Posted on December 7, 2022.

Ending the climate crisis will almost certainly require putting solar panels and wind turbines on huge amounts of land — some of it valuable wildlife habitat, some of it now used for food production, some of it held sacred by Indigenous tribes.

It’s an uncomfortable reality backed up by robust scientific research — and the starting point for many efforts to identify the least damaging places to build renewable energy infrastructure. I wrote recently about one of those efforts, a Nature Conservancy study with the optimistic conclusion that the American West can generate enough clean power to replace fossil fuels, even if some of its most ecologically important landscapes and best farmlands are placed off limits to solar and wind projects.

The study represents a common way of thinking about renewable energy planning, known as “smart from the start.” The idea is to push development to lower-conflict areas, helping projects get approved faster while also protecting the natural world.

As far as Shannon Eddy is concerned, it’s a good strategy in theory — but in practice, it can leave a lot to be desired.

Eddy runs the Large-scale Solar Assn., a Sacramento trade group that represents and lobbies for the solar industry. Her member companies are tasked with building much of the machinery needed for California to reach 100% clean energy — a task that can be lucrative but also challenging. Almost anywhere you try to construct a solar farm in this state, someone will try to stop you.

Eddy is a fierce advocate for her industry — it’s her job — but she also cares deeply about solving the climate crisis, and doing it equitably. She reached out after reading my piece on the Nature Conservancy study, and told me she wanted to talk.

In her view, state and federal officials are making it far too difficult to build the solar panels and wind turbines needed to phase out coal, oil and gas — tipping the scales toward a future of mass extinctions and dire human health consequences.

The following transcript of our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Is “smart from the start” the right approach to accelerating the energy transition? If not, what does it miss?

Solar is a risk-averse industry. So mapping and protecting wildlife habitat and prime agricultural land can be useful. It helps the solar industry avoid proposing projects in those locations, where they might not get approved.

But one of the problems with “smart from the start” is it’s biased toward protecting values that can be mapped at a large scale. You don’t really get the granular detail you need to determine if a solar project is going to be viable at a particular site.

I worry these mapping exercises have created this false sense of hope, that somehow the energy transition will be simple and easy and obvious — don’t put solar projects here, put them over there instead. That kind of thinking is going to jeopardize our climate targets, because everybody’s going to oppose solar projects in their communities, thinking we can just put them somewhere else. And that’s not the case anymore. The easy sites have largely been taken.

So what’s missing from “smart from the start”? What factors aren’t getting considered that should be?

Transmission is one of the biggest things. When solar developers look for places to build, they look at where new power lines are planned or where existing lines have available capacity. You don’t have transmission, you don’t have a project.

The number of landowners at a project site is also a big deal. Only really large solar projects have the economies of scale to pay for the transmission upgrades often needed to connect to the grid. And larger projects require more land, which means you’ve got to negotiate deals with more landowners. For the most part, they’ve all got to say yes in order for that project to work.

What percentage of private landowners typically say yes?

About 10% to 20%, based on my conversations with companies.

And that’s one reason why you think there should be fewer barriers to building on public lands.

That’s right. And in the Western U.S., public lands represent about 50% of the total land. They’ve also got some of the best solar resources in the world.

The Biden administration has a goal of permitting 25,000 megawatts of renewable energy on public lands by 2025, which is good but not enough. Not when the U.S. needs to build at least 1 million megawatts of renewable energy — maybe more — in the next decade or two to keep global warming from getting out of control. We need about 1% of the total land surface of the United States devoted to utility-scale solar. We are talking about one of the largest shifts in land-use patterns in U.S. history.

Source: www.latimes.com