US Confirms Plans to ‘Fast-Track’ Solar on Federal Lands in 3 Western States

With the new year, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) reaffirmed its commitment to 'fast-track' the nation's first utility-scale solar energy projects on public lands.

The BLM pledged to complete environmental impact studies for 31 of America's "most promising" renewable energy projects by December 2010. Fourteen of these are proposed solar plants — 10 to be built in California and the rest in Nevada and Arizona. The other projects include seven wind farms, three geothermal plants and seven transmission projects.

Together, these fast-track proposals have the potential to power 900,000 homes. The hope is to make them eligible for stimulus money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which expires in less than a year.

BLM Director Bob Abbey said the move will help the nation reach its "green energy future."

For the solar industry, the announcement "is great news," said Rhone Resch, president and CEO of the Washington-based Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), a trade group representing 1,100 solar-related firms.

The BLM manages 253 million acres of public land, one-fifth of the country's landmass. Studies show that much of that is rich in sun and wind.

So far, the agency has identified 23 million acres with solar energy potential in six southwestern states, and more than 20 million acres with wind power potential in 11 western states.

While some 20 percent of the nation's installed wind capacity of over 20,000 MW has been built on federal lands — mainly in the Midwest — the BLM has "not approved one acre for solar power development," Resch told SolveClimate.

It is not for lack of trying.

Nearly 160 applications for large-scale solar projects have been stalled at the BLM. Some of these go back five years, when the Bush administration first opened up public lands to renewable energy projects under the Energy Act of 2005.

If all of those projects were built, solar panels and mirrors would carpet 1.8 million acres of federal lands in six western states and generate 97,000 MW of electricity, or enough to power 29 million homes, according to BLM figures. That's almost one-third of the nation's total residential electricity consumption.

The BLM is only promising to complete environmental studies for 14 solar projects, but it has to start somewhere, Resch said.

"Although we want BLM to move forward on all of the applications, dealing with the first group of projects will streamline the process for additional solar projects to be approved in the near future," he said.

Sluggish action has long concerned the solar industry, whose representative say the sector's emerging growth depends on access to remote Western expanses.

The industry also says jobs are at stake. Solar plans in the pipeline would create nearly 40,000 new jobs, according to SEIA figures.

After some fits and starts, the BLM appears to be moving towards some semblance of pro-solar regulatory reform.

We're seeing "a significant shift from the Bush administration," Resch said.

In June 2008, the BLM under President Bush slapped a 22-month moratorium on new solar power plant applications in order to complete an environmental impact study. One month later, after a storm of public and industry protest, the agency dropped the freeze.