Battle Brewing Over Giant Desert Solar Farm [View All]

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Tessera Solar plans to plant 34,000 solar dishes — each one 40 feet high and 38 feet wide — on 8,230 acres of the Mojave Desert in Southern California.

Although the lengthy licensing process for the Calico solar farm remains in the early stages, several environmental groups are already raising red flags about the massive project’s impact on such protected wildlife as the desert tortoise, the Mojave fringe-toed lizard and Nelson’s bighorn sheep.

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Also jumping into the fray is a well-funded labor group that is pressing solar developers to employ union workers, and the Wildlands Conservancy, a Southern California non-profit that supports a proposal by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, to ban renewable energy development on hundreds of thousands of acres of the Mojave adjacent to Calico.

Most of the land for the solar farm would be leased from the federal government.

“Our feeling is the utility-scale project should first be sited on disturbed land, public or private, instead of pristine lands,” April Sall, the conservation director for the Wildlands Conservancy, told California Energy Commission staff at a recent hearing on the Calico project. “There are several endangered species, plant and animal, that would be affected by this project,” Ms. Sall said, adding that the “the side-blotched lizard” might also affected.

The labor group, called California Unions for Reliable Energy, sent an attorney and biologist to testify at the hearing. The group has come under fire for inundating developers who decline to sign labor agreements with demands that they conduct scores of costly environmental studies on their solar projects.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/battle-brewing-over-giant-desert-solar-farm/