S3E26: The New Western Solar Plan: A Disaster for Desert Ecosystems?

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0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out 90milesfromneedles.com/donate or text the word needles to 5355.

0:00:24 — (Joe Geoffrey) Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:00:43 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you, Joe, and welcome to yet another episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. This is your host, Chris Clarke, and we're talking about the final programmatic environmental impact statement for the western Solar Plan, which was released to the public at the end of last week. And you know what? I am really tired of talking about solar in the desert. I love solar power. I especially love photovoltaic solar power. That's the kind with just the solar panel that is thin and you set it in the sun and current comes out.

0:01:19 - (Chris Clarke): I think there are ways to improve the technology, but it is a fantastic technology. It's got no moving parts. It's simple. It uses advanced physics compared to setting something on fire, boiling water, and using it to turn a turbine to generate electricity. You can slap it up on just about any surface you want. If that surface gets any sunlight at all, it'll generate power. You don't have to build enough of it to generate 200 power. You can generate a kilowatt or two on your roof. You can put it on a carport or a parking lot.

0:01:53 - (Chris Clarke): More on that later. You can generate electricity from your carport to charge your electric car, you can have one that's three or four inches wide to power a laptop. Hell, 30 years ago, I used to go into the desert when I didn't live here yet, and I had a pair of solar panels that were about maybe eleven by 15 inches. They were in a little nylon cordura briefcase thing that I could just unzip, open up, point at the sun, plug my laptop into it, and run it essentially indefinitely as long as the sun was up.

0:02:27 - (Chris Clarke): I could charge a phone if I had one back then, which I didn't. But if I had, I could have charged it really easily. It's cheap power. I think even back in the early nineties, when I got that little laptop solar power setup, it was maybe $50. Solar power from photovoltaics is almost free. I mean, it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to put it on your roof. If you have the money to do that upfront, of course it saves you money in the long run.

0:02:55 - (Chris Clarke): It amortizes really quickly. It's a democratizing power. It basically eliminates the need for power plants. It almost eliminates the need for transmission grids, and for utility companies, as long as there's storage along with the photovoltaics nearby. Photovoltaics don't generate power when the sun's not out of, but if you pair it with batteries, it basically eliminates the need for utility companies.

0:03:21 - (Chris Clarke): And that is one of the big problems with it, politically speaking, because utilities know this, and they are doing their damnedest to stay relevant in the 21st century with their 19th century business plans. If you've listened to the podcast before, or if you know me, you've heard me say this at least three or four times, but I feel like every time I spend time talking about the downsides of desert solar, I need to preface it with the fact that I am a huge fan of solar.

0:03:50 - (Chris Clarke): I've been raising the alarm about climate change since, I think, 1973. I had a letter published in the Buffalo Evening News. I was 13 years old. For the entire 1990s I was reporting on things like the run up to the Kyoto summit and, you know, just things that we needed to do to keep our global warming under one degree celsius and then under 1.5 degrees celsius. There were a few of us doing that, a few thousand, to be honest.

0:04:17 - (Chris Clarke): But I had a bigger megaphone than most because I was publishing newspapers and magazines that were going out to environmentally concerned audiences, and we were voices crying in the wilderness. Nobody wanted to hear this. Everybody thought it was going to be something that maybe would be an issue in 2080 or 2100. And now, now that society mostly agrees that climate change is not only a threat, but is happening right now, and that we have to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, we're doing this in the worst conceivable way because of the utilities and the energy companies and their stranglehold on the political process.

0:05:01 - (Chris Clarke): We are deploying solar, not on rooftops, in a way that would stimulate economic democracy, that would give people money off their monthly expenses, keep money in neighborhoods, not in a way that keeps us from having to build giant power plants. We're building out solar in a way that ensures the existence of giant power plants and ensures utility profits. And I really want to talk about other stuff.

0:05:28 - (Chris Clarke): There are other things threatening the desert as well, you know, including climate change. But the rollout of solar on the utility scale continues to threaten the desert, and there is no better evidence of this fact than what we got on Thursday. The final version of the programmatic environmental impact statement for the western solar plan in eleven western states, which on the very face of it is the death knell for a contiguous desert habitat that we enjoy. Right now, we're talking west wide from Montana and Wyoming and Colorado and New Mexico all the way to the coast.

0:06:03 - (Chris Clarke): This is basically as bad as it could possibly be. We thought the 2012 plan sucked, but it's infinitely preferable to this. What was the 2012 plan? If you remember back to the very first episode of this podcast, season one, episode one. Back in January 22, former co host and I talked about the 2012 western solar Plan. It was called the Solar Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement. For six southwestern states.

0:06:32 - (Chris Clarke): It was just California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona at that point. And in 2012, the departments of the Interior and Energy looked at the broad landscape of those six states and established what they called solar energy zones, or "Sezzes," SEZs, where the building of solar power plants was going to be streamlined. Wouldn't take nearly as much red tape in the approval process if you put your solar project in a solar energy zone. And we did think this was bad. There were a couple of solar energy zones that were proposed that were just insanely bad, including the Iron Mountain proposed solar energy zone, which did not come to pass. And we recorded our very first episode in the boundary of what would have been the solar energy zone at Iron Mountain.

0:07:15 - (Chris Clarke): It's now an intact and thriving desert microfil woodland with ironwoods and palo verdes and cat claw acacias, all that kind of stuff. Beautiful place. The Bullard, wash proposed solar energy zone, one of the few places in Arizona, and thus the world where Joshua trees and saguaros grow together. If you were going to establish a national monument based on an interesting and unique desert flora, Bullard watch would be a place to do it.

0:07:42 - (Chris Clarke): And it was on the chopping block to be bulldozed and covered in solar, and we stopped that somehow. I'm not sure how I weighed in directly with the guy who was running the BLM solar program. I have no idea whether that made a difference. As an indirect result of that 2012 process, eastern Riverside county in California became a solar energy sacrifice area that a lot of green groups signed off on because there were other places in the desert that they liked better.

0:08:10 - (Chris Clarke): And that's been a problem since, because that area is really culturally significant to the Kaweah people, the Mojave people, the Chemehuevi people, the Kwtsan, a bunch of other native people. And neither the BLM nor the green groups really were interested in having the tribes weigh in on this. And we are still on the green side repairing that damage to the relationship between the conservation world and the tribal world.

0:08:35 - (Chris Clarke): It was a nasty process, and it was so much better and so much less threatening than this western solar plan 2.0. I think if those of us who were raising concern about the original version of this back in 2012 knew what was in store, we would have put a lot more energy into making sure that the 2012 version actually worked. But it didn't actually work because it was not set up all that thoughtfully. It didn't get buy in from industry.

0:09:02 - (Chris Clarke): You can still talk to people in the solar industry who are livid about what happened back then. Solar energy zones were established with no nearby transmission, which if companies have to build transmission, that's a whole nother process, that's a whole nother expense. It doesn't really work for the companies, and it's got to work for the companies if it's going to work. What is it about this new version of the western solar plan that's got us alarmed?

0:09:31 - (Chris Clarke): Let's talk about the differences they added. More states. Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington are now in the mixed California has mostly been left alone, relatively speaking, because California already has a 22 million acre desert renewable energy conservation plan finalized in 2016. The DRACP area was delineated by a process that was based on the 2012 western solar plan. There's a whole lot more areas that have been looked at in finer grain detail, some approved for solar, some restricted for conservation purposes. People that have been working on solar and conservation in the desert in California begged and pleaded and basically rallied the troops to get the DRECP area left out.

0:10:14 - (Chris Clarke): But the other ten states have gotten hit pretty hard, some of them. In total, 31,726,373 acres have been designated as suitable for solar development in this new document. That's 49,572 sq. Mi. That's a big number, and it's important, when you're talking about numbers this big, to have some way of making it relevant and visceral to the person that's listening. And really, the best I can do, I think, is to say that if that 49,572 sq. Mi was a state, it would be the 32nd largest state of the 50. It'd be the same size, more or less, as Louisiana and Mississippi.

0:11:00 - (Chris Clarke): You could fit just under 165 New York cities into this area. Most of it's in the desert southwest, including those parts of Oregon and Wyoming and Washington and Idaho, which are technically desert. And at the risk of making your eyes glaze over, let's just run through the area in each state real quick. For each state, I took a city that will be familiar to the people in those states, they'll have a rough idea of how big it is and compared that to the area being set aside in that state for solar development.

0:11:35 - (Chris Clarke): So let's do this alphabetically. Arizona has 4414 sq. Mi. That's eight and a half times the size of Phoenix, California, where most of the desert's already been excluded. Just a little bit of land, really, compared to the other states. California has 293 and three quarters square miles. That's 60% of the size of Los Angeles. In Colorado, 928 and one third square miles offered up for solar. That's six times the size of Denver, and a little bit more in Idaho, 2490 sq. Mi.

0:12:15 - (Chris Clarke): That's just under 30 times the size of boise. In Montana, 897.8 sq. Mi. That is one and a quarter times the size of butte. Nevada gets hammered in this document. 18,500 sq. Mi. That's 130 times the size of Las Vegas, New Mexico, 6294 sq. Mi. That's 33 and a half times the size of Albuquerque. Oregon is 1790. 6 sq. Mi. That's 13 times the size of Portland. Utah has 7828, 0.5 sq. Mi. Offered up to solar at 70 times the size of Salt Lake City, 175 sq. Mi. In the state of Washington, that's twice the size of Seattle.

0:13:12 - (Chris Clarke): In Wyoming, almost 6000 sq. Mi. 5953.77 sq. Mi. And there aren't a lot of big towns in Wyoming. But I picked Laramie because it's the state capital, 335 times the size of Laramie. If Laramie is a little bit of an obscure reference for you, that 5953 sq. Mi offered up for solar in Wyoming is 1.7 times the size of Yellowstone National park, which is 3472 sq. Mi. This is a lot of acreage. This is around a fifth of the BLM land in all of these states.

0:13:52 - (Chris Clarke): Interestingly enough, if this was all developed for solar, which won't happen, and we'll get into that in a minute, but if it was all developed for solar, assuming photovoltaic rather than solar thermal, and this is a simplistic comparison, because we can't run the country solely on solar, certainly not without storage. But, you know, there's wind, there's geothermal, there's a bunch of other ways that we can generate power without using fossil fuels.

0:14:20 - (Chris Clarke): Nobody is suggesting that we run the United States entirely on solar. But if all this land was developed for solar, it would provide us with between 18 and 25 times as much power as the entire us used in 2022. It's upsetting. You know, you have the Department of the Interior spending this much time. It's been at least a couple of years that this has been an in progress. Spending taxpayer dollars figuring out where we can put solar on BLM lands in the west without damaging the environment in the west any more than we have to.

0:14:51 - (Chris Clarke): Don't you think that if you were doing this and you came up with an area of land that was 20 times more than you conceivably needed, wouldn't you say? Okay, we need to add more filters to this. We can protect more stuff. Let's talk about keeping it off of critical habitat for threatened species. Let's talk about consulting more thoroughly with the tribes and leaving places alone that are important in the cultural landscape. Let's talk about view sheds. Let's talk about particulate matter generation when we disturb desert soil and have the wind kick up pm ten and valley fever spores.

0:15:24 - (Chris Clarke): Let's talk about just having intact, contiguous habitat and avoiding edge effect issues on the environment. Every time you bulldoze a place to put in solar, there's going to be invasive plants that spring up, red brome or cheatgrass or buffalo grass or Sahara mustard some places. The more tattered the edges of an ecosystem get, the less vital and vibrant and durable that ecosystem will be. If we can get by with, at an absolute maximum, one 20th of the land that we've designated here, why don't we do that?

0:15:58 - (Chris Clarke): There is a reason there's an answer to that question. You might have thought it was a rhetorical question. I do ask those, but there is actually an answer. It's because the BLM got so slammed by the solar industry last time around that they wanted to bend over backwards to ensure that the solar industry was happy. And the solar industry is happy with this. They got everything they wanted, basically anywhere within 15 miles of an existing or planned transmission line that's on a less than 15% slope.

0:16:29 - (Chris Clarke): That qualifies in the BLM's vague definition as being on disturbed land and which doesn't conflict with one of a short list of resources. That land got put on the maps in this plan as suitable for solar. Now, I mentioned a bit ago that wed get into why all of this land will not be developed for solar, and that is simply because nobodys going to pay for more energy than the country needs. In order to prove that a solar project thats proposed is viable, the builders need to get power purchase agreements from utilities. Thats basically exactly what it sounds like a utility will say, okay, yeah, we'll buy 600,000 megawatt hours of power from your solar plant, and they sign a contract and it's a done deal.

0:17:17 - (Chris Clarke): And then the builder goes to the bank with all the power purchase agreements they were able to get. And the bank says, okay, you're going to be making money on this. We will lend you the money to get this bill. If you don't have the power purchase agreement, the bank's going to look at you like you just wandered in out of the desert, which maybe you actually did. The more solar gets built and put online, the less utilities are going to be interested in buying more.

0:17:43 - (Chris Clarke): And so it's unlikely that even a 10th of this land will get developed for solar. And so what this all means is that the BLM has approved somewhere between ten and 20 times as much land as our country really needs for solar development. Of that 49,500 sq mi okayed for solar in this plan, it's doubtful that we'll see even 5000 sq mi developed in solar, rather than being focused in a few places. What this means is solar sprawl.

0:18:19 - (Chris Clarke): Instead of having everything concentrated, you'll have a 3000 acre solar project here and a 7000 acre solar project there. Essentially, itll be like taking the map of Nevada or Utah or New Mexico and walking 100 paces away and hitting it with buckshot. There will be holes in the ecosystem, scattered willy nilly, which is the status quo. Now, its important to note that all of this land is available for solar development right now.

0:18:48 - (Chris Clarke): Its not like the BLM is taking protected land and opening it up to solar speculation. This is just bad planning. But Chris, I imagine someone asking, yeah, this is less than ideal, but we need to jumpstart our post fossil fuel transition as quickly as we can, and we are likely to lose some stuff along the way that we didn't really want to lose. But what's the alternative? Climate change is an existential threat to the planet, to human civilization, to any number of species that we care about, and some that we don't know even exist yet.

0:19:21 - (Chris Clarke): Aren't you just throwing roadblocks in front of making the kinds of changes that we need to make in order to survive this climate apocalypse now? I understand the rationale behind that question. Believe me, climate change is not the only existential threat we face. Back in 2016, I wrote something when I was still working at KCT in Los Angeles, which I will link in the show notes. The title was climate change is really dangerous. Here are six environmental issues that are even worse, and that was based on a study published in Nature in August 2016, that actually identified threats in descending order of harm, and they were overexploitation.

0:20:00 - (Chris Clarke): It's the biggest threat to species. Overexploitation is logging, fishing, hunting, gathering of plants, etcetera. The next one was agriculture. The third was urban development, including residential, industrial, commercial, recreation, and tourism. Following that was invasion and disease, which includes invasive species, problematic native species, and introduced genetic material, which wasn't gmO's, but it was like unwanted hybridizing of native species, that kind of thing.

0:20:30 - (Chris Clarke): Pollution was next, which includes air pollution, garbage, landfills, microplastics, all that stuff. System modification of natural ecosystems was next down on the list, which was fires, fire suppression, dams, other things like that. Climate change was the 7th worst problem facing the planet in this study, which includes drought, habitat change, storms, and extreme temperatures. After that was human disturbance, transportation, and energy production.

0:21:01 - (Chris Clarke): So climate change is really, really important, but it's one existential threat, and a constellation of existential threats that emphatically include habitat destruction. Destroying habitat to counter climate change is a bad idea. And to be fair to the BLM, avoiding habitat destruction is kind of what they had in mind. Bye. Restricting solar to lands that have been identified as disturbed. And there are problems with that. I mean, how do you define disturbed?

0:21:28 - (Chris Clarke): Having a landfill, overgrazing, having a wildfire go through there. I've seen land that has been classified as disturbed that basically had a 50 year old jeep turret going through the middle of it, but it had amazing biological diversity. Disturbance is not the sole metric of habitat destruction. Visible disturbance, that is, visible disturbance, like a jeep trail or an old homestead or even a freeway, doesn't necessarily map to how important the habitat is for local species. So that's important to keep in mind.

0:22:04 - (Chris Clarke): But let's look at the disturbance issue a little bit more closely, shall we? Now, there are certainly kinds of disturbance that one could argue make little difference to the species that live there. Periodic wildfires are things that ecosystems can actually evolve to need. There are landslides and things like that that will be colonized by native species. And even off road vehicle playgrounds, where you might imagine that anything of ecological value has been run over or trampled or covered with dust can bear a huge amount of really important ecosystem values.

0:22:42 - (Chris Clarke): But there are other places where nobody's going to disagree that the ecosystem there has been trashed. And solar is going to be a net benefit because of its ability to mitigate the effects of climate change. I am, of course, talking about the built environment. We say solar on rooftops a lot of the time as a sort of gut level reaction to building solar facilities on old growth desert habitat and rooftops.

0:23:08 - (Chris Clarke): Here's your word of the day, synecdoche rooftops stand in for a whole bunch of different things that include rooftops but aren't limited to rooftops. That is what is known in the literary world as a synecticae. There's more than just rooftops. In 2012, the US Geological Survey was looking at land use across the United States and how that land use has changed the flow of precipitation and infiltration of groundwater. And as part of that study, the USGS put together a spreadsheet that takes every single county in the country and then tells you what percentage of that county is devoted to parking lots.

0:23:57 - (Chris Clarke): Not parking structures, not underground parking, not street side parking, not driveways, just parking lots. The nice thing about this spreadsheet is that you can take the spreadsheet and then add a couple of columns and come up with the land area of each county, which is basically a cut and paste job from the list of counties by land area page for each state on Wikipedia. And then crunch those numbers and you have the number of square miles of parking lots in that county.

0:24:32 - (Chris Clarke): For instance, Ada county in Idaho, there's 1.08% parking lots in 2012. According to USGS, Ada county is 1055 sq mi, and that means 11.39 sq mi of parking lots in Ada County, Idaho. So I am going to be putting together an issue of my email newsletter, letters from the desert that goes into significantly more detail on this. But I've already thrown a whole lot of numbers at you. So letters from the desert is lettersfromthedesert dot substec.com.

0:25:11 - (Chris Clarke): but let's just take the basics I went through, took the original six states that were in the 2012 western solar plan and figured out how many square miles of parking in each of those states added it together. The original six states in the western solar plan according to the USGS from 2012 data, this figure probably has gone up since in the last twelve years, there's 2165.28 sq mi of parking lots total, according to the USGS figures in the original six states for the western solar plan. So California, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah.

0:25:56 - (Chris Clarke): If you take the additional five states that were added for this round, which is Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming, there is an additional 1202.72 sq mi of parking lots. And then, just because I could, I looked at Texas. Now, Texas has been left out of this whole planning process because there's precious little public land in Texas, especially in the desert section it's a lot of large privately owned ranches, but there are more than 200 counties in Texas and some of them have a lot of parking lots. So just in Texas, there are 1276.59 sq. Mi of parking lots.

0:26:39 - (Chris Clarke): Add that all up. The eleven states that are in the 2024 western solar plan and Texas offer a total of 4644 sq. Mi of parking lots. That is pretty close to 10% of the total number of square miles 49,500 made available for solar in this plan that we've already agreed maybe a 20th of will get developed. Parking lots almost never have ecological value that would be disturbed by putting solar panels above the parking spaces.

0:27:15 - (Chris Clarke): We're not talking replacing the parking lots here. That would be really unpopular in a lot of places. Probably a good idea overall. But you put solar above the parking lots, people park in the shade. It saves energy regardless of what kind of car they have, because the parking space is going to be cooler, so you don't have to spend as much energy cranking the AC in the car, which is really important if it's an internal combustion engine. But it's still important if it's an electric cardinal, which you could conceivably be charging by plugging into the parking lot. Solar basically zero environmental cost other than manufacture the solar panels, which is significant, and we'll devote an entire episode of the podcast to that someday.

0:28:00 - (Chris Clarke): But parking lots in those twelve states, the eleven western states in the western solar plan and Texas get us to more than 4500 sq. Mi available. Landscape that is ready made for solar won't require grading, won't require displacing any endangered species. Put another way, the BLM itself expects that maybe 700,000 acres of the land described in the western solar plan will be developed in solar by 2050.

0:28:36 - (Chris Clarke): Parking lots offer 2,972,409 acres of land that is ready for solar implementation. So that's the 700,000 acres that the BLM predicts will be developed as a result of this western solar plan, plus 2.2 million acres extra. Now, the BLM is not responsible for parking lots for the most part, they have a few of their own. But the BLM's charter here was to find places on public land that were suitable for solar, and they did that. They didn't do the job I was hoping they would do. They didn't limit it nearly as much, but nonetheless, they're not in charge of parking lots.

0:29:16 - (Chris Clarke): And here's the thing, it should not be up to land management agencies to cite this stuff. If we went through the IR's, for instance. Almost all of these parking lots are privately owned. Those private owners may balk at the idea of shelling out money to put solar on, especially with the lack of cooperation of utilities. However, you can make it worth the while to these private landowners that own these parking lots.

0:29:47 - (Chris Clarke): Let's say a presidential executive order saying that for the next 18 months, owners of private parking lots who put solar on those parking lots will get 120% tax credit. Let's just say so whatever they spend on the solar, they will recoup on their next year's tax bill, plus get a refund of 20%. So if it costs $10,000 to solarize your parking lot, you get that ten k back, and then you get two k. Just as sort of a tip from the government, a thank you, a gratuity.

0:30:22 - (Chris Clarke): Is this politically feasible? Yeah, it's going to be difficult. There's a lot of private landowners. People are going to say, who's going to pay for this? I think you could probably persuade the insurance companies who'd be responsible for covering climate disasters to pony up some of that 20% extra. But even if it comes entirely out of tax money, how much are we spending on every single solar facility on public land for environmental analysis?

0:30:49 - (Chris Clarke): How much do we value the habitat value on that land? What are we losing? These are all questions we could be asking, and we're not. And it's not up to the BLM. I mean, there are people that are making the case that the BLM needs to include distributed generation alternatives to compare things to whenever they are working on environmental assessment of public land solar. The BLM doesn't agree that they need to do that.

0:31:18 - (Chris Clarke): I'm not an attorney, so I know what I wish they would do, but I don't know that they are legally obliged to, or even have the power to decide to, out of the goodness of their heart, include that disregarded generation alternative. But that doesn't mean that we have to assume that the BLM is the main generator of large amounts of solar power in this country, and parking lots are just one piece of the built environment that's suitable for solar. But here's the news flash. The podcast 90 miles from Needles, which is a project of the desert advocacy media network, has determined, according to government data, that the parking lots in twelve of the 50 states could generate more power than the country needs if they're covered in solar.

0:32:03 - (Chris Clarke): Let that sink in, Sadeena. We've got a few people who heard my fundraising appeal in the last episode and signed on as new donors, and we are incredibly grateful to them. They are Nicholas Stover, Carol Inouya Matthews, Nancy Baumeister, Nancy Cusumano and Michael Gordon. You are all absolutely wonderful, and I'm just very, very pleased that you find what we're putting together here worth supporting. I also would like to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover announcer and Martin Mancha, our artist.

0:33:22 - (Chris Clarke): Our theme song, moody western, is by Brightside Studio. And we're at least in this part of the desert, running into another extreme heat warning from the National Weather Service. Somewhere between the middle and the end of this week, it's gonna get hot again in the southwest. Please take care of yourselves. Be careful. The desert needs you. And I will see you at the next watering hole. Goodbye now.

0:34:30 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from needles, is a production of the Desert Advocacy media network.