The wrong sites for solar

[XemaSab]

In the name of greening America, the Obama administration is about to open up as much as 21.5 million acres of mostly undisturbed, fragile desert land for potential industrial-scale solar energy development. That means huge swaths of public land in the West could be developed, degraded and effectively privatized.

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What's fueling the demand for land? Battling climate change and a dismal economy with green jobs, the Obama administration is offering generous subsidies for Big Solar development. These subsidies include cash grants of up to 30% of the cost of a project and loan guarantees in the billions, and they accrue to familiar corporate interests: oil companies, utilities and Wall Street firms. For example, $1.37 billion is going to Bright Source — whose investors include BP, Chevron and Morgan Stanley — for three proposed plants in the Mojave Desert. BLM tops it off by offering lease rates based on artificially low land values.

Claims of reducing greenhouse gases undergird the project approvals. Yet research shows that carbon storage rates in the Mojave rival or exceed those of some forest and grassland ecosystems, so the harm of carbon released during construction could offset the promised benefits of the utility-scale solar developments.

On top of that, the estimated operational life of each project runs from 30 to 50 years, but environmental impacts to the land will be felt for centuries. Although to some they appear devoid of life, the deserts and their fragile soils are biologically rich, providing habitat for rare and protected plants and animals like the desert tortoise, the fringe-toed lizard and the Joshua tree. Even BLM concedes in its draft analysis that desert ecosystems could take up to 3,000 years to fully recover from the soil and vegetation disturbances associated with the industrial sites.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rosenberg-solar-20110518,0,1010788.story