Guest Column

Solar Projects in the West Require Responsible Development

By Steve Belinda, Guest Writer, 4-22-11

	Photo by Flickr user Living Off Grid.

For years, I’ve worked to safeguard some of the West’s best hunting and fishing spots from poorly planned oil and gas development on public lands. Today, a new and surprising challenge is emerging for management of these lands: large-scale, commercial, renewable energy development.

Solar and wind energy have the potential to transform America, creating great jobs and providing a reliable source of clean, domestic energy. Yet despite its many virtues, utility-scale renewable energy requires massive infrastructure that could adversely affect the West’s public lands and sporting heritage, if it isn’t done right from the start.

Fortunately, we have decades of experience with oil and gas siting, enabling us to responsibly pursue siting renewable energy on public lands. Smart, common-sense solutions can foster a smooth transition to clean energy, sustain our hunting and fishing traditions, and avoid costly red-tape delays, litigation and habitat damage that often characterize public-lands oil and gas development in the past.

This month marks the end of public comment on a document that will guide solar energy development in six Western states: California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona. This document will set the precedent for large-scale renewable energy development in the West. We must get it right. Two primary alternatives are being considered: the Department of the Interior’s and Department of Energy’s preferred alternative calls for creating 24 “solar energy zones” and enabling development on an additional 22 million acres of BLM land in these six states.

A review of the 24 SEZs—including three in Utah, four in Colorado and three in New Mexico—shows that they were placed to have minimal conflict with fish and wildlife and hunting and angling. But a review of the 22 million acres that would become available for solar energy development shows some flaws – and fails to ensure we won’t re-create the “land rush” that has plagued energy development on public lands for decades. Renewables development on these lands could expose important fish and wildlife habitat – and therefore hunting and angling – to severe impacts, restricted use, or even exclusion of existing uses. For example, Nevada has a small pronghorn herd of about 25,000 animals, which are rare and prized game for hunters. The Nevada Division of Wildlife and local sportsmen’s organizations have worked for decades to revive this herd, which once fell to fewer than 3,000. Yet under the federal agencies’ current preferred alternative, much of the public land proposed for solar development in Nevada would fragment this pronghorn habitat, cutting off crucial migration routes and endangering the future of this valuable population.

Many sportsmen prefer an approach that focuses all development into the 24 solar energy zones, places located close to existing transmission infrastructure with minimal fish and wildlife conflicts or carefully constructed in accord with new, properly placed transmission lines. This practical solution can meet our clean energy needs, achieve the DOI’s predicted goal of developing 214,000 acres over the next twenty years, and uphold our Western heritage. Further, it would enable DOI and DOE to utilize the knowledge of local stakeholders by establishing a clear protocol to allow sportsmen and others to add, modify and eliminate solar energy zones in the future.

Sportsmen support and encourage domestic energy development, including renewable energy, which provides a secure energy future. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar understands the Western way of life and the importance of sustaining America’s hunting and fishing traditions, making him the right person to oversee this effort. The current guidance process on siting solar presents an opportunity for him to lead us toward a future that facilitates the development of clean energy and secures our Western heritage.

Steve Belinda is director of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s Center for Responsible Energy Development. A former BLM biologist who has worked in Wyoming, New Mexico and Oregon, he lives in Red Lodge, Montana.

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