News and Views from the Desert Protective Council.

Big Solar Should Use Disturbed Lands

August 25th, 2008 Posted by Larry Hogue in RETI, renewable energy

The Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative (RETI) stakeholders group needs to hear from you — by Wednesday! — with the message that disturbed lands need to be given priority over undisturbed habitat as the group evaluates “Competitive Renewable Energy Zones”  (CREZs). Some of the stakeholders actually seem to prefer building solar facilities in undisturbed habitat – a policy that makes no sense considering the thousands of acres of abandoned agricultural lands in the desert.

More information on RETI is here.

The environmental stakeholders in the group, Johanna Wald of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Carl Zichella of the Sierra Club, need to hear from as many people as possible supporting the preference for already disturbed lands.

Just drop Carl and Johanna a quick e-mail, with the following comments on the “RETI Interim Draft Reports” (suggested by John Moore of the California-Nevada Desert Committee of the Sierra Club):

1) state your strong support for preferring the use of disturbed lands, including agricultural lands
2) support including a disturbed lands criterion in the comparison of CREZs

Send your comments to: carl.zichella@sierraclub.org and jwald@nrdc.org  (we don’t include live e-mail links, so you’ll need to cut and paste these e-mail addresses).

Carl and Johanna will then pass your comments on to the rest of the stakeholders group. Deadline is Wednesday, August 27!

(Photo of Kramer Junction concentrated solar power facility courtesy of Wikimedia.)

  1. One Response to “Big Solar Should Use Disturbed Lands”

  2. By Larry Hogue on Aug 27, 2008

    This alert has already prompted at least one interesting e-mail exchange between Carl Zichella and a reader. Hurry, you still have a few hours to get your comment in!

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