Feds approve controversial remote desert solar plant near Baker

A bighorn sheep climbs the terrain of the Mojave National Preserve, about a mile northeast of the proposed site for the Soda Mountain Solar project on Tuesday, July 21 2015 near Baker. (Stan Lim)

By Jim Steinberg
The San Bernardino Sun

Over objections of environmentalists, the Obama administration on Tuesday approved a 287-megawatt solar energy plant for a remote part of the Mojave Desert.

The 1,767-acre project being developed by Bechtel Corp. is located on land managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, about six miles southwest of Baker.

“Soda Mountain is another step forward toward diversifying our nation’s energy portfolio and meeting the state of California’s growing demand for renewable energy,” said BLM Director Neil Kornze.

The project is consistent with BLM’s landscape approach for the California desert, which supports careful development of renewable energy while protecting the resources and places that make the desert special, Kornze said in a statement.

“The approval of Soda Mountain Solar is a stark contradiction by the Obama administration,” Theresa Pierno, president of the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a statement.

“Less than two months ago, we lauded the administration as conservation heroes after they designated national monuments in the desert to protect and connect important landscapes,” she said.

Allowing the Soda Mountain project to proceed “inhibits national park wildlife from migrating and adapting to a changing climate,” Pierno added.

The project will provide enough power for more than 86,000 homes and help toward meeting Obama’s Climate Action Plan goal of 20,000 megawatts of power derived from renewable energy project on public lands by 2020, the BLM statement said.

The agency said it spent more than three years consulting and working with a variety of federal and state partners, members of the public and others to develop a “comprehensive environmental analysis” of the Soda Mountain project area and devise a project design that preserves scenic vistas, reduces potential impacts to wildlife in the area and protects groundwater.

The agency said its approved design removes an array of solar panels originally approved north of the 15 Freeway, eliminating most of the visual effects of the project within the Mojave National Preserve.

Last year, the project was reduced from the originally proposed 2,222 acres.

The agency also said its decision ensures the project will not block future efforts to re-establish bighorn sheep movement across the interstate highway.

But Ileene Anderson, Los Angeles-based senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the massive solar array would block the “last, best linkage” for desert bighorn sheep between the Mojave National Preserve and the Soda Mountain Wilderness Study Area.

Renewable-energy generation “has to be done right,” she said.

The smaller, revised project is located in an area of disturbed lands including an active utility corridor for oil and gas pipelines, electricity transmission and communication lines and facilities, BLM said.

However, the National Parks Conservation Association says the project is in the “undeveloped” South Soda Mountain region immediately adjacent to Mojave National Preserve.

Francis Canavan, a Bechtel spokesman, acknowledged that the company doesn’t yet have an agreement to sell the electricity from the project, but he added that talks are underway with potential buyers.

Bechtel also does not have a signed agreement to use the power lines that run past the project site, which are owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Getting permission to use Los Angeles’ power lines, however, “shouldn’t be a problem,” Canavan said.

House Republicans open probe of new California national monuments

By Carolyn Lochhead
SF Gate

WASHINGTON — House Republicans opened an investigation Tuesday into President Obama’s designation of three new national monuments in the California desert that protect more than 1.8 million acres of public land, along with six other monuments Obama has designated since January 2015.

The California desert monuments almost doubled the amount of land that Obama has set aside under the 1906 Antiquities Act, setting a new record for presidential land designations, three committee chairmen wrote in a letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Christy Goldfuss, managing director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

“The broad and frequent application of the Antiquities Act raises questions about the lack of transparency and consultation with local stakeholders,” wrote Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee; Rob Bishop, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee; and Hal Rogers, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

Request for documents

The letters request “all documents and communications referring to or relating to the selection or designation of national monuments under the Antiquities Act” from January 2009 to the present, the letter said, setting a deadline of 5 p.m. April 12. Neither the Oversight Committee nor the White House responded to a request for comment.

The Antiquities Act gives the president power to create national monuments on public lands. Republican President Herbert Hoover used the law to establish Death Valley as a monument in 1933 just before he left office, and his successor, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, designated Joshua Tree as a monument under the act in 1936.

Obama invoked the Antiquities Act on Feb. 7 to declare the Mojave Trails, Sand to Snow and Castle Mountains national monuments in the California desert, acting at the direct behest of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a longtime champion of the Mojave Desert.

The monuments link wildlife corridors and preserve the last open stretch of historic Route 66, which was under threat of solar and wind development in 2008 until Feinstein stepped in with proposed legislation to protect the areas. The Bureau of Land Management allows mining, grazing, energy and other development on the federal lands under its jurisdiction; the monument designations prohibit such uses.

Feinstein made the request after more than six years of work on a desert conservation bill that Republicans refused to entertain.

The Democrat defended the monuments, saying she and her staff “held hundreds of hours of meetings with the full range of desert stakeholders,” including “environmental groups, local and state government officials, off-highway recreation enthusiasts, cattle ranchers, mining interests, the Defense Department, wind- and solar-energy companies, public utilities, Native American tribes, local residents and many others.”

Feinstein said the Antiquities Act “allows the president to protect ‘historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest.’ Anyone who has been to the California desert knows that it has all these things and is certainly qualified for protection under the law.”

Activists frustrated

The GOP charges of lack of transparency and local consultation flabbergasted desert activists who helped Feinstein draw the boundaries of her legislation, which Obama then borrowed.

“I put probably 20,000 miles on my car — just my car — going around the desert for the last 10 years” talking with people about protecting the lands, said Jim Conkle, a retired Marine who championed the inclusion of Route 66. Conkle said the letters from Chaffetz and Bishop, who represent districts in Utah, and Rogers, from Kentucky, suggest that “we were land grabbers, but we didn’t take any more land than was already under the stewardship of BLM anyway.”

David Lamfrom, California desert program director for the National Parks Conservation Association, said he “worked on the ground building support (for the monuments) for at least the last seven years.”

“I really think it was a nonpartisan effort, and there was general agreement throughout the desert that this was the appropriate response,” he said.

David Myers, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy, the California nonprofit that was instrumental in protecting the monument lands from real estate speculators, said he thinks the investigation is mainly intended as a warning shot from Utah Republicans to the White House over a potential designation of a 1.9-million-acre Bears Ears national monument in southern Utah.

“There isn’t a monument in U.S. history that has had more participation from the private sector,” Myers said.

California desert town being sold for $5 million

The historic Hotel Nipton is included in the Nipton town site now for sale.

David Schuman
KTNV Las Vegas

A For Sale sign is up in front of the entire town of Nipton, California.

The sale includes the 80 acres of land, all the buildings, and the fields of solar panels.

Buyers are looking at the small desert community just across the state line for its environmental sustainability and its potential for development.

Six people live in Nipton full-time. They like the isolation.

"It's quiet except for the trains, and I don't even hear the trains anymore," said Jim Eslinger, who lives in Nipton with his girlfriend. "I sleep right through them."

Tony Castrignano with Sky Mesa Realty and Capital is the man tasked with selling the town.

For $5 million, the buyer gets the country store, the RV campgrounds, the Nipton hotel and the solar panels that allow Nipton to operate at 50 percent off the grid.

"You can take it to the resource and tourism industry or you can take it into a more commercial industry or a combination of both," Castrignano said.

He said potential buyers have talked about building housing, selling solar power, growing organic food and turning the community into a tourist hot spot.

"If you own the town you can call yourself the mayor if you want to because you have all the votes," Castrignano said.

He says there are about six serious buyers looking at Nipton right now, which include both individuals and companies.

Desert tortoise gets 7,400 acres

Biologist Jeff Valentine, working for BrightSource, walks back to his truck just outside the gates of the BrightSource solar project in 2011, after releasing a desert tortoise in the Ivanpah Valley. A large amount of desert tortoises have been displaced to make way for the companies large-scale solar project.

BY JANET ZIMMERMAN
Press-Enterprise

More than 11 square miles of private land and prime habitat in eastern San Bernardino County have been set aside for the desert tortoise - which is sliding toward extinction - to offset the impacts of future renewable energy projects and other development.

While environmentalists were pleased with the conservation, they accuse Cadiz Inc. of establishing the preserve to appear more environmentally sensitive and win favor for its widely opposed plan to pump groundwater from the Mojave Desert and pipe it to cities across Southern California.

Cadiz’s new “conservation bank,” on the southeastern edge of the Mojave National Preserve, is separate from its proposed water mining operation in a valley to the south, between the preserve and Joshua Tree National Park.

Critics of the pumping project, including Seth Shteir of the National Parks Conservation Association, say it would deplete the ancient aquifer and dry up seeps and springs for the desert tortoise and other creatures in the surrounding Fenner Valley. And that has cast a shadow on the newly declared preserve land.

The conservation bank “doesn’t alleviate or minimize or mitigate the damage that will be caused by the Cadiz water project,” said Shteir, senior program coordinator for the group, one of several that sued unsuccessfully to block the water project. “We feel that this recent effort is an attempt to greenwash that project.”

Los Angeles-based Cadiz established the 7,400-acre conservation bank earlier this month through the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. The concept is similar to cap and trade, with developers buying mitigation credits in the bank if their project affects the tortoise or its habitat, rather than having to search for property on their own.

The desert tortoise is a hardy species, able to live years without water and survive temperatures of 140 degrees Fahrenheit. But their numbers have dwindled since the 1950s as their habitat was swallowed up by development. They were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990.

Since then, the battle over their territory has grown even more heated as utilities hustle to meet a mandate that one-third of their energy come from renewable sources by 2020. Solar and wind energy projects have been approved for almost 48,000 acres of the California desert and applications on more than 70,000 acres are pending, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

The conservation land is made up of a dozen separate parcels around Interstate 40 and U.S. Route 95 west of Needles. It is part of the 70 square miles Cadiz has owned in the Mojave since 1993.

“This is a way we can harmonize our other land uses while providing land benefits,” said Scott Slater, the company’s president and CEO.

The conservation bank stands to be profitable for Cadiz.

With quality habitat and privately owned parcels hard to find, desert land that once sold for less than $1,000 an acre now sells for five times that, said Ileene Anderson, a biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity, which also sued to block Cadiz’s water project.

“These lands would be hard to develop and this is one way they can make money off these lands and also look environmentally sensitive,” she said.

Slater denied any financial motives for setting up the Fenner Valley Desert Tortoise Conservation Bank.

The company doesn’t need the mitigation land for any of its projects, spokeswoman Courtney Degener said. Depending on where a project is located, the developer must acquire one to four acres of mitigation land for every one acre disturbed.

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WHAT IS A CONSERVATION BANK?

• A conservation or mitigation bank is privately or publicly owned land that protects threatened and endangered species habitat.

• Mitigation is required to compensate for a project's impact on threatened or endangered species or their habitat. Steps taken to minimize environmental impact can include setting aside habitat outside the project area or buying credits in a conservation bank.

• In exchange for permanently protecting, managing and monitoring the land, the bank operator is allowed to sell or transfer habitat credits to developers who need to satisfy legal requirements for mitigating the environmental impacts of projects.

• Conservation banks help consolidate small, fragmented mitigation lands into large, contiguous preserves, which have much higher wildlife habitat values.

• Agencies that approve and regulate conservation banks are the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service.

Source: California Department of Fish and Wildlife

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Desert tortoise

STATUS: In the early 1900s, as many as 1,000 tortoises per square mile inhabited the Mojave Desert. As late as the 1950s, the population averaged at least 200 adults per square mile. More recent studies show the level is now five to 60 adults per square mile. In 1990, the tortoise was listed as threatened with extinction under the Endangered Species Act.

THREATS: Primarily human activities causing loss of habitat, including road construction, housing and energy developments, conversion of native habitats to agriculture, grazing and off-road vehicle use, as well as disease.

HABITAT AND RANGE: Creosote bush scrub at elevations ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 feet above sea level, although they are known to occur in suitable habitats up to about 5,000 feet in elevation. They occur over a relatively large region including the Mojave and Sonoran deserts of California, Nevada, Utah and portions of Arizona.

FEEDING: Vegetation, including annual wildflowers, grasses and new growth of selected shrubs, cacti and their flowers. Desert tortoises forage in the spring and again in the fall, and obtain most water from moist spring foods. During the late summer, they may emerge from their underground burrows to drink standing water after thunderstorms. They may go many years without drinking.

BEHAVIOR: Tortoises are able to live where ground temperatures may exceed 140 degrees farenheit by digging burrows 3 to 6 feet deep to escape the heat of summer and the cold of winter. The animals spend up to 98 percent of their time underground.

Source: Defenders of Wildlife

Desert plan shifts focus to public land

Federal and state officials put plans for privately owned land on the back burner.

Larry LaPre, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, describes the location of a solar energy development planned near the Mojave National Preserve.

BY DAVID DANELSKI
Press-Enterprise

A ballyhooed energy development and land conservation plan for California’s deserts will now focus just on public lands managed by the federal government, at least for the time being, state and federal officials announced Tuesday, March 10.

The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan has been hailed by the Obama administration as an all-encompassing plan for the desert regions of seven counties, including Riverside and San Bernardino.

In the works since 2009, its goal was to get federal, state and local officials to agree on the best places to locate huge solar, wind and geothermal projects while also preserving the desert’s most important wildlife habitat, and archeological and recreational areas.

When the 8,000-page draft was released last fall, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell appeared in Palm Springs to promote it.

The draft called for directing alternative energy development to 2 million acres of mostly privately owned land that is expected to have little value as endangered-species habitat.

But after receiving 12,000 public comments on the plan, federal Bureau of Land Management and California Energy officials, in a conference call with reporters, appeared to reel back expectations, if not the plan itself.

With no certain time frame, the plan now is being broken into phases, the first of which will pertain only to public lands managed by the BLM, said Jim Kenna, the agency’s California director.

Planning for privately owned land will be delayed to give local officials in the seven counties more time to complete their own planning initiatives, he said.

The draft plan now calls for some 392,000 acres of public land for focused alternative-energy development, 4.9 million acres for conservation and 3.6 million for recreation, Kenna said.

Officials with Riverside and San Bernardino counties have expressed concerns that large-scale solar increases demand for county fire and sheriff’s services without providing the county additional property tax revenue.

San Bernardino County officials also are concerned that large-scale solar projects could be made obsolete by other technological advances.

“We don’t want obsolete solar projects on land that would have been good for other kinds of development,” said county spokesman David Wert.

Ileene Anderson, a biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, said it was disconcerting that the focus now is on public land, because most of the already disturbed land most appropriate for development is privately owned.

“This was supposed to be a grand, coordinated plan,” she said.

Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan

What is it? A proposed land-use plan for California's deserts that strives to place big solar, wind and geothermal projects in place that do the least harm to wildlife habitat and cultural resources.

Where is it? Desert portions of Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego counties.

Who is doing it? The plan is a collabaration led by the Calfornia Energy Commission and U.S. Department of Interior.

What's is the Preferred Alternative?

A version of that calls for:

-- Renewable energy development focus on more than 2 million acres of public and private land, where environmental conflicts are expected to be minimal.

-- Conservation designations for 4.9 million acres of public land managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

-- Recreation designations on more than 3.6 million acres of BLM-managed lands.

-- More than 183,000 acres of land identified for future analysis.

Source: The California Energy Commission

Will renewable energy ruin an 'irreplaceable' Mojave desert oasis?

The BLM has called the Silurian Valley an "undisturbed, irreplaceable, historic scenic landscape." But now the federal agency is considering a proposal for two solar facilities amid the oasis

Highway 127 cuts through the landscape in the Mojave Desert, carrying tourists, campers and hikers to Joshua Tree and Death Valley. (Gina Ferazzi)

By JULIE CART
Los Angeles Times

In one of the hottest, driest places on Earth, velvety sand dunes surround dry lake beds that, with luck, fill with spring rains. Hidden waterways attract a profusion of wildlife and birds; submerged desert rivers periodically erupt in a riot of green.

The federal Bureau of Land Management describes the Silurian Valley as an "undisturbed, irreplaceable, historic scenic landscape."

Now, a Spanish energy firm is proposing a wind and solar project that would cover 24 square miles of the Mojave Desert oasis.

Iberdrola Renewables wants to build a 200-megawatt wind farm that would sprout as many as 133 turbines reaching heights of 480 feet. Next door would be a 200-megawatt solar facility with 400 pairs of photovoltaic panels. The industrial facility would operate around the clock and be visible from nearly every point of the valley.

If approved, the project would be the first major exception to the BLM's strategy of guided development across more than 22 million acres of California desert.

The BLM's approach aims to encourage development in less-sensitive parts of the Mojave. But the agency allows developers such as Iberdrola to apply for variances — critics call them loopholes — that let energy prospectors plant their flags just about anywhere in the California desert if they successfully clear hurdles designed to discourage building in environmentally fragile areas.

Iberdrola's experience will help developers determine whether the difficult process is worth their time and money. For environmentalists, it will be a test of the government's commitment to protect sensitive areas of the desert.

In its application, Iberdrola said the plants would create 300 construction jobs and about a dozen full-time positions once the facilities are completed. It would require building 45 miles of new roads, a new power substation and 11 miles of transmission lines to connect the site to the power grid. The two plants would generate about 400 megawatts of power.

There has been wide position to the project, which sits astride the Old Spanish Trail, a historic trade route managed by the National Park Service.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and California's Department of Fish and Wildlife have criticized its proposed location: a valley that serves as a crossroads for three major wildlife corridors and an important avian flyway. They warned that the long-standing migration corridors would be disrupted and wildlife would be injured or killed in the wind project's turbines or the solar project's superheated panels.

This lonely place is a tourist mecca too. The valley's volcanic mesas and creosote forests are bisected by Highway 127, a two-lane black ribbon that connects three jewels of Southern California: Joshua Tree National Park, the Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley National Park.

Mark Butler, who retired this year as superintendent at Joshua Tree, said energy developments in the desert must be smartly placed to protect sensitive ecosystems.

"I believe it would be a mistake to place this in the Silurian Valley," he said. "We need renewable energy — it's just about where it is and how we go about it."

Conservation groups, which have opposed variance exceptions, say the Silurian Valley is a poor testing ground for the process.

"They are proposing something that has such grave impacts, that benefits so few and harms so many and is opposed by so many," said David Lamfrom, the associate director of the California Desert program for the National Parks Conservation Assn., a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

Iberdrola representatives declined requests for an interview.

Some local officials have sent letters to Congress opposing the project, in part because they fear industrialization could mar the valley and deter tourists.

Le Hayes, who for 23 years was the general manager for the town of Baker, called the proposed energy plants the latest example of "the ongoing pillage of the desert, scraping off thousands of acres to generate electricity so the metropolitan areas can light their streets, big box parking lots, etc."

Proponents of the projects say the plants will become an engine for job creation in San Bernardino County, while others cite the need for more clean energy sources to combat climate change.

Siting renewable energy on public lands in the West is a priority for the Obama administration, which has pledged to generate 20,000 megawatts of power from federal land by 2020. There have been 375 applications for renewable-energy related projects in California since 2007, BLM State Director Jim Kenna said. The BLM has approved 18 applications.

The proposal comes as both solar and wind facilities are facing criticism over bird fatalities.

Three solar farms were examined in a recent report from the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory. The investigation concluded that one of the plants was a "mega-trap" for insects, attracting birds that later died. The report described birds igniting as they chased after their insect meals and flew into the plant's concentrated solar beam. Workers at the site referred to the smoking birds as "streamers," according to investigators.

At the Ivanpah project near the Nevada border, investigators saw "hundreds and hundreds" of dead dragonflies and butterflies that had been attracted to the luminescence generated by 170,000 mirrors focused on a 450-foot glowing tower.

Other birds, the report said, died after striking photovoltaic panels or other structures. The report did not offer a definitive number of annual deaths, because investigators only observed the sites on a few occasions, but they collected more than 200 birds from 71 species.

BrightSource Energy, which developed Ivanpah, reports avian mortality to the California Energy Commission monthly and said investigators' estimates were greatly exaggerated.

When it comes to permitting renewable energy projects such as Iberdrola's, the BLM employs a carrot-and-stick approach.

To encourage companies to develop projects in less sensitive zones, it offers fast-tracked permitting and streamlined environmental review. The shortened process can take less than two years.

The stick comes down on companies seeking to develop outside designated areas, known as Solar Energy Zones. Those projects are relegated to the back of the line, and the companies must pay for costly environmental analysis.

Iberdrola is the first to use the variance process. Its development plan will have to pass muster on a 25-point review that examines potential effects on air and water, cultural resources, wildlife, parks and other conservation lands. Developers also must demonstrate that they have the financial and technical resources to complete the project. The projects' plans are open to public comment.

"It was always anticipated to be a rigorous process," Kenna said.

The variance decision for Iberdola's Silurian Valley project rests with Kenna, who said he will rule early this month. Should he deny the application, Iberdrola may appeal to the Department of the Interior's Board of Land Appeals.

Iberdrola originally had envisioned completing construction by this December. Three years after beginning the process, not a spade of dirt has been turned.

"Given the often-stated desire of the current administration to responsibly develop more renewable energy on the large amount of federally owned lands, the actual reality of the variance process they've initiated seems to be somewhat at odds with that desire," Iberdrola spokesman Art Sasse said in a statement.

Solar companies argue that the variance process is critical to allow industry to choose its own sites.

Environmental groups are watching to ensure that companies such as Iberdrola meet the strict requirements meant to protect natural treasures like the Silurian Valley.

"There was a high bar put in place and a lot of scrutiny," said Kim Delfino of Defenders of Wildlife. "We … very much feel this is a test for the BLM."

The park service has said the visual impact would be "significant, irreversible and likely unmitigatable."

Southern California Desert Management Plan Worries Activists

A sweeping renewable energy management plan for Southern California's desert regions is stirring fears about potential new solar farms and transmission lines in San Diego and Imperial counties.

California power lines, Feb. 21, 2011 (Robert Couse-Baker)

By Erik Anderson
KPBS.org

A sweeping renewable energy management plan for Southern California's desert regions is stirring fears about potential new solar farms and transmission lines in San Diego and Imperial counties.

Federal and state officials have been crafting a desert management plan for five years.

The recently unveiled proposal would help manage development and habitat protection on 22 million acres of federal, state and privately owned land in the eastern part of the state.

The idea is to streamline the development process for renewable energy projects on about two million acres.

East County resident Donna Tisdale has fought against backcountry development for years. She's trying to get the word out that this plan could have major negative impacts.

"I had to contact a lot of farmers in the Imperial Valley to try and get them up to speed on what was going on," Tisdale said. "People in East County were kind of shocked to hear that there's at least one more 500 KV line, like Sunrise Powerlink, proposed."

Sunrise Powerlink is a 117-mile transmission line that connects San Diego with the Imperial Valley. It was put into service June 17, 2012.

The plan's architects consist of what they call "an unprecedented collaborative effort between the California Energy Commission, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also known as the Renewable Energy Action Team."

The state and federal coalition is currently seeking public comment.

The desert energy and conservation protection plan is scheduled to be finalized next year.

Massive Solar Power Project for California Desert Scrapped

The proposed Palen Solar Electric Generating System. (Palen Solar Holdings)

by Chris Clarke
KCET.org

The consortium of solar companies seeking to build a 500-megawatt solar power tower project in Riverside County has formally withdrawn the project's application from consideration by the California Energy Commission.

The Palen Solar Electric Generating System had just received tentative approval from the Commission this month to build one of two planned 750-foot solar power towers in the eastern Chuckwalla Valley.

But on Friday afternoon, project owner Palen Solar Holdings formally withdrew its petition on behalf of the project, which likely means the project is dead -- at least for the foreseeable future.

Originally approved by the commission in 2010 as a large parabolic trough solar project, Palen changed hands in 2012 after its original owner Solar Millennium went bankrupt. Bought by BrightSource Energy, who later brought Abengoa Solar on as a project partner, Palen was redesigned to incorporate BrightSource's proprietary solar power tower technology, in which two 750-foot towers with boilers on top would be surrounded by tens of thousands of mirrors. The independently targetable mirrors, called heliostats, would have focused concentrated solar energy -- "solar flux" -- on the boilers, which would then have generated steam to turn turbines.

The project had come under fire for its potential threat to migrating birds from that concentrated solar energy after BrightSource's smaller Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System began burning birds that flew through that plant's flux fields. Commission staff had estimated that each of Palen's two towers would pose more risk to birds than all three of Ivanpah's towers combined.

After a contentious series of hearings in which environmentalists and Native activists challenged Palen's likely impact on wildlife, visual resources, and Native cultural values, the commission recommended in December 2013 that the project's tower redesign be denied -- then reversed itself this month when Palen Solar Holdings agreed to build the projct one tower at a time, with the possibility to add thermal energy storage capability to the project at a later date.

Friday's withdrawal came as a surprise to observers of the process. BrightSource Energy Vice President Joe Desmond told ReWire in a phone conversation Friday afternoon that the withdrawal was made after careful consideration of all the factors involved. "We're withdrawing the project in the interests of a renewable energy solution that best reflects the interests of all the stakeholders in this process," Desmond told ReWire. "We're grateful to the California Energy Commission for their meticulous and careful consideration of our petition to amend [redesign] this project."

A formal statement by Palen Solar Holdings released Friday, signed by Desmond, said:

After carefully reviewing the proposed decision recommending approval of one tower, we determined it would be in the best interest of all parties to bring forward a project that would better meet the needs of the market and energy consumers.
We believe concentrating solar power, and specifically tower technology with thermal energy storage, can play a key role in helping California achieve its clean energy goals by providing the necessary flexibility needed to help maintain grid reliability. In addition, we are committed to bringing projects to the market that follow sound and responsible environmental measures to ensure all impacts are avoided, minimized or compensated for properly.

With the withdrawal in place, almost certain to be accepted by the commission, any new move to push the project forward would involve restarting the somewhat lengthy and cumbersome commission approval process. That is, unless the proposal was essentially identical to the earlier parabolic trough version of the project approved in 2010. It's worth noting that Palen Solar Holdings partner Abengoa Solar has extensive experience in building and operating parabolic trough solar power plants, including the Mojave Solar project near Harper Lake.

It'll be interesting to see how the project shapes up, if at all, in the next year. In the meantime, we'll have reaction to Palen's withdrawal from supporters and opponents on Monday.

Work begins on $1 billion solar plant in Nevada

Silver State South concept.

Associated Press
Reno Gazette-Journal

LAS VEGAS – Construction has begun on a $1 billion solar power generating station in the Mojave Desert that officials say will produce enough electricity to power about 80,000 California homes when it is completed in 2016.

The 250-megawatt project, dubbed Silver State South, will capture solar energy with panels spread across almost 4 square miles of federal land south of Las Vegas, according to a fact sheet obtained Friday from a First Solar Inc. representative.

Executives with Arizona-based First Solar and Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources put the cost of the project at $1 billion during a Wednesday ceremony with federal Bureau of Land Management chief Neil Kornze at the site off Interstate 15 near the Nevada-California state line.

Kornze said in a statement Friday that since 2009, the BLM has approved more than 50 renewable energy projects around the country.

“The Silver State South Solar Project is another step forward in using clean and abundant energy resources to make energy and create good-paying jobs,” he said.

When completed, it would be the same size as the largest solar project in the state, a 250-megawatt plant that First Solar is building on Moapa Paiute tribal land along I-15 north of Las Vegas. That project broke ground in March.

First Solar is building the Silver State South array adjacent to a 25-megawatt Silver State North project the company completed in 2012 on almost 1 square mile of federal land near Primm.

A subsidiary of NextEra will own both plants.

Silver State North was the nation’s first large-scale solar power plant built on public land. It sells power to NV Energy for use in the Las Vegas area.

Silver State South will provide power to Southern California Edison under a long-term contract.

“Renewable energy sources such as solar power play an important role in the future energy mix in this country,” Armando Pimentel, NextEra president and CEO, said in a statement. “We look forward to working with First Solar and Southern California Edison to make this project a reality.”

Several more solar power projects have been proposed in Southern Nevada, where arrays are also under construction in the Eldorado Valley south of Boulder City and outside the Nye County seat of Tonopah.

'Alarming' Rate Of Bird Deaths As New Solar Plants Scorch Animals In Mid-Air

Solar panels stand at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert near Primm, Nevada, U.S., on Monday, March 10, 2014. (Bloomberg via Getty Images)

By Ellen Knickmeyer and John Locher
Associated Press

IVANPAH DRY LAKE, Calif. (AP) — Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant's concentrated sun rays — "streamers," for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair

Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one "streamer" every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator's application to build a still-bigger version.

The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group.

The deaths are "alarming. It's hard to say whether that's the location or the technology," said Garry George, renewable-energy director for the California chapter of the Audubon Society. "There needs to be some caution."

The bird kills mark the latest instance in which the quest for clean energy sometimes has inadvertent environmental harm. Solar farms have been criticized for their impacts on desert tortoises, and wind farms have killed birds, including numerous raptors.

"We take this issue very seriously," said Jeff Holland, a spokesman for NRG Solar of Carlsbad, California, the second of the three companies behind the plant. The third, Google, deferred comment to its partners.

The $2.2 billion plant, which launched in February, is at Ivanpah Dry Lake near the California-Nevada border. The operator says it is the world's biggest plant to employ so-called power towers.

More than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect solar rays onto three boiler towers each looming up to 40 stories high. The water inside is heated to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes.

Sun rays sent up by the field of mirrors are bright enough to dazzle pilots flying in and out of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Federal wildlife officials said Ivanpah might act as a "mega-trap" for wildlife, with the bright light of the plant attracting insects, which in turn attract insect-eating birds that fly to their death in the intensely focused light rays.

Federal and state biologists call the number of deaths significant, based on sightings of birds getting singed and falling, and on retrieval of carcasses with feathers charred too severely for flight.

Ivanpah officials dispute the source of the so-called streamers, saying at least some of the puffs of smoke mark insects and bits of airborne trash being ignited by the solar rays.

Wildlife officials who witnessed the phenomena say many of the clouds of smoke were too big to come from anything but a bird, and they add that they saw "birds entering the solar flux and igniting, consequently become a streamer."

U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials say they want a death toll for a full year of operation.

Given the apparent scale of bird deaths at Ivanpah, authorities should thoroughly track bird kills there for a year, including during annual migratory seasons, before granting any more permits for that kind of solar technology, said George, of the Audubon Society.

The toll on birds has been surprising, said Robert Weisenmiller, chairman of the California Energy Commission. "We didn't see a lot of impact" on birds at the first, smaller power towers in the U.S. and Europe, Weisenmiller said.

The commission is now considering the application from Oakland-based BrightSource to build a mirror field and a 75-story power tower that would reach above the sand dunes and creek washes between Joshua Tree National Park and the California-Arizona border.

The proposed plant is on a flight path for birds between the Colorado River and California's largest lake, the Salton Sea — an area, experts say, is richer in avian life than the Ivanpah plant, with protected golden eagles and peregrine falcons and more than 100 other species of birds recorded there.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials warned California this month that the power-tower style of solar technology holds "the highest lethality potential" of the many solar projects burgeoning in the deserts of California.

The commission's staff estimates the proposed new tower would be almost four times as dangerous to birds as the Ivanpah plant. The agency is expected to decide this autumn on the proposal.

While biologists say there is no known feasible way to curb the number of birds killed, the companies behind the projects say they are hoping to find one — studying whether lights, sounds or some other technology would scare them away, said Joseph Desmond, senior vice president at BrightSource Energy.

BrightSource also is offering $1.8 million in compensation for anticipated bird deaths at Palen, Desmond said.

The company is proposing the money for programs such as those to spay and neuter domestic cats, which a government study found kill over 1.4 billion birds a year. Opponents say that would do nothing to help the desert birds at the proposed site.

Power-tower proponents are fighting to keep the deaths from forcing a pause in the building of new plants when they see the technology on the verge of becoming more affordable and accessible, said Thomas Conroy, a renewable-energy expert.

When it comes to powering the country's grids, "diversity of technology ... is critical," Conroy said. "Nobody should be arguing let's be all coal, all solar," all wind, or all nuclear. "And every one of those technologies has a long list of pros and cons."

Mojave Solar: Can big power make it online?

Mojave Solar Project near Hinkley, California under construction.

GARY BRODEUR, STAFF WRITER
Victorville Daily Press

HINKLEY — One of the world’s largest solar-thermal projects is progressively going online this year, but not all of its power can be delivered unless more transmission lines are installed, experts say.

Nestled against the small community of Lockhart, about 20 miles northwest of Barstow on the edge of Harper Lake, the Mojave Solar project comes with a $1.6 billion price tag and a $1.2 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. Financial closing from the Federal Financing Bank helped start construction in 2011.

The project is the second of its type in the United States being built by Abengoa Solar, a Spain-based corporation. It will help fulfill the state’s mandate that 33 percent of electrical power supplied in California must come from renewable-energy sources by 2020.

“Mojave Solar will produce the clean energy equivalent to that needed to power approximately 90,000 households,” Abengoa Solar spokesman Luis Rejano Flores said in an email from corporate offices in Spain.

When completed, Mojave Solar will occupy 1,765 acres of mainly fallow alfalfa fields and use concentrating solar power, “a new parabolic trough technology that will be more efficient and cost effective” than previous solar-energy plants, the company says.

The installation at Mojave Solar’s two 140-megawatt “power islands” uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s thermal energy in a low-profile configuration and drive conventional steam engines, the company says. It was intended to start transmitting power about mid-year but it is not yet in commercial operation, Flores said.

The project is engineered to transmit electricity to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and prevent 437,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year when compared to a natural gas plant, according to corporate literature. It can store six hours’ worth of energy for use when there is no sunlight.

However, the Abengoa facility depends on a proposed Southern California Edison transmission project to become fully effective.

“They have an agreement to sell the power from their plant in Hinkley to PG&E, but it connects to the transmission grid on the SCE portion of the California ISO system,” said Charles Adamson, SCE’s manager of major projects. “Abengoa Mojave Solar cannot deliver all of its output to PG&E without the Coolwater-Lugo (Transmission Project).”

The California Independent System Operator manages the power-supply market and distributes electricity through high-voltage, long-distance power lines for 80 percent of the state and a small portion of Nevada. SCE’s Coolwater-Lugo project proposes to beef up existing transmission lines and electrical capacity from the Yermo area to Hesperia, where it is meeting resistance from some residents. It is still early in the permitting and approval process but is hoped to be approved for upgrade in 2016.

Abengoa Solar, with U.S. regional headquarters in Denver, also operates a similar 280-MW parabolic trough plant near Gila Bend, Arizona. Named Solana, it is the largest parabolic trough plant in the world, occupying 1,920 acres, the company says.

The Solana project received a $1.45 billion federal loan guarantee for construction, which was completed last year. It supplies power to 70,000 households through Arizona Public Service Co.

“Abengoa Solar will continue to provide clean energy, jobs and economic growth in California and the United States with both the Mojave and Solana projects,” the corporation says.

Solana created more than 2,000 construction jobs and 85 permanent jobs, Abengoa says, and Mojave Solar is creating more than 1,500 construction and permanent jobs. Corporate facilities include an operations and maintenance office in Victorville.

A spokesman for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., Denny Boyles, confirmed the facility is not yet online and that connecting to the grid is the developer’s responsibility. He added that PG&E is on track to meet and sustain the state mandate of having renewable-energy sources contribute at least a third of its electrical production portfolio by 2020 and beyond.

The Mojave Solar installation will generate about $169 million in tax revenues over its 25-year expected life, according to company projections — after its 280-MW output is fully connected to the grid.

Editor’s note: This is the first of two stories examining renewable energy plans in the High Desert. Today’s story focuses on Abengoa’s Mojave Solar facility near Hinkley. Sunday’s second part will focus on Southern California Edison’s proposed Coolwater-Lugo Transmission Project.

Mojave Desert not ideal for massive solar project

Soda Mountain is a proposed solar project seen from the air on Wednesday, February 5, 2014. Several big solar and wind energy projects are moving forward on environmentally sensitive public land despite government land use planning efforts designed to focus such projects on less important habitat. (Kurt Miller)

OPINION

By CURT SAUER and J.T. REYNOLDS
The Press-Enterprise

The father of American conservation, Aldo Leopold, said, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” If so, the proposed construction of the Soda Mountain Solar project one quarter mile from the boundary of the Mojave National Preserve, our third largest national park site in the contiguous 48 states and a biologically diverse gem, is dead wrong.

The potential damage the proposed Soda Mountain Solar Project stands to inflict on Mojave National Preserve’s fragile desert ecosystem has been well-chronicled. The 4,000-acre development would block bighorn sheep from moving between nearby desert mountain ranges and preclude reestablishing a critical wildlife corridor between the South and North Soda Mountains. Migrating and resident birds, attracted by the area’s numerous seeps and springs, would likely be injured or killed if they collide with photovoltaic panels.

Unobstructed views from the Mojave National Preserve, which surveys demonstrate are one of tourists’ key reasons for visiting the California desert national parks, would be marred. Desert tortoise habitat would be bulldozed. The project’s groundwater pumping could dry up springs along Zzyzx Road that are used by bighorn sheep, as well as harm the water quantity and quality of Soda Spring, threatening the survival of the federally endangered Mohave tui chub.

As planned, the project would include a 350-megawatt solar power facility, with a solar array spanning approximately 2,000 acres of the Mojave Desert, straddling northern and southern points of Interstate 15, west of Baker. According to the project’s website, the facility would produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of 170,000 homes. However, the project proposal has not identified a buyer for the electricity and some of the transmission lines running through the area are already at maximum capacity.

However, there has been little focus on the project’s adverse impacts to the Zzyzx Desert Studies Center and the Mojave National Preserve’s environmental education programs. The Desert Studies Center is managed by California State University and is nestled in a refuge of natural desert ponds, dry lakes and foothills just to the east of the proposed project. It draws students and experts from around the world to conduct research, teach about the wonders of the Mojave Desert and experience the pristine desert environment. As former superintendents of Joshua Tree and Death Valley national parks, we are well aware of the benefits of such hands-on educational programs in building stewardship and teaching people about the value of the desert.

The Mojave National Preserve also uses this facility for environmental education programs that reach underserved schoolchildren from the Barstow area. Elementary and middle school children search for scorpions with ultraviolet lights, learn about the special adaptations of desert plants and animals, acquire knowledge about Native American cultures and gaze up in wonder at the dark, starry night skies.

Consider for a moment that if the Soda Mountain Solar Project is built, these young students will escape the urban environment of Barstow only to encounter an industrial zone next to a national park. Is this really the message we want to send to our youth, especially when better options exist?

The project harms the very resources that are the foundation and instructional basis for these programs. Soda Mountain Solar would create light, glare and thousands of acres of photovoltaic panels, marring scenic vistas and night skies. Air quality stands to be diminished by fugitive dust from construction. Drawdown of critical seeps and springs would impair the fragile desert ecosystem. The Soda Mountain Solar Project’s impact to the human dimensions of the desert ecosystem has not yet been thoroughly examined.

Aldo Leopold thought that one of our outstanding scientific discoveries was not technological, but our understanding of the complexity of the land. Leopold aptly observed, “Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.” Far from being harmonious, the Soda Mountain Solar Project strikes a dissonant chord with those of us who have worked hard to preserve and protect special places like the Mojave National Preserve because it threatens this country’s considerable investment in our desert public lands and national parks.

We ask U.S. Bureau of Land Management Director Neil Kornze and state BLM Director Jim Kenna to relocate the project to an area that will not adversely impact our desert communities, educational programs, or ecosystems.

Curt Sauer was superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park from 2002-10 and J.T. Reynolds was superintendent of Death Valley National Park from 2001-09.

Off-roaders cry foul at renewable energy plan

Brightsource Solar Facility

Anneli Fogt
Desert Dispatch

VICTORVILLE • Off-roading enthusiast Jon Stewart was among dozens of people who showed up at a public hearing Friday to protest a plan that would fast-track renewable energy projects throughout California’s deserts.

“They’re not looking at hunting, photography, astronomy and stargazing, it’s all of these little things people want to go out and do and enjoy,” said Stewart, a member of the California Association of 4 Wheel Drive Clubs.

One of the main topics of Friday’s Off Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Commission meeting was expected to be OHV vehicles on the Pacific Crest Trail. However, after a presentation on the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, the focus quickly shifted to the preservation of the desert and the use of public land.

The plan is a collaboration between the country, state and numerous other agencies to take 22 million acres of the desert from the Mexico border to Inyo County and use the natural resources — sun and wind — for renewable energy. The plan has been under scrutiny since in its introduction in 2012.

The tipping point of Friday’s meeting was the concern over the preservation of recreational areas. Even though the plan states that recreational areas will be preserved, many OHV proponents are wary.

“It’s a bait-and-switch tactic,” said Stewart. “They’re subdividing (OHV vehicles) into a corridor and not looking at the big picture of how people enjoy the desert.”

OHMVR commissioner Kevin Murphy said it is “alarming to think about zoning the desert” and cutting it up into areas of energy production while leaving others for those who want to photograph or enjoy recreation.

“Someone trying to appease one group to use the land for some non-public benefit is upsetting as a person that lives out here and loves the desert,” said Lancaster resident Doug Parham. “Recreation has never been controlled.”

Parham suggested putting solar panels on the roofs of the urban landscape where there is plenty of open space on the tops of buildings and parking garages.

Terry Weiner from the Desert Protective Council seconded Parham’s suggestions of urban solar but had different concerns behind her reasoning.

Weiner said the problems go beyond humans’ desire for unspoiled beauty and recreation. She said solar panels cause problems for wildlife as well. She said birds can be burned by the heat coming off of solar towers or mistake a sea of solar panels for water. She also said the land can be negatively affected by the massive amounts of construction. Weiner urged the plan to be held off until all of the studies are done about how everything will be affected.

The public draft of the plan is expected to be released in the spring or summer this year, and there will be a 90-day comment period for the public to voice its opinions.

A Ghost Town, Going Green

Mr. Freeman and his wife, Roxanne Lang, reopened the town’s store and cafe, and restored the hotel, room by room, creating a destination for bikers, hikers, miners and tourists. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

By DIANE CARDWELL
New York Times

NIPTON, Calif. — Gerald Freeman leaned on a walking stick on a dusty hill near the four rows of his solar arrays, talking about it like an apostle on a mission. Down the road are the eucalyptus trees he planted as a potential source of biomass. And not far away, he said, he hopes to install a hydrogen system, another source of renewable fuel.

It’s all part of Mr. Freeman’s unlikely dream here in the Mojave Desert — to turn this tiny town into a community running on clean power entirely of its own making.

The dream began in earnest about 30 years ago, when Mr. Freeman, a gold miner living in Malibu, bought this ghost town — hotel and general store included. He still has a ways to go, but Nipton now produces roughly half the electricity for its fluctuating population of 30 to 70 residents from the array Mr. Freeman installed in 2010.

“The more independent we can become of outside resources, the better,” Mr. Freeman said, citing the rising cost of utility power, frequent outages and preserving the environment as motivation. “I’ve been conscious of the global warming issue since my early days in school. It’s only now beginning to be so much part of the present day. People are slow to adapt to an oncoming reality.”

For decades, people have experimented with self-reliant living, whether hippies flocking to communes in the hills or survivalists hunkering down across the plains. But not since Henry David Thoreau took off into the woods near Walden Pond has the idea of going off the grid seemed so within reach — albeit this time without sacrificing the modern conveniences.

With cheaper and more widely available ways to make power at home or in town, individuals and communities have been moving ever closer to declaring their energy independence, using technologies like solar, batteries and even small-scale wind. In recent years, towns dedicated to environmental sustainability while reducing the reliance on fossil fuels — known as transition towns — have sprung up in Europe, Australia and the Americas.

Still, it is not yet easy to unplug from the power system, as Mr. Freeman’s journey — which he may not get to complete because of flagging health — illustrates.

Mr. Freeman, 81, first got to know the place — not much more than a few buildings plopped behind the railroad tracks like a movie set — back in the 1950s. With a degree in geology from the California Institute of Technology, he would come from Los Angeles to prospect for gold, spending days climbing and sampling the rocks on his own. He eventually established a successful mine and moved to Malibu with his second wife, Roxanne Lang, now 63, whom he had met on a dive boat off Catalina and wooed with the opening line, “Can I help you with your wet-suit?” she recalled.

But Malibu became expensive and was far from the mining operations he oversaw. So when Nipton came up for sale, he bought it, moving there with Ms. Lang in 1984.

The town offered tremendous natural resources in the form of a Pleistocene-era underground lake whose waters flow there first and strong, year-round sunshine barely trespassed by clouds. It also had a rich history, bustling from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries along with the mining industry, and even boasting a hotel that played host to the silent-movie star Clara Bow, who owned a ranch nearby.

But by the time the couple moved there, it was all but empty and in disrepair. They stayed for six years, until their son outgrew the one-room schoolhouse that serves the area, and then moved to Henderson, Nev., a Las Vegas suburb.

In that time, they reopened the store and cafe and restored the hotel room by room, creating a destination for bikers, hikers, miners and tourists, especially Europeans, looking for the flavor of the Old West.

Michael Truman, for instance, usually escapes the cold of Medicine Hat, in Alberta, Canada, to come to the area from November to March. He had never been to Nipton before, but took a different road looking for places to travel with the dog he was planning to look after for friends and stumbled upon it.

“It looked cool, so I said, ‘I’m going there,’ ” he said, adding that he would probably bring the dog back for a day in the preserve bordering the town. “I like plants and animals more than people — they’re easier to get along with.”

It has also attracted a cluster of about 10 full-time residents who work in Nipton, some who say they were attracted by its peace and solitude.

The couple running the cafe, Susan and Fernando Gamez, have begun growing some of the vegetables they use for offerings like the If Looks Could Kale burger, using an intensive vertical system intended to save on space, energy and water.

“The whole area is more and more into how do we use our environment,” said a woman behind the cash register who gave her name as Brenda M. “Let’s not trash it; what can we do with it?”

For Mr. Freeman, those questions were there all along. He had begun experimenting even before he bought the town, using a grant from the state to plant eucalyptus as a potential energy source and farming euphorbia, which produces a latex that can be refined into fuel.

But he had always been interested in solar, he said. Over the years, he talked to several companies about installing an array, but it was too expensive. Then he came across a Palo Alto-based company that used mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on light-sensitive material to increase the efficiency and lower the cost, and decided to go ahead, especially given the generous state and federal incentives.

That company, Skyline, has since gone out of business, but the array shines on.

“It seems to come up when the normal path of the 20th century toward eternal growth is stymied or when groups of people feel like that path is not going to work for them,” said Dona Brown, a University of Vermont professor and author of “Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America.”

Mr. Freeman said he was now looking to a system to make hydrogen, both to store energy and to sell. The couple have put in five tent cabins using a modified Frank Lloyd Wright design and are talking about building an R.V. park to accommodate workers from the giant Ivanpah solar power plant nearby and a rare-earth mine just around the bend.

Mr. Freeman may not be the one to see all those plans to fruition, however. With diagnoses of congestive heart and renal failures, he is considering selling the town or finding a partner who can realize the vision.

Standing near the spot where, on those long-ago prospecting trips, he would call the train depot to tell the motorman to pick him up on the way back, he referred to the need for self-sufficiency in the face of global warming and economic instability.

“Things are evolving and the future is clear,” he said. “It’s just a question of how soon we can get there.”

Environmentalists pushed Bundy ranch standoff over endangered [sic] tortoises

A helicopter takes off from a staging area of BLM vehicles and other government vehicles off of Riverside Road near Bunkerville, Nevada over the weekend of April 12-13, 2014. (Reuters)

Michael Bastasch
Daily Caller

Some have speculated that the standoff between federal agents and Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy is the result of a secretive deal orchestrated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and political allies in the solar industry.

But the Bundy standoff is really the culmination of a long battle with environmentalists who want to keep federal lands off limits to economic activity. The primary vehicle used by government officials and environmentalists to advance this goal has been the desert tortoise, which was listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act in 1990.

The land Bundy’s family had used for cattle grazing since the late 1800s suddenly became off-limits. Bundy refused to give up his grazing rights and wound up in a prolonged court battle. The court ruled against Bundy in 1998 and ordered him to remove his cattle, or else the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) would do it for him.

The BLM even had a webpage detailing the problems they saw from Bundy’s “trespass cattle” that were grazing in desert tortoise habitat. The webpage, however, was deleted. So was the cached copy after the Bundy standoff became nationwide news.

A screenshot of the deleted page from the BLM’s website shows that environmental groups were some of the main forces aligned against Bundy’s trespass cattle. Environmentalists were pushing for the disputed federal lands to be used as “offsite mitigation” for the impact of solar development. Solar development in the area is heavily supported by Nevada environmental groups.

“Non-Governmental Organizations have expressed concern that the regional mitigation strategy for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone utilizes Gold Butte as the location for offsite mitigation for impacts from solar development, and that those restoration activities are not durable with the presence of trespass cattle,” the BLM page says.

“The Center for Biological Diversity has demanded action to resolve trespass in designated critical desert tortoise habitat in several letters,” BLM page notes. “Western Watersheds has requested a verbal status update and later filed a Freedom of Information Act request.”

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Western Watersheds Project (WWP) have been actively pushing the government to impose heftier grazing fees on cattle ranchers for years, along with pressuring officials to close of huge areas of public lands to grazing and oil and gas development.

“While Cliven Bundy is an extreme example, WWP knows that this sense of entitlement and disregard for federal authority is not uncommon in public lands ranching,” WWP said in a statement. “Bundy’s cows are not the only livestock trampling fragile deserts, precious riparian areas, and imperiling native plants and animals. That is why WWP will continue working to end abusive public lands livestock grazing and to press for meaningful policy reform.”

“We’ve been working for the Mojave desert tortoise since 1997. Challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s grazing practices on arid public lands, we’ve helped protect millions of acres of fragile tortoise habitat,” CBD says on its website.

“It’s so blatant,” says Rob Mrowka, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity said of Bundy’s trespass cattle in 2009. “Anyone can go out there anytime of the year and see cattle. BLM employees trying to protect sensitive plants and animals are very frustrated. It’s a problem that’s been going on and on.”

In April 2012, the BLM were preparing to remove Bundy’s cattle from federal lands, but mysteriously abandoned the operation — note that this was an election year. CBD filed an intent to sue against the BLM under the Endangered Species Act for failing to remove the Bundy’s trespass cattle that year.

CBD was also enraged when the BLM halted removing Bundy’s cattle this month during a fierce standoff between armed federal agents, Bundy supporters and militia members. The BLM returned the 400 cattle they had rounded up to Bundy, angering environmentalists.

“The BLM has both a statutory and sacred duty to manage our public lands in the public interest, to treat all users equally and fairly,” said Mrowka. “Instead it as allowing a freeloading rancher backed by armed thugs to seize hundreds of thousands of acres of the people’s land as their own fiefdom.”

“The BLM monumentally failed to remove the trespass cattle, collect fees, or protect the land for more than 20 years,” Mrowka added. “Now it backed down in the face of threats and posturing of armed so-called ‘sovereignists.’ This is absolutely pathetic and an insult to ranchers and others who hold permits and pay their required fees to use the public lands.”

The Bundy ranch is not out of the woods yet. CBD and other environmentalists have also promised to hold the BLM to its court-mandated orders to round up Bundy’s cattle.

“[I]t’s clear that the BLM has a legal duty to remove trespass cattle for the land entrusted to it by the American people,” Mrowka said. “It has a moral responsibility to not let armed thugs and threats of violence seize hundreds of thousands of acres of public land for their own. We intend to hold the BLM accountable to the American people, fair play, and to justice.”

Huge solar project questioned

The proposed Silurian Valley solar project would install photovoltaic panels such as those pictured here at the First Solar is project near Desert Center. The project would cover 11 square miles of public lands north of Baker, dwarfing the mammoth Brightsource Solar project near Ivanpah Dry Lake. (David Danelski)

David Danelski
Riverside Press-Enterprise

Worries about possible environmental damage from another large-scale solar project proposed for the Southern California desert has prompted the federal government to give people more time to submit comments on the proposal.

The Silurian Valley solar project would go on 11-square miles of public land in San Bernardino County, about 10 miles north of Baker, between Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve.

The project calls for erecting thousands of photovoltaic panels that would generate a peak of 200 megawatts of electricity -- enough for more than 35,000 homes. The panels would be arranged in several arrays and connected by 44 miles of new roads.

Art Sasse, a spokesman for the developer, Iberdrola Renewables, said the location was chosen because of its ample sunshine and proximity to power lines. The company is the United States subsidiary of Iberdrola SA, which is based in the autonomous Basque region of northern Spain.

The project is one of many large-scale solar plants proposed in Southern California deserts. The Obama administration has approved six commercial-scale solar projects on public land in the deserts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Three already are operating. An additional eight are in the planning stages.

After people raised several concerns about the Silurian Valley solar project during a public meeting in Barstow last month, Sasse said his company supported extending the public comment period by a month. The new deadline is May 28.

“The public needs more time to express its interest in the project,” he said.

David Lamfrom, the California desert program manager of the National Parks Conservation Association, said the project is “poorly sited” and well outside a solar energy development zone set in 2012 by the Obama administration to avoid environmental conflicts.

The project would mar what is now a scenic, 30-mile drive on Highway 127 between Death Valley National Park and Mojave National Preserve, he contends.

”We know this site is critical for kit fox and golden eagle, and is a stunning landscape enjoyed by millions of residents and (park) tourists alike each year. We know there are better places for these projects,” Lamfrom said.

The project area also may have cultural significance. The site is near trails used by Native Americans and it’s close to the Old Spanish Trail, which was the route Mormons and other white settlers took after crossing Death Valley, said Joan Patrovsky, a real estate specialist for the BLM.

Sasse said Iberdrola is following a stringent environmental review process designed for projects that fall outside the solar designation zones and these reviews will address all concerns raised about the project.

He added that projects outside solar zones also are needed to bolster the nation’s alternative energy supply that’s needed to cut the carbon emissions associated with global warming.

He also said the company wants to be transparent and is working with the BLM to publicly release biological surveys and other reviews and studies commissioned by the company during the past three years.

The BLM asks that comments about the projects’ impacts on views, air quality, recreation, wildlife, cultural resources and any other issues be sent to: Katrina Symons, BLM Barstow Field Manager, 2601 Barstow Road, Barstow, CA 92311 or by email to Silurian_Valley_Solar@blm.gov.

Park service says project would harm Mojave preserve

Soda Lake in the Mojave National Preserve is the point where the Mojave River, which flows from the San Bernardino Mountains, reaches its end. A commercial solar project planned within a mile of the lake bed has triggered worries about water depletion in spring-fed ponds and the fate of an endangered fish, among other concerns. (DAVID DANELSKI)

By David Danelski
Riverside Press-Enterprise

The National Park Service has lodged strongly worded objections to a proposed 6.5-square-mile solar development about a half-mile from the Mojave National Preserve, saying the project would harm wildlife and suggesting that it be built elsewhere.

Preserve Superintendent Stephanie Dubois submitted an eight-page letter to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the public land where the Soda Mountain solar project is planned and which is handling the environmental analysis of the development.

A subsidiary of the Bechtel Corp., one of the world’s largest construction companies, wants to put solar panels on both sides of Interstate 15 about six miles south of Baker and just outside the northwest corner of the national preserve, where the bright white Soda Lake is a striking landmark. The lake, mostly dry, is bordered by springs, seeps and ponds, providing a small oasis for wildlife.

Dubois' letter says the BLM failed to adequately examine the project's potential to harm groundwater, threatened and endangered species, and scenic views, among other issues. The project would be detrimental to the desert tortoise, bighorn sheep and protected birds in the area and could reduce water supplies that support one of the few populations of an endangered fish, she wrote.

“We urge the BLM to reconsider the potential for this project to be sited on other BLM lands, private lands, or other degraded lands where renewable energy projects would present fewer adverse impacts to natural and cultural resources,” Dubois wrote in her March 3 letter to the BLM.

BLM spokeswoman Martha Maciel said Dubois’ letter is just one of many written comments the agency received as part of the process to evaluate Bechtel’s requests for a right-of-way permit the company needs in order to build on public land.

"We will consider all the comments and adjust our analysis where appropriate," said Maciel, reached by phone at her office in Sacramento.

Airplane pilots hit by ‘nearly blinding’ glare from massive California solar facility

Heliostats reflect sunlight onto boilers in towers during the grand opening of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert near the California-Nevada border. (REUTERS/Steve Marcus)

Michael Bastasch
Daily Caller

Airplane pilots cruising over southern California have been complaining about a “nearly blinding” glare emanating from a massive government-funded solar thermal facility.

The Ivanpah solar energy plant in San Bernardino County is the world’s largest solar thermal plant and has 173,500 large mirrors that reflect sunlight onto boilers in three 459-foot towers. A feat of modern engineering — to green energy advocates, but a flying hazard to pilots.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) got two anonymous complaints in August that mentioned a “blinding glare” coming from the Ivanpah solar facility. One complaint came from a Los Angeles air traffic controller and the other from a small transport plane pilot that took off from an airport in Boulder City, Nevada.

“The FAA is aware of potential glare from solar plants and is exploring how to best alert pilots to the issue,” an FAA spokesman told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Dozens of flights per day fly over or near the Ivanpah solar facility on routes between the Las Vegas area and Southern California. On its initial climb leaving Boulder City airport, the pilot of the small transport plane “experienced a very bright, intense light from three solar complexes which interfered with their ability to scan for traffic,” according to the ASRS filing.

“[T]he Co-pilot and I were distracted and momentarily blinded by the sun reflecting off of mirrors at the solar power plant facility located near the CA-NV border near the town of Primm,” the pilot wrote to ASRS. “This solar power plant which I believe is still under construction consists of three massive circular arrays of thousands of mirrors oriented inward toward a central tower.”

“From the pilot’s seat of my aircraft the brightness was like looking into the sun and it filled about 1/3 of the co-pilots front windshield,” the pilot added. “In my opinion the reflection from these mirrors was a hazard to flight because for a brief time I could not scan the sky in that direction to look for other aircraft.”

“Daily, during the late morning and early afternoon hours we get complaints from pilots of aircraft flying from the northeast to the southwest about the brightness of this solar farm,” wrote the Los Angeles air traffic controller in August.

“On this particular morning, an air carrier complained about the brightness and reiterated that it was ‘nearly blinding,’” the controller continued. “I have no idea what can be done about this situation, but being a passenger on an aircraft that flew through this airspace and saw it for myself, I would say that something needs to be done. It is extremely bright and distracting.”

In August, the Ivanpah solar facility was still being built. During the time of the complaints, the facility’s developer BrightSource Energy “was testing and calibrating the mirror assemblies, called heliostats, but it is unknown if that had anything to do with the reflection,” reports the Press-Enterprise. The Ivanpah facility was brought online last December.

Ivanpah’s co-owner and operator, NRG Energy, was notified of the “blinding” complaints this week and said it would respond within 10 days. The FAA received the complaints last November and the Clark County Department of Aviation was notified of them at the end of January.

BrightSource’s environmental impact study for Ivanpah included mitigation measures for glare issues related to the site’s reflective mirrors. The aviation community actually raised such worries during the environmental review process.

Ivanpah’s environmental impact study found that the solar thermal plant could cause temporary blindness to pilots flying within 3,300 feet of the heliostats, which compromises safety. BrightSource had to develop a heliosat position plan to mitigate the potential harm from Ivanpah’s glare.

“At the right angle, you will get the intensity, which is similar to looking at a car headlight at night. If you were to look away you’d still have that shape in your vision,” Chad Davies, president of Riverside Air Service, told the Press-Enterprise.

“If you see a reflection, you turn your head, you don’t look at it,” said Phil Shallenberger, who regularly flies over the project to refuel his plane. “It’s not going to stay there long. When you move, it goes away.”