The Bureau of Land Management is revamping its policy for industrial solar development on public land in the West.
It's called the 'Western Solar Plan' and the latest draft shows a proposed allocation of nearly 12 million acres in Nevada and over 31 million acres across eleven states. Nevada would hold the largest stake at 37% of the total acreage.
Outside of both Pahrump and Amargosa Valley, two places where Channel 13 has reported resident pushback from the pressure of industrial development, the BLM is proposing around 220,000 acres be opened up for solar.
In the future, proposed projects would still undergo site-specific environmental review and public comment. If you’d like to weigh in, the deadline to provide feedback to the BLM on this solar proposal draft is Sept. 30th. You can provide your comments and also read the proposal in its entirety here.
Conservation Concerns:
“Nevada is the crossroads of the green energy transition, and I think it's really an open question right now about what the future of Nevada's public lands is going to look like," Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin Director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told Channel 13.
"So the Western Solar Plan presents an opportunity to put these projects in the right places and exclude them from the wrong places," he said.
In recent years, Donnelly has been watching the Bureau of Land Management closely to keep tabs on any impacts to endangered and threatened species.
“You know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was isolated projects that we were concerned about and isolated impacts to specific places of land, whereas now we're talking about landscapes," he said. "Now we're talking about 10 projects from here all the way to those mountains there, wall to wall energy projects.”
He said, these days it's hard to keep up with the pace.
“For these projects, there's a sense to which this clean energy transition is like a speeding freight train, and no one really has control over it."
Donnely said just because these wide open landscapes might appear to be empty, doesn’t mean they don’t serve an important purpose.
“There's a lack of awareness about how special and how biodiverse the Mojave Desert is. Pahrump Valley is this enormous intact habitat for Desert Tortoise, Joshua trees, you know, all the wonderful organisms that make this desert such a great place," Donnelly said.
Meeting Federal Climate Goals:
Earlier this year, the Bureau of Land Management hosted an info session for the 'Western Solar Plan' in Las Vegas and Channel 13 spoke with Nevada State Director Jon Raby, who acknowledged some of the community concerns.
“The plan has been getting a lot of broad support. There has also been a lot of questions and some concerns by local communities, some conservation groups about going, you know, it's too much, too fast,” Raby said.
With this revamped policy, the federal agency is working to meet the national priorities for clean energy production - an effort to fight climate change.
“We want to make sure that we're in it for the long, long haul, and that we're meeting our goals of 2035 and a carbon-free energy portfolio by 2050, and so it is going to be a long game for us," Raby said.
