DesertBlog

Romm vs. the Desert

Update: Later this afternoon, Joe approved my original comment — probably just the links kept it from being approved right away.

This post began as a comment on Joseph Romm’s Climate Progress blog. Since it hadn’t been approved by the time of this writing, I decided to post it here. It probably won’t make much sense unless you go over there and read his post, then come back here.

Romm’s post objects to Senator Feinstein’s proposal to create a new National Monument in the Mojave Desert because it will block some concentrating solar projects. He uses the meme of “if you don’t like every renewable energy project, you must be a climate change denier.” Leaving aside the government’s duty to honor the stipulations of the donors who gave the land to the public, the point that really caught our attention was where he equated “desertification” with viable desert habitat.

Joe is a great champion of making global climate change much more of a national priority, and we can’t fault him for that. He just needs to get up to speed with desert ecology, give PV more credit, learn about and promote feed-in tariffs for solar, and follow what’s actually happening in the planning processes in the California desert. Is that too much to ask?

Joe’s post led us to update our “Bad Solar, Better Solar, Best Solar” map, with Chris Clarke mapping destroyed desert lands near Lancaster, most of which is in private hands. Check it out now if you haven’t seen it yet. If you know of other good sites that are privately owned, and thoroughly degraded, post them in the comment section below. Some of the sites on this map are old or current alfalfa farms. One has to wonder if these farmers, who are raising a marginal crop and paying more money for less water, wouldn’t rather lease or sell some of their land to the concentrating solar industry. Do they even know that they’re being passed over in the solar stampede?

Here’s the response to Climate Progress:

Joe,

First, “desertification” does not mean “creating more desert habitat.” Deserts are vital habitats for a wide variety of species, and these species add greatly to the planet’s diversity of life. Further, deserts actually store a great deal of carbon, on par with some temperate forests. Desertification, on the other hand, is always a process of degrading habitat, removing diversity, and destroying carbon sequestration. See Chris Clarke’s excellent blog post on this topic: http://tinyurl.com/atuzrq . He points out that the term “desertification” should be changed to something else like “dustification,” because of the word’s negative connotation toward deserts.

There are vast tracts of the Mojave Desert that have indeed been “desertified,” and might be appropriate for industrial developments like concentrating solar power. The problem is, most of these are in private hands. As the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope has pointed out, there’s a perverse incentive for solar entrepreneurs to locate on cheap public land rather than on more expensive private land.

This is exactly the situation with BrightSource’s Ivanpah project, which is located in good desert tortoise habitat. The company had the option of doing the more environmentally friendly thing, which was to locate the project near the town of Daggett just off of Interstate 40. But BrightSource turned that option down because it was “not economical”, and the California Energy Commission is letting it get away with it.

The company has also offered only a 1:1 mitigation ratio (one acre of land purchased for conservation to every one acre destroyed), when the scientific protocol is 5:1. The idea that concentrating solar can be developed in an environmentally sensitive manner is not being borne out by this first, and most prominent, solar development in the California desert. Instead, as with most industries, the company seeks to externalize its costs onto the public in the form of degraded habitat.

Baseload: BrightSource is not using any storage technology, so, as you admitted on one Grist.org post, this is not really baseload power. Since it’s really peaking power, it has only a small advantage over that other peaking solar power source, photovoltaic panels, in that it can produce power slightly past 4:00 p.m. But both can contribute to a reduction in coal-fired power because, if we have enough solar, even without storage, and whether it is PV or CSP, then current baseload plants will become “reverse load following” plants. This is very hard duty for a coal-fired power plant to perform, and there are a lot of moth-balled gas-fired plants just waiting to take over that duty.

Another option is to build concentrating solar at a smaller scale, as eSolar wants to do. It says it can employ its concentrating solar technology at a scale of 46 megawatts on a 160-acre parcel. As Chris Clarke points out on the Google map, that’s about the size of a typical center-pivot-irrigated alfalfa field. Let’s hope eSolar and the Farm Bureau are talking.

Stirling Energy Systems has a technology that could work (if it works at all!) as easily for distributed generation as for large-scale projects, but again economics are the only thing pushing it to build massive installations in the desert. As one smart commenter on Grist.org said, this has more to do with having a project large enough to attract investors, than with building the most appropriate project.

Since there are so many good alternatives to large-scale concentrating solar, it is unfair to characterize those who are concerned about the impacts of these projects as global warming deniers. It’s also clear that setting aside more land in remote areas won’t stop the solar revolution, since there are so many more appropriate places close to towns and cities. Please, Joe, leave out the villification and help us look for the best, truly environmentally friendly solutions to global warming.