Posted February 26, 2009
Big Solar and the Desert - Fact Sheet
The deserts of the southwest face an unprecedented land rush of solar companies seeking to build large-scale projects, potentially covering over 600,000 acres in California alone. While these projects are touted as solving the global warming crisis, they also have serious environmental impacts that need to be carefully considered. They also entail the construction of long transmission lines, which have their own impacts and greenhouse gas emissions. At the Desert Protective Council, we are very concerned about the number and location of these projects in the desert.
Of course we agree that action on global warming is vital, because climate change could soon rival habitat destruction as the leading cause of species extinction, and will also add immeasurably to human misery. In addition, recent studies1 project that Earth will warm twice as much by 2100 as previously thought. Yet there is a serious possibility that some measures could do more harm than good.
We have already seen our country rush into support for ethanol as a solution to global warming, only to discover that its benefits are limited compared to the resources used to create it. We are concerned that the same could be true for our efforts to produce renewable energy in the desert. The public remains too little aware of the impact these projects will have on the desert environment, while the impact they will have on global climate change remains uncertain. Under such uncertainty, the best course is to follow the physician’s motto: “First, do no harm.”
To explore these issues, we present this fact sheet, in question and answer format.
Q: Isn’t the desert just a vast, empty wasteland? What’s wrong with putting renewable energy projects there?
A: Deserts are just as valuable as any other landscape, such as forests, mountains, and rivers, providing habitat for countless species specifically adapted to the unique 
requirements of this particular environment. The desert tortoise2 (California’s state reptile) and the Mojave ground squirrel3, both listed as threatened species, are just two of the animals that make their homes here. And these animals in turn depend on a variety of uniquely adapted plants, many of which are also endangered. Deserts also provide an array of values for human enjoyment, just as forests do, not limited to the beauty of open spaces. And finally, recent studies4 show that the Mojave Desert in particular stores as much carbon as some temperate forests.
Yet we don’t see forests being clearcut to make way for solar mirrors, because that would clearly be absurd. And hydroelectric dams are mostly off the table as a tool for fighting global warming because of widespread acknowledgment of the impacts dams have on river ecosystems. In contrast, thousands and even millions of acres of desert are currently proposed to be scraped to make way for solar (and wind) projects and their accompanying transmission lines.
This type of direct habitat destruction is still the main cause of the massive extinction event5 the Earth is currently experiencing. And, contrary to a widely held misconception, most large-scale projects do scrape vast swaths of the desert to bare ground, for a comparatively small return in energy. (See this chart6 for exactly how many acres are sacrificed for different types of energy production.) Not only does this ground disturbance destroy the homes of rare and unique plants and animals, it can also be counter-productive in the fight against global warming, since it removes the land’s ability to store carbon.
As an arid landscape, the desert depends on the little rain that does fall, most of it available only deep underground in the water table. Since large solar projects require water (and some require vast quantities of it), groundwater pumping can be another impact to the desert landscape. Depleting a desert water table takes the “renewable” out of “renewable energy.”
We need to think carefully about all of the impacts any project, renewable or not, will have on the immediate environment, whether it’s a mountain, a river, or a desert. That’s what our environmental laws are for, and they should not be ignored for renewable energy projects, as some have proposed7.
Q: If large solar power plants have drawbacks, what other alternatives do we have to combat global warming?
A: There are many ways to reduce our energy-related carbon footprint, many of them cheaper, greener, and quicker to implement than large-scale projects on public land. While these are much discussed, they are too little implemented. Some make the argument that we need to “do it all” to combat global warming. But we remain convinced that we are NOT doing it all, but are instead putting most of our eggs in the basket of large-scale renewables and accompanying transmission lines. (See this post8 on DesertBlog that shows the ways in which one planning process in California places inadequate emphasis on local renewables and energy efficiency incentives.)
The following approaches may be the least profitable for large corporations, but they are the first and most important things we should be doing to combat global warming:
- Focus on energy efficiency and conservation. The cheapest and greenest watt is the one you never produce. While California has gone far in energy conservation, we could go much farther, and other states are lagging behind. We should be seeing massive investments in this area on a scale comparable to what is currently proposed for increasing energy supply. The California Public Utilities Com¬mis¬sion has already required public utilities to reach “100% of cost-effective energy efficiency measures” by 2020. According to engineer Bill Powers, “The net effect of this decision will be an average absolute decline in annual energy usage between 0.5 and 1 percent per year from 2008 forward, and no growth in peak demand over time.” Yet even here, energy efficiency is given short shrift, both in planning and in implementation.
- Maximize rooftop or building-integrated solar. Photovoltaic (PV) power can be generated right at the point of use, saving the construction of wasteful and expensive transmission lines, and it can be done with little environmental impact if placed on existing structures. No lengthy environmental review processes are required. Costs for solar panels have plummeted in recent years, making PV cost-competitive with large-scale Concentrating Solar Power (CSP). The United States is far behind other countries in this area. While California brags about installing 150 megawatts of PV per year, Germany installs 10 times that amount, and is on track to have 10,000 MW installed by 2010.
- Enact Fair Payments for Solar. This approach, known in the industry as a “Feed-In Tariff” (FIT), pays solar panel owners for every kilowatt they produce. Feed-In Tariffs are the engine that has allowed Germany to far surpass our rooftop solar efforts. Currently, people aren’t jumping all over PV to “save the planet” or even to save modestly on their electric bills, but you can bet they will when they can make a profit from it, just as the Germans have. The main reason we don’t have a feed-in tariff already? Utility companies hate the idea, for reasons that aren’t hard to guess. (See the Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy’s website9 for a great article on the German model.)
- Develop smarter technologies. There are a host of other approaches to balancing the energy supply-demand equation beyond renewable energy and efficiency, including Combined Heat and Power, smart metering, improvements to the electricity distribution system, and more. For one plan that combines all of these approaches, achieving a projected 50% reduction in energy-related carbon footprint, all without the need for distant sources of power and long transmission lines, see the San Diego Smart Energy 2020 report10.
Q: Even if we do all this, won’t we still need some large-scale CSP plants?
A: We probably will. The Desert Protective Council is not opposed to all large-scale renewables. Concentrating solar does have some advantages over PV solar, in that it can generate power somewhat later in the afternoon than PV can, and even later when storage technologies are added. (Most large scale solar developments in California do not incorporate storage technology, by the way. And feasible, non-toxic storage devices for photovoltaic solar could be available within 10 years.) However, if we pursue all of the approaches mentioned above, we will need far fewer large scale renewable projects than currently considered necessary by our planning processes, such as the Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative. And we are encouraged by news that one company, eSolar, now proposes11 a type of concentrating solar power that can be built in smaller, modular units near urban areas rather than out in the desert. All of this means it will be much easier to find appropriate locations for the large-scale projects that we may need.
Q: Can’t we find some places in the desert for large-scale renewables that don’t require habitat destruction?
A: No doubt we can. Everyone agrees (or pays lip service) to the importance of “appropriate siting,” from environmental groups to Big Renewable lobbying groups like CEERT to regulatory agencies. Thousands of acres of low-value and abandoned agricultural lands are available in the desert, so it should be easy to find spots that don’t destroy habitat. Yet, so far, both environmental groups and state regulators have failed to ensure that these projects will be built in the most appropriate places first. Take, for example, BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah solar proposal, which is the project closest to approval in the California Desert. This project would destroy 4,000 acres of good desert tortoise habitat, turning it from this12 to this13. While the California Energy Commission had the opportunity to fully evaluate alternative sites such as the agricultural land around Daggett (east of Barstow – satellite view here14), it declined to do so because this alternative was deemed too “uneconomical” for the company. Thus, BrightSource is allowed to externalize its costs of doing business onto the environment and the public, while suitable land remains unutilized. This cost comes in the form of destroyed habitat for the desert tortoise, pushing it one step farther down the road to extinction. Biologists agree that the warning signs marking the end of that road are already clearly visible.
In a commentary on Huffington Post15, the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope pointed out the lack of appropriate siting that has so far characterized renewable projects, in the California desert and elsewhere: “And because the Bureau of Land Management sets its royalty rates below those of the prevailing private market, solar and wind entrepreneurs have a perverse incentive to locate their facilities in the most pristine natural settings instead of in already developed (but often privately owned) locations.” These were encouraging words, since the Sierra Club has been on record16 as “not opposed” to the Ivanpah project. If large environmental groups are willing to go along with projects that threaten a signature species such as the desert tortoise, then there is little hope that we will achieve the “appropriate siting guidelines” to which so many pay lip service. And if this is the sacrifice they’re willing to make now, at the beginning of our efforts to combat the global warming crisis, how much longer will our National Parks and wilderness areas remain sacrosanct?
Q: There has been a lot of talk lately about the need for a national energy grid. Don’t we need new transmission lines to get the power from the desert, where the best solar resources are located, to the cities of the Southwest and the West Coast?
A: While it’s true that solar resource maps show that the best areas are in the deserts of southeastern California and eastern Arizona, the differences between these areas and urbanized parts of the southwest, and even on the coast, are on the order of 5 to 15%. A similar amount of energy will be lost by transporting the power over long transmission lines, reducing the solar advantage of the desert areas. If new transmission lines are needed to reach those resources, building and operating those transmission lines will cause the release of yet more greenhouse gases, further offsetting the global warming benefit of the remote renewables. (It would take 12 years, for instance, for the Sunrise Powerlink to offset all of the greenhouse gases released during its construction and operation, no matter how much renewable energy it carries.) Finally, since most large-scale solar plants built in the desert will be “dry-cooled,” they will suffer a 30% reduction in efficiency on the hottest days. When all of these factors are considered, the advantages of greater “insolation” turn into just one more desert mirage.
We can just as easily, and more greenly, generate that power on the thousands of square miles of rooftops and parking lots with which we’ve already covered southern California and the southwest.
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1. http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/2/24/164525/948
2. http://www.defenders.org/wildlife_and_habitat/wildlife/desert_tortoise.php
3. http://www.tortoise-tracks.org/denizens/mgs.html
4. http://www.dpcinc.org/blog/2008/05/05/should-we-clearcut-forests/
5. http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/obama_and_extinction/
6. http://www.allianceforresponsibleenergypolicy.com/chart.html
7. http://www.redcounty.com/orange-county/2008/09/cook-attacks-rohrabacher-plan/
8. http://www.dpcinc.org/blog/2009/01/09/more-on-retis-crezy-idea/
9. http://www.allianceforresponsibleenergypolicy.com/Desert%20Report%20Article.pdf
10. http://www.sdsmartenergy.org/11-oct-07_SD_Smart_Energy_2020_report_complete_FINAL1.pdf
11. http://greenwombat.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/02/23/coal-fired-utility-signs-big-solar-deal/
12. http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3096/3201125571_1942d51610_b.jpg
13. http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20090211/EilonPaz_1139_saturated_610x406.jpg
14. http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=35.234403,-116.455078&spn=1.045419,2.460938&t=h&z=9&msid=110960969859373494806.000463d70ba3d0342dc70
15. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-pope/the-job-of-the-rest-of-us_b_169610.html
16. http://www.inlandsocal.com/business/content/enviroment/stories/PE_News_Local_S_solar12.42340e7.html
