Cutting up the California Desert

Heading east on Interstate 10 toward Blythe, California, the desert appears just as quiet, still and timeless as ever. The sweeping vistas, remote mountain ranges and wide open skies appear as they have for millennia. However, I know there is something different. Five miles north of the highway, construction has begun on the McCoy Solar Energy project, a 750-megawatt solar photovoltaic facility approved on close to 4,500 acres of undisturbed public land. This facility will produce energy that will travel along transmission lines to southern California, and is expected to supply an estimated 225,000 homes with clean electricity. This project is the third to be approved, permitted and now developed here – a region of the California desert that was designated in 2010 as a solar energy development zone by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). These zones were identified to avoid scattering projects haphazardly across the landscape.

As I drive up to the construction area, my heart sinks as I think about this ancient landscape – former shores of the Colorado River – now being converted to industrial-scale solar developments. When it is planned the right way, in the right places, to have minimal impacts on wildlife and habitats, renewable energy development can be a win-win. Unfortunately, at some facilities within the BLM’s renewable energy zones, areas very important to wildlife have been affected. At the Genesis project, construction activities caused irreparable harm to cultural and archaeological resources, and legal challenges from Native American tribes are still unresolved.

Good Projects and Bad

While the BLM’s zone-based approach to renewable energy development was a good idea in theory, it does not mean that all public lands within a zone are equally appropriate for renewable energy development. For example, the McCoy solar energy facility is located on lands that were intended to be preserved in as pristine a state as possible because of the region’s ecological importance. These lands are home to patches of Sonoran desert trees such as the blue palo verde, ironwood and smoketree, which provide crucial water resources for key desert plants, imperiled wildlife like the desert tortoise, migratory songbirds such as the loggerhead shrike and warbling vireo, and many reptiles such as the large leopard lizard and western whiptail.

After visiting the construction site at the McCoy Solar Energy facility, I drive a short distance to the east where there are thousands of acres of abandoned agricultural fields. These lands, already scraped and graded, have little value to wildlife. This site – just five miles away from the McCoy facility– is exactly the kind of land where smart from the start solar development should occur. In fact, the recently approved Blythe Mesa solar project, a 485-megawatt solar photovoltaic facility, is located on the previously disturbed agricultural lands like these.

A Smarter Way Forward

Finding appropriate places to develop large-scale solar energy projects is not an easy task. The BLM’s solar energy program was the first step toward developing a landscape-scale approach to zoning our public lands for development and ensuring that important lands are set aside to protect wildlife and its habitat.

In California, there is an opportunity through the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP), to further refine the solar energy development zones based on additional information about the needs of wildlife like desert tortoises, migratory birds, and desert bighorn sheep. Defenders of Wildlife’s staff have actively worked for more than six years in the DRECP process, attending countess stakeholder meetings, writing hundreds of pages of comments, organizing local support in the various desert counties and providing the state and federal agencies with recommendations and maps of areas in the desert that should be protected, as well as those that could be available for lower-impact development. Our hope is that, through the DRECP, we can protect places that support many species of wildlife, like the unique desert dry wash woodlands and the once pristine lands where McCoy is now being built. And that projects take advantage of the thousands of acres of desert lands that have already been disturbed.