http://www.basinandrangewatch.org

I would just like to add that I believe that the amount of roof tops in the southwest alone could save enough energy and cut enough GHG to rival the amount of industrial facilities planned for the Mojave Desert. Rood top energy does not need to be backed up by a Natural Gas base load. Natural Gas plants will emit GHG on a large scale. The energy from a small personal photovoltaic system can store enough energy in batteries to power a home all night. Large industrial facilities can not do this. A system where home owners can sell energy back to a power company will provide a great incentive for people. The Feed in Tarif is the most environmentally friendly way to produce green power.

There are enough of us who love our deserts. We are going to make major efforts to stop as many of these projects as possible. We may not be able to stop them all, but when you consider the amount of people who love the deserts, you have to face that this fight will just make no one happy. I say this not to stir anything up, just to point out that it will be a lot easier to reduce GHG by using the previously disturbed areas talked about above. We don’t have to trash the Earth to save her. Instead of fighting, why not use the most environmental alternative? It will work better. I do see an improvement on the attitudes of people in the last year. I am noticing that conservation of desert ecosystems is getting more and more attention.

Plus, desert ecosystems store carbon and removing them will only speed up climate change:

Sandy storehouse
Alicia Newton

Global Change Biol. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2486.2008.01593.x (2008)

DOUG DOLDE
Deserts may be a much more important storehouse for carbon dioxide than previously thought, suggests a new study of the Mojave Desert in the southwestern United States. The retention of atmospheric carbon dioxide in desert soils, which cover more than 30 per cent of the Earth’s surface, is often assumed to be low owing to the characteristic sparse vegetation
http://www.nature.com/ climate/ 2008/ 0805/ full/ climate.2008.34.html

I have been closely following global warming issues for several decades, and I clearly understand the incredible challenges we face in getting off fossil fuel and onto renewable energy sources as fast as possible. And even so, a lot of bad things are going to happen due to what we already have put into the pipeline.

But having spent my career protecting California’s wild places, it is incumbent upon me to defend our deserts. These are living ecosystems. In 1994, Congress passed the California Desert Protection Act, designating 7 million acres of my state’s federal desert lands as wilderness. And on Monday, President Obama approved legislation that added even more desert land to our National Wilderness Preservation System.

Unlike some of my friends, I do feel it is necessary to find some places in our deserts to build concentrated solar projects. But as mentioned above, there are disturbed private lands and some public lands that should be looked at first. And the suggestion of tearing down Las Vegas and building renewable energy projects there certainly is appealing.

But some of the projects being offered at this time are bogus.

For example, there is a project being proposed in the Ivanpah Valley in the eastern Mojave. Good desert tortoise habitat. This information was gleaned from a staff person who works for the California Energy Commission. The discussion occurred during our neighborhood Friday happy hour, where our dogs played on the green while the parents sipped wine and kumquat daiquiris, so I hope I have this straight.

I was surprised to learn how much water the Ivanpah project would use, so I started looking through the staff reports on the plan. Most the water required would be used to wash the mirrors each night. This will be done by slowly driving diesel trucks through the complex spraying water on the mirrors. There is no reclamation of water planned; the water is expected to be evaporated during the next day.

My friend said he was puzzled by the amount of diesel emissions that were expected from the project. Now he realizes it was from the mirror washing. It was determined that the CO2 emissions from the nightly forays of the trucks would be about the same as if the power plants were burning natural gas instead of capturing the energy of the sun. So there is no benefit in reducing greenhouse gasses from this particular project.

He shared that another project being proposed as a “solar” plant near Victorville actually would be powered by natural gas 90 percent of the time, with only 10 percent of the energy coming from the sun.

I know there are solar technologies that do not use lots of water or lots of fossil fuels. But these are the projects that need to be advanced, not the ones on the front burner now.

Jim

This map will evolve as people with knowledge of different areas add sites that really are appropriate for solar. Then we’ll just need the political will to insist on the best approaches to solar, not the business-as-usual models.

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

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

This is exactly the situation with BrightSource’s Ivanpah project, which is located in good desert tortoise habitat. The company had the option of doing the more environmentally friendly thing, which was to locate the project near the town of Daggett just off of Interstate 40. A map of these two options is available at this link: http://tinyurl.com/dmbabr. But BrightSource turned that option down because it was “not economical”, and the California Energy Commission is letting it get away with it.

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

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

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

Since there are other solar options to large-scale concentrating solar, and there are better ways to do concentrating solar than what’s currently happening, it is unfair to characterize those who are concerned about the impacts of these large-scale projects as global warming deniers. Please, leave out the villification and help us look for the best, truly environmentally friendly solutions to global warming.

There are tens of thousands of acres of land in the Mojave Desert that have been scraped clean of all native life and planted with alfalfa, a low-value crop irrigated with subsidized water, or farmed for a while and then abandoned. Most of these parcels are far closer to electrical consumers and transmission rights of way than are the wilderness sites currently under consideration. It is low-value land, much of it bought as speculation expecting a real-estate boom that will never come. Much of the land consists of large parcels owned by single individuals or companies.

Why are these parcels not being discussed when we talk about concentrating solar? Because the solar speculators are actually motivated by taking investors’ money, not so much by producing carbon-neutral energy, and having to pay 2,000-4,000 an acre for a project site makes a project less enticing to get-rich-quick investors, even if the income and carbon reduction potential is greater on the farmed-out land.

I’ve been an environmental journalist for twenty years, and a radical environmental activist for longer. I know as well as anyone what we’re up against with climate change. When I edited Earth Island Journal we reported on runaway climate change, the destabilization of tundra and methane clathrate deposits, the likelihood of non-linear and thus catastrophic change from half a dozen different directions. We are in big trouble.

And this is a gold rush, plain and simple. It’s a public lands giveaway that people calling themselves environmentalists have been hoodwinked into supporting. Simple engineering sense would dictate the closer, already-graded areas, many of them with actual housing nearby for workers. But those aren’t being discussed, and those of us who actually know something about the conditions on the ground — who aren’t declaiming from afar about other areas needing to take one for the team — are dismissed as “NIMBYists” or, what was the line above? “Disingenous in the least and climate criminals at worst.”

The only difference between that kind of argument and Bush energy policy is that once desert mountains are “removed” for solar mining, the New Face of Big Energy won’t leave sunshine slag heaps lying around.

http://www.latimes.com/ news/ la-na-desert25-2009mar25,0,2852352.story?track=rss

Funding for forest service roads and fish habitat: NO
HR2466 9/14/1999

She still is a wolf in sheep skin when it comes to the Basic Human Rights:
1. Extend PATRIOT Act: YES
S.2271 3/1/2006

2. Telecom Immunity for violating privacy laws.
When I wroter her about this, she replied saying that she didnt’ want this issue to hold up other legislation.

There are private lands that can be used as well.

I sense panic. Do it right now or each and every mistake made (loss of endangered species, or easily forgone better alternative sites later pointed out) will be brought to light and used by deniers as a weapon against future federally funded or facilitated renewable energy developments.

The scientists who are alerting us to the dangers of global warming were very cautious and made sure they had it right before ringing the alarm bells. Energy development and other saving technologies should take the same approach and do it right the first time.

There is no need to panic. There is a need to act immediately.