DesertBlog

DPC Prompts Additional Big Solar Meeting

This is an urgent post from the Desert Protective Council’s Imperial County Conservation Coordinator.

Your presence is needed at an important public hearing. This is your most important opportunity to learn about and voice your questions and concerns about the rush to the deserts of the southwest to develop huge industrial-sized solar and other renewable energy infrastructure.

On June 9th, the Desert Protective Council (DPC) was invited to participate in the “Public Affairs” program about the multitudinous proposals for huge solar developments throughout the southwestern U.S. on NPR station KPCC of Los Angeles. On June 16th, DPC wrote a request to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for additional public hearings on these proposals in San Diego and/or Imperial County where at least one mega-solar project is proposed. On June 18th, the California State Office of the BLM called us and informed us that at least partly as a result of DPC’s voice on the KPCC program, the Washington D.C. office of BLM had agreed to schedule an additional meeting in El Centro California in the Imperial Valley. The meeting will be held Thursday July 10th at 6PM in the El Centro County Administration Center, 940 Main Street, Suite 211. Many more details regarding the format and content of this important public meeting can be found here: our web site.

Please attend this important public meeting on July 10th. The desert needs you presence and your voice to demonstrate to the Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior that very many people care about what happens to our California and southwestern deserts. At this meeting you will learn about the multiple hundred or more applications to the BLM from renewable energy companies to develop vast swaths of our desert public lands. You will learn about some of the serious impacts to desert plants and to animal habitat and to air quality and have a chance to express your concern about these huge projects.

We don’t need to allow invasion of our beleaguered deserts in order to meet our energy needs and the mandate for generating 20% of our energy in California from renewables! The DPC believes that we can short-circuit, so to speak, the need to exploit our deserts if we get serious about conserving energy in our cities, beginning, as one example, in our homes and in city and county government buildings by setting the air conditioning at 78 degrees, as state agencies do in buildings in Sacramento, and if we take advantage of the rapidly improving “thin film” photovoltaic technology for gathering the sun’s energy on the roof tops of private homes and on commercial and public buildings and spaces, in combination with installation of traditional solar panels and by increasing the efficiency of already existing local small power plants.

Please do come to this meeting. Invite your friends and relatives and carpool if you live a distance from San Diego. Again, you can find more details about this meeting here: our web site.

Thanks very much. Let’s go save the desert.

Terry Weiner