energy projects on public land, including large-scale solar facilities in parts of California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. Companies are taking advantage of fast-track federal permitting and huge tax incentives that will come to those who can presentsubstantial plans by the end of 2010. The Southwestcould be especially hard hit, with hundreds ofthousands of acres of fragile desert paved in mirrors, if the projects planned there go through. Intuitively , large solar energy projects strike mostpeople as sensible, an unquestioned public good, even benign. For public lands advocates, however, it is much more complicated. The average proposed “Big Solar” project occupies 5,000 acres. Of the hundreds of projects lining up for permits, about 35 are currently on the fast track, and of those, 14 (planned on about 50,000 acres) are in critical habitat for the threatened deserttortoise. These facilities must also hook up to transmission lines, and hundreds ofmiles of new lines and extensions are planned. Where permits succeed, the projects will be builton public land rights- of-way , a temporary use. The solar plants have estimated project lives of only 30 years. Yet the Rethinking Big Solar on Public Lands scale, intensity , and irreversibility of the impacts these projects will bring to public land essentially render them permanent. In fact, we consider the projects to entail “virtual privatization,” because they completelyalter their sites and preclude all other us es and public values. Some of the national environmental groups have called for large energy projects to be built on “already-degraded” public lands, or on private agricultural land that has gone out of use. But for the most part, they have acquiesced to the sacrice of large areas of public land they might otherwise defend to accommodate a non-fossil-fuel energypolicy they also support. We were more sympathetic to the dilemma before we found copious (if largely unpublicized) evidence that better, far less damaging, and more efcienttechnology is available in the form ofdistributedsolari.e., installations on rooftops and other areas of the builtenvironment. The common “wisdom” has been that these technologies cannotcompete in cost- The desert is perenniallyundervalued and too easilyabused. Photo: Chris ClarkeContinued next page