On Thursday, the department released a provisional plan with maps highlighting 285,000 acres judged to be best suited to such development in California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona and Colorado..
Department officials said in a telephone news conference that while solar developers would find their bureaucratic path smoother if they set their sights on these areas, they were welcome to propose others.
The interior secretary, Ken Salazar, made clear, however, that an application outside the federal solar energy zones might take a considerably longer time to work its way through the approvals process. Of the 17 chosen areas, he said, “That’s where the sweet spots are, so that’s where development will be driven.”
The department received 80,000 comments on its original proposal for the sites, many of them from environmental activists from around the West concerned about the impact of industrial solar installations on wildlife like the desert tortoise.
Most mainstream environmental groups praised the effort. Jim Lyons, a renewable energy expert at Defenders of Wildlife, said that the department had covered the right bases, figuring out what unavoidable damage would have to be mitigated, ensuring there was adequate transmission capacity nearby and front-end loading environmental reviews to expedite the granting of permits for individual projects.
Defenders of Wildlife, the Wilderness Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council , the Sierra Club and two groups supporting the solar industry issued a statement welcoming Interior’s proposal as “a balanced package intended equally to reflect the needs of the emerging solar industry and the mandate to conserve our nation’s precious natural resources.”
Keely Wachs, a spokesman for BrightSource Energy, a company that is among the early movers in constructing large-scale solar-power plants — it is building a plant in Ivanpah, Calif., in the Mojave Desert near the Nevada border — also applauded the effort. The Ivanpah project has been somewhat controversial; Mr. Wachs confirmed that 178 tortoises had been removed from the site to ensure their safety.
The Interior announcement comes after weeks of bad publicity for the Obama administration, not to mention fusillades from Republicans, over the bankruptcy filing of Solyndra, a solar panel maker that received a $528 million federal loan guarantee.
Whatever skepticism exists among Americans about solar power, acceptance is growing globally. According to the Earth Policy Institute, Germany is the current leader in installing photovoltaic systems, with 17,200 megawatts of installed capacity. The United States ranks fifth, with 2,500 megawatts.
SOURCE: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/interior-dept-anoints-solar-energy-sites/
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