Can threatened tortoises and utility-scale solar plants coexist in the California desert? Since the solar rush began a few years ago, results have been discouraging. But an ambitious new plan aims to strike a long-lasting compromise. Northern Californians get a chance to weigh in on the process at a public meeting in Sacramento on Wednesday, September 5.

BrightSource Energy

The sprawling Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is scheduled to go online next year.

The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan — just call it the DRECP — is designed to establish habitat protection guidelines for dozens of species, not just the elusive desert tortoise, across an incredible 22.5 million acres of desert caught in the crossfire between conservation and clean energy.

It’s already being called the nation’s largest-ever Habitat Conservation Plan (a tool created by the federal Endangered Species Act of 1973), and the first to be framed around renewable-energy development. Habitat conservation plans work by addressing mitigation and conservation needs up front and requiring developers to pay into them — rather than the scattershot, reactionary approach employed in the desert to date.

No matter how the DRECP turns out, its implications are likely to be enormous — even beyond California, where it could set an example for other states pursuing large-scale clean-energy development in remote areas.

And yet the plan has flown quietly under the radar since the planning process began in March 2009 with a diverse, often contentious group of stakeholders. But next week at the California Energy Commission’s offices in Sacramento, members of the public can listen in and offer comment as state and local government agencies, renewable-energy developers, environmental groups, and land-use attorneys debate the ins and outs of habitat conservation on public land. The federal Bureau of Land Management owns more than 11 million acres in the California desert.

According to DRECP Director Dave Harlow, the plan relies on sophisticated, state-of-the-art species-distribution models and tools to account for a wide variety of desert plant and animal species, including 36 plants, 20 birds, ten mammals, seven amphibians and reptiles, and even four fish.

But April Sall of Southern California environmental group The Wildlands Conservancy, one of the numerous stakeholders, is worried that everything may not come together as planned. She claims that industry representatives have been lobbying to keep land open for development, and the project’s rapid timeline — a final draft is due next spring — may not allow sufficient time to fill in knowledge gaps about habitat and species distribution in certain areas of the desert.

“I’m hopeful that this will work, but at this time I have a bit of concern,” she said. “It’s kind of our only chance for the desert at this point.”

Barbara Boyle, the Sierra Club’s senior lead for energy issues, who has also been participating in the planning process, shared Sall’s concerns. “They are moving it pretty quickly, and that makes us nervous. They are on a very fast track.”

In addition to conservation considerations, the DRECP will also help determine how many new transmission lines can be built in the California desert, Boyle said, and ultimately how much the state will rely on remote, large-scale renewable energy to meet its Renewable Portfolio Standard. “There are some really important policy choices here that are being made that are going to affect things over the long-term,” she said. “These are huge policy issues that are all wrapped up this in plan.”

A draft version of the DRECP will arrive in December.

By Nate Seltenrich

Craig Miller

Last year brought a fresh breeze for wind energy, and projections indicate that 2012 will be even better. But over the next two years, a variety of forces could conspire to hamper wind energy development across the United States, despite a significant decline in the cost. These are the main findings of a new report by the US Department of Energy and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

It’s that classic good news-bad news scenario: should proponents focus on the fact that in 2011 wind energy became cheaper, more efficient, and more widely distributed than ever? Or should they dwell on the looming challenges, including steep competition from cheap natural gas, inadequate high-voltage transmission in many parts of the country, and the possible expiration of federal incentives at the end of the year?

A little of both, say study authors Ryan Wiser and Mark Bolinger. That’s particularly true in California, where mixed signals abound. On the bright side, the state wind industry had its best year ever and outpaced all others in 2011, adding 921 megawatts of new production throughout Northern and Southern California. Illinois came in second with 692 megawatts and Iowa in third with 647. All told, the nation added 6,816 megawatts of new production, bringing its total at the end of 2011 to a little more than three percent of the nation’s electricity supply.

On the flip-side of the coin in California, wind-energy costs are higher here than in any other state. This is largely due to permitting and siting costs, driven upward by stricter environmental controls. But it can also be attributed to the finer workings of California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, which calls on large utilities to purchase a third of their power from renewable sources by 2020.

Many wind-energy developers offer electricity to utilities at a higher price than they otherwise would because they know they can get away with it, said Bolinger. The end result is that in California, wind energy is much less competitive with natural gas than it is in other states, particularly in the Midwest.

“Natural gas prices have come down, pushing wholesale prices down, but wind has followed along,” says Bolinger. Nationwide, new wind contracts in 2011 averaged about 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour — rivaling all-time lows set in 2003 — while in California the average was nearly triple that.

Looking forward, Bolinger and Wiser expect 2012 to go down as another banner year. But with federal incentives set to expire on December 31, the coming year doesn’t look so rosy. It’s not simply because the incentives could end — after all, Bolinger notes, wind prices are cheap enough in some parts of the country to be competitive even without them — but because of the sheer uncertainty. “The incentive is to wait until the incentive comes back,” he said. “If there’s a chance, why not wait? If it was definitely gone, then they’d proceed.”

In other words, if developers knew for certain they weren’t getting any help, they’d go ahead and build. But since there’s a chance they’ll be offered financial assistance if they hold out a little longer, they’d rather wait and see. Expect that dynamic to dictate wind-energy development nationwide as we round the corner into 2013.

Craig Miller

Wind is one of the few energy sources that requires virtually no water.

The Gordian knot of interdependence between water & power (not the political kind — that’s another story) has been getting a lot of attention lately as the “water-energy nexus.” A new report from Oakland’s Pacific Institute warns that as population grows and a changing climate further wrings water out of the West, “These trends will intensify water resource conflicts throughout the region.”

Oh, goody. Just what the West needs; more water conflicts.

Matthew Heberger / Pacific Institute

The Intermountain West

Defined by topography and climate, rather than political boundaries, the report focused attention on a region that takes in all of Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Arizona, and portions of seven other states, including a narrow vertical slice of California.

The authors calculate that power plants throughout the region “withdrew” (note that this doesn’t mean “consumed”) more than 1.1 million gallons of water each day to keep running, or about twice the amount that the City of Los Angeles uses in a year.

They further reckon that:

“Under current trends, by 2035, water withdrawals and consumption for electricity generation in the region are projected to increase by 2% and 5%, respectively, over 2010 levels – but water availability is already affecting power plant operations and siting in the Intermountain West.”

The report also catalogs how water is slurped up by the use of fossil fuels in particular, in extraction, refining and transportation.

The authors suggest that the way out of this conundrum is to move aggressively toward less water-intensive renewable energy, while pushing for more advances in energy efficiency.

Tillson Burg / iStock.com

Energy production casts a long shadow over an already-thirsty West. Steam-generating power plants like this one use the most water.

It’s worth mentioning that with the exception of wind power, most renewable energy requires some water — even photovoltaic solar “farms” have to be watered, so to speak, if only to wash the dust off the panels.

It’s also worth mentioning that the problem goes beyond just the anticipation of scarce water for cooling “thermal” power plants, which includes coal, natural gas, nuclear, and so-called solar-thermal facilities. The authors also point to more subtle pressures on the energy-water nexus:

“Warmer temperatures reduce the efficiency of thermal power plants and of transmission and distribution lines. More power will need to be generated, and more water withdrawn and consumed, to offset these efficiency losses. Likewise, reductions in hydropower generation and increases in electricity demand associated with warmer temperatures will increase demand for additional power generation and as a result, likely increase water withdrawals and consumption.”

In its 66-page report, the Institute concludes that “these alternative strategies can permit increases in electricity production with a significant reduction in total water demands, reducing pressure on scarce and over-allocated water resources.”

The research, by Heather Cooley, Julian Fulton, and Peter Gleick, was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Craig Miller

California’s three big utilities have another two years to reach their mandated target of having 20% of their electricity generated from renewable sources, and today PG&E announced two new deals that could inch the company closer to that goal:

• Wind:  An agreement with NextEra Energy Resources, for 25 years of wind power from the company’s 163 megawatt North Sky River project in Tehachapi, CA.  PG&E says the energy from this project could meet the needs of about 90,000 typical homes.

• Solar:  A 25-year contract with Sempra Generation for 150 megawatts of solar power from an expansion of the Copper Mountain Solar complex near Boulder City, NV.  Just under 2/3 of that power is expected online in 2013, with the remainder available by 2015. Ultimately, the company says, this project could power 45,000 homes.

PG&E spokesperson Lynsey Paulo said that together, these two contracts will push PG&E one percent closer to the 20% goal.

As of last week, PG&E was at 15.9% of electricity generated from renewables, according to latest numbers out from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).  Southern California Edison is a 19.3%, and San Diego Gas & Electric is at 11.9%.

The official Renewable Portfiolio Standard (RPS) is 20% by 2010, but the CPUC has implemented flexibility allowing the utilities until 2013 to meet the requirement.   Ultimately, the legally-mandated RPS requirement is 33% by 2020.

For more on California’s quest for renewable energy, check out our multimedia series 33×20: California’s Clean Power Countdown.

"Dry casks" waiting to be loaded with spent fuel at Diablo Canyon. (Photo: Craig Miller)

It could be worse. This could be Illinois, the undisputed spent fuel champ, with more than 8,000 tons piled up at plants. As it is, California ranks eighth in the nation.

“This country has an obligation to those states and those communities to take those materials and put them into deep geologic disposal, where they can be safely isolated for a very long period of time,” says Per Peterson, who chairs the nuclear engineering department at UC Berkeley.

Trouble is, the country seems farther now from meeting that obligation than it was in 1998, the original legislative deadline for opening a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel.

Peterson is also member of a White House commission on nuclear waste solutions, due to report its findings next Friday. Between now and then, Climate Watch and KQED’s The California Report will collaborate on a three-part series on the issue of high-level nuclear waste.

“We’ve made progress but it’s taken an enormous amount of time,” Peterson told The California Report’s Senior Producer Ingrid Becker, in a recent interview.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future is not expected to offer specific site recommendations for long-term storage. More likely, it will suggest an interim strategy of sort-of-long-term storage for the 65,000 tons of accumulated waste sitting more or less literally in the back yards and “attics” of US plants.

Peterson thinks a good place to start is with the spent fuel still sitting in dry storage at two decommissioned plants in California:

- Humboldt Bay, the state’s first commercial nuclear plant, which went online in 1963 (160 tons), and

- Rancho Seco, east of Stockton, which Sacramento voters shut down by referendum in 1989 (202 tons)

Peterson suggests consolidating the “relatively modest amounts” of fuel from those locations somewhere that can serve as a pilot project for “informing decisions as to what do with the spent fuel of larger quantities at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre” (California’s two operating plants). Peterson says that “getting to the development” of a permanent tomb for spent fuel “conceivably could happen in 20 to 30 years.” From some estimates we’ve seen, that’s at the optimistic end of the timeline.

Speaking of timelines, you can explore the history of commercial nuclear power in California, with our interactive timeline, assembled by Chris Penalosa.

Experts agree that most vulnerable to both terrorist attack and natural disaster are the uranium fuel rods suspended in pools of water at reactor sites. Utilities operating Diablo Canyon and San Onofre have both begun moving older, less radioactive rods to more durable “dry casks.” The bad news is that two-thirds of California’s spent fuel remains in “wet pools.”

The good news is that Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told a Senate hearing that he believes the temporary storage methods used in this country are adequate for the next 100 years or so. Let’s hope he’s right because at this rate, it might take that long to find a permanent home.

Where the Waste Resides

This interactive map shows the current locations and amounts of spent nuclear fuel at commercial reactor sites in California.
View California Nuclear Power Plants in a larger map

Tune in to the companion radio series: Part 1: California’s nuclear waste profile. Part 2 (Tue): What we can learn from Sweden. Part 3 (Wed): The town that said: “Yes, in our back yard.”

The US Chamber of Commerce says it’s taking too long to green-light energy projects — not just in California but across the US — and that it’s putting a drag on economic recovery.

Map shows energy projects that are facing permitting or court challenges, 31 in California. (Image: US Chamber of Commerce)

The pro-business group issued a report that attempts to quantify the opportunity cost of projects that were in permitting or litigation limbo during March of 2010. That “snapshot” includes 31 projects in California.

Authors of the report, entitled “Progress Denied,” say that using standard multipliers from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, the California projects alone could generate more than 142,000 jobs and yield a total benefit of $59.1 billion to the state’s total economy.

“We just have to get on with these kinds of things,” said Peter Morici, former chief economist at the US International Trade Commission and designated peer reviewer of the report. “We’re shooting ourselves in the foot.” Morici told reporters in a conference call that the large number of renewable energy projects on the list “Does indicate that you really can’t get involved in anything that the NIMBY movement, the no-growth movement, the zero-growth movement doesn’t get on your back.”

Steve Pociask of TeleNomic Research, who co-authored the report, said that nationwide, 45% of the projects on the limbo list were renewables.

Here’s the breakdown for California:
Projects awaiting groundbreaking: 31
Renewable Energy: 19, which includes:
Wind: 7
Solar: 7 (including one hybrid gas-solar project)
Geothermal: 1
Wave: 1
Biomass: 1

Renewable Fuels: 2

The list also includes five transmission projects, including the controversial Sunrise Powerlink in Southern California, and more than a half-dozen natural gas generating plants that are also in the permitting process. Although the Sunrise corridor has been approved, William Kovacs, who heads Environment, Technology and Regulatory Affairs for the Chamber, says “The permit has an enormous number of conditions and is still under litigation.” Kovacs said they counted any project that “was subject to a challenge.”

Just two days prior to release of the Chamber report, the federal Bureau of Land Management issued a list of nineteen “priority” renewable energy projects, eleven of which are in California, on federal lands managed by BLM. The list includes solar, wind and geothermal projects for generating electricity. To be eligible for the list, projects had to “minimize” environmental impacts and far enough along to “potentially” break ground by the end of this year.

(Photo: Craig Miller)

That next gust of wind you hear may be a collective sigh of relief from the renewable energy industry. By a margin of more than two-to-one, state senators have approved a bill to cement California’s requirement that utilities draw at least a third of their power from renewable sources by 2020.

Dan Kalb of the Union of Concerned Scientists says that while the bill still has to clear at least three committees in the assembly, it could come up for a floor vote in that house within two weeks.

But wait — isn’t that requirement already in place? Yes but it’s never had the force of law. The current “33-by-20″ renewable energy standard was set out by former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the form of an executive order. Later it was adopted as a regulation by the California Air Resources Board — but Kalb and others say that “stakeholders have never taken that seriously.” It has long been feared that the order might not hold up until 2020; rescinded by a future governor or fall victim to a court challenge to the Air Board’s authority (for most purposes, utilities in the state fall under the purview of the California Public Utilities Commission).

If passed as expected, the bill known as SBX1 2 (sounds more like a top-secret experimental aircraft) would create the kind of staying power that investors and developers of renewables have been hoping for; an assurance that there’ll be a market for their wind-and-solar-generated electrons, when they’re ready to deliver them.

Flocks of birds near wind turbines in Solano County. (Photo: Craig Miller)

It’s hard to find people who are just flat out against wind energy. As with real estate, attitudes seem to come down to location, location, location. That’s why three of the thorniest issues with wind are project siting, transmission (lines for the power produced), and the industry’s turbulent history with birds and bats. Some of those challenges are highlighted in this slide show, designed to accompany my two-part radio series.

Last fall, even the National Audubon Society, one of the nation’s most stalwart protectors of winged creatures, published a position statement generally favorable toward wind power, calling it a “good news, bad news” proposition. The statement calls California’s Altamont Pass “notorious for killing many raptors, including golden eagles.” A 2003 study by the National Renewable Energy Lab calculated that on average, each turbine in the pass was claiming a bird about once every five years (0.19 birds/turbine/year) — but there are thousands of turbines in the pass, many older models that are more of a danger to birds.

Developers are in the process of “repowering” the pass with newer, larger turbines, less lethal to birds. That may seem counterintuitive but the older, smaller models caused more problems. Since they had lower output, more of them were required. The blades were positioned lower, spun faster, and supported by lattice towers that provided inviting nesting spots, unlike the smooth tubular towers of new turbines.

Altamont is the oldest of California’s four biggest wind energy zones, highlighted on this interactive map.

View Major Wind Energy Pockets in California in a larger map

The Audubon statement concedes that newer turbine designs are becoming more bird-friendly, and finds climate change a bigger threat to avian critters in the long run. The Society went on to call for an extension of the federal Production Tax Credit for wind development, fearing its expiration next year encourages wind developers to rush projects along and “cut corners” on siting.

Meanwhile industry and wildlife groups have joined forces to address the bat mortality issue.

Hear my two-part radio series on challenges facing wind energy development in California on The California Report. Those and all other stories in our series, “33 x 20: California’s Clean Power Countdown,” are archived at our special series page.

Cattle and wind turbines dot the Solano County landscape. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Those who don’t see them on a daily basis might be surprised to learn that there is already something on the order of 13,000 commercial wind turbines operating in California. Ryan Wiser, who tracks wind energy trends at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, does a rough calculation that meeting that state-imposed threshold of 33% renewable energy could take 5,000 more, in order for wind to do its share. That’s based on an estimated 10,000 megawatts of new wind power, using the current standard two-megawatt turbine. While most of these will be concentrated in a few major “wind resource areas” (there are currently four big ones in the state), numbers like that almost ensure that wind turbines will become a more familiar feature of the California landscape.

If fulfilling the California dream for renewable energy takes thousands of turbines, a full-on decarbonization of the world’s energy production will take millions.

Those numbers don’t faze Mark Jacobson in the least. Recently when President Obama raised eyebrows with his goal of getting 80% of the nation’s electricity from “clean” energy sources by 2035, the Stanford engineer  was just about to publish a paper that upped the ante, writing in an email to Climate Watch that “the clean energy should not only apply to the electricity sector but also the transportation, residential heating/cooling, and commercial heating sectors.”

Jacobson’s vision is that all new energy needs around the globe could come from a combination of wind, solar, and water-driven energy…by 2030. Of course, we’d be talking about planting four million wind turbines around the world, as well as 90,000 solar plants. Jacobson then laid out a “path” to his vision It seems at odds with the President’s broad definition of “clean,” which includes nuclear power and coal power with carbon capture:

First, right now investment is focused on too many options, most of which (e.g., natural gas, coal with carbon capture, biofuels, nuclear) are either not beneficial or less beneficial than clean wind, water, and sun (WWS) technologies. The spending of money on the less-efficient technologies is an opportunity cost wasted given the limited amount of funds available. Wind results in 50 times less carbon emissions than coal with carbon capture (“clean coal”) and orders of magnitude less air pollution than “clean coal” (“clean coal” actually increases air pollution over current coal since 25% more coal is needed to run the carbon capture equipment, and the equipment doesn’t reduce other pollutants aside from carbon dioxide).

No prudent businessperson would spend money on an investment that yields 50 times less money, so why should policy makers favor a technology that results in 50 times more carbon and much more air pollution than that?

Second, policies need to be put in place to correct the distortion of the current market mechanism that provides subsidies to fossil fuel and biofuel energy sources even though these sources cause health, climate, and other environmental damage, increasing health insurance costs, health effects, and taxes for all of us. By first eliminating such subsidies and second, instituting a revenue-neutral carbon and air pollution tax or something similar (a tax on these industries to account for their externality costs to society, where the proceeds are used to subsidize clean-energy industries — this would shift incentives toward production of clean energy systems with no net individual taxpayer cost.)

The full paper, which Jacobson co-authored with UC Davis professor Mark Delucchi, is published in the journal Energy Policy.

Hear my two-part radio series on wind energy in California, on The California Report. It and all reports in our series, “33 x 20: California’s Clean Power Countdown” are archived on our special series page. “33 x20″ is a collaboration with KQED’s Quest science unit.

By Ruxandra Guidi

The road that takes you from the sleepy town of Boulevard into the path of the Sunrise Powerlink is a dusty, unmarked path that’s a couple of miles long. It ends at a gate without a sign, where a guard stands in the hot midday sun. He knows to keep any unauthorized visitors away; there’s a party going on inside, while the protesters make noise for hours outside.

David Elliott speaks to protesters outside the Sunrise Powerlink headquarters in the town of Boulevard. (Photo: Ruxandra Guidi)

No one yet knows what the Sunrise Powerlink will end up looking like, and at what cost — and that’s just two of the main issues people have with it. Opponents of the giant network of powerlines, towers, and substations, say it will run for 120 miles, through delicate ecosystems and fire-prone areas. Its impact on local residents and wildlife will be irreparable.

On the other hand, SDG&E says its “superhighway” for transporting electrons from remote solar and wind farms to coastal population centers, will respect state and federal lands and go around delicate areas of the desert; that it will generate much-needed jobs while meeting state goals for green energy development. In the process, the California Imperial Valley is being touted as a so-called “mega-region;” a showcase for clean energy production.

But David Elliott sees both sides of this picture with a heavy dose of skepticism. He lives in the mountains north of Boulevard, and belongs to the Manzanita band of the Kumeyaay Nation, a native community whose history and culture is rooted in the desert lands of California, Arizona, and Northern Mexico.

“We’ve been asked to survey thousands of acres that would fall within the Powerlink network,” says Elliott. “We’ve asked SDG&E and its contractors: ‘Where’s the footprint for the proposed towers or lines or roads?’ When we ask that question, they tell us, ‘I don’t know’.”

Despite the fact that no one can yet predict the actual size of the powerline, Elliott believes it is possible to gauge its impact on wildlife and the landscape. But what about the project’s impact on California history? The Kumeyaay and Quechan tribes, among others, know that there are thousands of burial artifacts that have remained undisturbed for generations underground, and they say that federal agencies have given the Powerlink permission to move ahead with construction plans, without proper consultation.

Outside the groundbreaking ceremony, David Elliott was one of two tribal members who showed up to protest the project. This just days after a different group of Native American tribes gained national attention when President Barack Obama settled a historic lawsuit with them, filed by their parents and grandparents 15 years ago. The settlement wasn’t over land or artifacts, but over royalties for oil, gas, grazing and timber rights. Elliott thought about the significance of this news, and saw it, too, with some degree of doubt.

“All the resources that have been extracted from Native American lands over hundreds of years; there’s no amount of money that the government can give to those people, our people, or certain individuals, that would ever be able to repay what they’ve taken out,” said Elliott.