The Obama Administration on Thursday released a much anticipated draft of the federal government’s plan to build solar energy projects on public land throughout the western United States.
At 10,000 pages, it’s not exactly light reading. So, in an effort to save you some time, we’ve whittled down the plan — officially called the Draft Solar Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement — to highlight the most important details.
To begin with, the draft identifies 24 area in six states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah — that are best suited for large-scale solar energy projects. According to Bureau of Land Management Director Bob Abbey, the areas were chosen because (1) there is ample land to accommodate large-scale solar plants, and (2) there’s the opportunity to build such plants while doing minimal environmental damage, such as uprooting entire species or draining water resources. If you remember, concern over the safety of local fauna was a major point of debate throughout the approval process of the Blythe Solar Project in California.
On Thursday, the Obama Administration released a solar plan for the western United States.
Another aspect of the plan will make life easier for solar project developers by expediting the project application process. Past experience indicates that currently the process is slow and unduly cumbersome. The Washington Post reports, for instance, there are solar project applications pending approval that date back to the George W. Bush Administration. And even though the U.S. Department of Interior has approved eight utility-scale solar projects in the past three months, there are over 100 applications still in in the queue.
The government’s plan to is to produce another 24,000 MW of electricity over the next two decades. During that time, the feds also plan to open up two million acres of land outside of the designated zones for more solar development.
Now the plan is open to public comments for the next 90 days — and will likely have to go through a bit of editing before gaining final approval. We’ll keep you up to speed on its progress.
If you want a three-minute crash course on the draft, check it out here.
At first, I liked all solar. Now, I don’t want to see millions of acres paved over for the inefficient solar trough or linear fresnel.
Solution:
Mass automation of the solar dish. It is simply post mounted and thus would be in almost perfect harmony with the deserts. We also need automated PV and LiFePO4 battery factories to be developed in order to properly combat oil depletion and GW.
Solar has been growing by some 30-35% since the 70′s. It still only produces .02% total power, but at this rate, WOULD POWER EVERYTHING IN LESS THAN 40 YEARS!
Obviously, we need the necessary automated factories to keep it going