Google announced it would invest $168 million in the project. The Department of Energy announced $1.6 billion loan guarantee. And on Friday, the company announced it plans to go public with a $250 million initial public offering. But a recurring issue has popped up: the desert tortoise.

A Mojave desert tortoise. (Image: USGS)

“It’s an endangered species. No project that is sited out there in within their habitat can negatively impact the population,” says Erin Curtis, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management. As anyone following the battles over solar farms knows, prime desert tortoise habitat also happens to be prime solar territory and has been targeted by a number of proposed solar farms.

BrightSource Energy agreed to mitigate the impacts their solar farm would have on the tortoises by capturing and relocating them to new habitat. Fences are being constructed to prevent the tortoises from returning.

In all, biologists are allowed to relocate or handle 38 tortoises over the lifetime of the project. But they’ve been finding more tortoises than expected and have already hit that limit.

“Therefore we needed to suspend activities so we didn’t touch another tortoise until we have a new biological opinion. You’re trying to manage wild animals and they don’t act in a predictable fashion. It’s adaptive management and we learn new things all the time,” says Curtis.

BLM has shut down construction on two sections of the solar thermal farm, until the Fish and Wildlife Service can issue a new decision on how many tortoises are in the area and where they could be relocated to. Biologists are now estimating that roughly 140 tortoises could live in the 3,500 acre project footprint.

That decision is expected to take three to four months and surveys are currently underway. BrightSource Energy has said they don’t expect the solar farm to be delayed.

Climate change is threatening the Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Park all right, according to a new report. But unlike the findings of recently-published study,  this report finds the park’s iconic, spiky namesake is unlikely to completely vacate the premises over the next century.

The new report was funded in part by Joshua Tree National Park, and its author Cameron Barrows, a researcher at UC Riverside’s Center for Conservation Biology, says that he conducted it partly in response to the recent study by Ken Cole of the USGS, which found that the trees would likely be gone from the park within the next 90 years.

“I facetiously say if that was to happen, we’d have to rename the park ‘Creosote Bush National Park’ or something like that,” said Barrows.  “It would be really sad if that’s the case.”

Barrows’s study looked up-close at the park itself, rather than the entire Joshua tree range, using both computer models and on-the-ground fieldwork.  He says that there are pockets of the park, at high elevations and in shaded canyons, where the trees could persist even in the face of significant environmental changes.

“If you look at it from the satellite view, you’re going to lose them,” he said. “But if you’re standing on the ground and looking at these canyons and the very diverse topography of the park, there are places where it looks like the trees will be able to maintain themselves.”

Barrows projects that a 3-4 degree F rise in temperature would shrink the range of Joshua trees in park substantially at lower elevations, but that they’d continue to thrive in higher elevation areas of the park. With a increase of more than 5 degrees, however, he said, the area where the trees could persist shrinks to the size of “about a couple of football fields.”

In the last decade, he said, temperatures in the park have increased close to 2 degrees F.  To test the effects of this warming, Barrows said he sent out teams of citizen scientists with the mission to find the smallest (and therefore youngest) Joshua trees they could.  This way, he could analyze where the trees have been reproducing over the last decade

“We found, in fact, that we’re already seeing the signature of climate change,” he said. “The distribution of the young trees is much smaller than that of the adult trees.  There’s no Joshua tree reproduction occurring right along the southern edge of its current distribution.”

The story is not just one of temperature. According to Barrows, precipitation plays an even more important role in the survival of Joshua trees. And precipitation is one of climate change’s great wild cards.

“The climate models are really pretty robust when it comes to temperature, but they are really not robust at all – the opposite of robust, really – when it comes to precipitation,” said Barrows.  “The only thing they agree on is its going to get more variable.”

He said the last decade has seen four of the park’s six wettest years and two of the park’s driest.  He takes that high variability as an indication that the park is likely already seeing the effects of climate change.

“What is going to kill the baby Joshua trees are these pulses of droughts,” he said.

But with increasing variability, those dry years could likely be followed by some wet ones, when reproduction could occur again, he said.

Even so, it seems that increased variability could make adolescence harder on Joshua trees than it was for their ancestors: Barrows says it takes between 50 and 100 years for a Joshua tree to reach reproductive age.

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.

A misty Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park; metaphor for the park's murky future? (Photo: Craig Miller)

Last month, in a post from Glacier National Park, I noted that Park Service director Jon Jarvis was not in a mood to mince words, calling climate change “the greatest threat to the integrity of the national park system that we’ve ever faced.”

That assertion was underscored last week in a new report on potential impacts to the parks from climate change. The collaboration by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, attempted to zoom in on specific parks and projected changes ahead for ten national parks in California, as well as impacts on the state’s economy.

Death Valley is already the hottest spot in North America. The highest recorded temperature there is 136 dF. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Some conclusions under a “medium-to-high” emissions scenario, toward the end of this century: Higher temperatures in Joshua Tree National Park would mean the end of, well, Joshua trees in the park. Muir Woods could be as warm, on average, as San Diego has been historically, making it less hospitable to the park’s legendary coast redwoods. Death Valley, already the hottest spot on the continent, could become virtually uninhabitable during the summer, as average temperatures rise by more than eight degrees, Fahrenheit, over average readings from 1961 to 1990.

And of course, for Montana’s Glacier National Park, the report’s authors cite projections that the last of the park’s glaciers will be gone within 20 years, if not sooner.

This is, perhaps, a good place to pass along a favorite mantra of park rangers of late; that Glacier park wasn’t actually named for its glaciers, but for the geologic history that formed the region’s spectacular features. But it’s logical that Glacier, tucked into the northwestern corner of Montana, has become the “poster child” of climate change in the national parks. Scientists estimate that its 25 remaining glaciers could well be gone in a dozen years or so. Superintendent Chas Cartwright conceded that may be a small part of why Glacier is seeing record numbers of visitors — more than two million this year, which is the park’s centennial.

“Glacier isn’t the only place we’re seeing direct effects from climate change on the ground, right now,” Jarvis said, standing on a gravel bar in McDonald Creek. The parks chief cited apparent climate effects throughout the park system, including receding glaciers, withering water content in the mountain snowpack, and rain-on-snow events shifting from spring to fall. “That completely changes the system,” said Jarvis, who said they’re also seeing wildland fires burning an average of 20 days longer into the season, encroachment of more exotic plants, and species moving up in elevation or vanishing from the landscape entirely. “We’re not just gonna sit around and not do anything about it.”

The question is what to do about it, which presents some unprecedented dilemmas for park managers and scientists, which, Jarvis says, are “causing us to rethink even the fundamental principles of national parks.” Where as in years past, for example, new species moving into a park were looked upon as invaders to be dealt with inhospitably, now “they may be coming in because this is their last refuge.”

Accommodating migrating species is one thing. But also on the table is direct, possibly radical intervention to save others. Jarvis recounts the time when a park scientist asked him, sardonically, “When do you put a sprinkler system on the giant sequoias?” Jarvis asks rhetorically, “Where is the next habitat for the giant sequoia and are we as a society willing to move them, or plant them (somewhere else)? “The biggest step in climate change is starting to ask those kinds of questions and to bring the very best minds to help us begin to wrestle with those as a society.”

To this end, Jarvis is advancing a strategy with four key components:

- Expand the science and develop long-term data sets

- Embrace adaptation and multiple-scenario planning “at the landscape scale”

- Continue mitigation efforts, reducing the carbon footprint of the parks themselves

- Communication, leveraging the “extraordinary bully pulpit” that the parks provide, training scientists to speak to the layman, seizing opportunities to talk to the public about climate change.

Park managers worry about the "downstream" impacts of vanishing glaciers. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Jack Potter, who directs science at Glacier, reinforced that this isn’t just tomorrow’s problem. He noted that spring “green-up” is occurring about three weeks ahead of the 40-year average at Glacier, which means that the landscape is drying out sooner in the season. “No matter what scenario you look at, it’s going to be drier,” said Potter, pointing toward distant mountain snowfields. “That has all kinds of cascading effects downstream.”

Potter said park managers are being forced to re-examine “the role of parks as reservoirs for biodiversity” and “how we view the type of appropriate management…in the face of the possible scenarios that are out there relating to climate.”

To read about another challenge facing the parks, see Lauren Sommer’s story on air pollution impacts at Yosemite.

National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis at McDonald Creek, Glacier National Park (Photo: Craig Miller)

Jarvis made the comment yesterday while touring Glacier National Park in Montana, with members of the Society of Environmental Journalists. “Renewables do not get a free ride,” said Jarvis, when asked about how the parks would treat development of renewable energy sources on park property.

Using the backdrop of Glacier National Park, where the remaining 25 glaciers (out of an estimated 150) are expected to disappear by 2030, Jarvis called climate change the most serious threat ever posed to the integrity of the park system.

But Jarvis said the Service is “struggling” internally with issues like the visual impact of large solar arrays, which can also be large water consumers. “Frankly, it’s a conundrum for us,” he said, because often the alternative is large coal-fired power plants, emissions from which degrade air quality and visibility.”We don’t want to stand up and say we’re against all forms of renewable energy that you can see from a national park,” said Jarvis. “But we do believe that it can be mitigated in some ways.”

Jarvis cited original proposals that included running electrical transmission lines through Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California. “We were very successful in pushing every one of those out,” said Jarvis, noting that pre-existing transmission lines still transit Lake Mead National Recreation Area, near Las Vegas. “There are challenges,” said Jarvis, “But I think the key is active early engagement.”

At the same time, Jarvis said the Park Service is on an aggressive path to reducing its own carbon footprint, conducting a series of reviews that he said should be completed in 2012. He said all new buildings will comply with at least the LEED “silver” rating for sustainable construction, established by the US Green Building Council, and noted that at Joshua Tree National Park in southern California the Service is producing 60% of its power from solar panels. But, said Jarvis, “You really don’t want to put a large solar array in Glacier National Park.”

Jarvis is a survivor, having come up through the ranks to head the Park Service and locked horns with California Senator Dianne Feinstein over oyster farming near the Point Reyes National Seashore.

The federal Bureau of Land Management today issued its first approvals of major solar energy projects in California.

The Tessera project will use "SunCatchers" to concentrate solar power. (Image: Tessera Solar)

Tessera Energy’s 700-megawatt Ocotillo project, located in the Imperial Valley, about 100 miles east of San Diego, and a smaller photovoltaic (PV) project by San Ramon-based Chevron Corp., are both cleared to go forward.

The two projects set a precedent not just for California. On a call with reporters this morning, Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar called it a “historic day,” saying the two projects “bear the distinction of being the first large-scale solar energy projects ever approved for construction on our nation’s public lands.”

For projects being developed on federal land, BLM approval is the final hurdle before construction can begin. Big solar-thermal projects, which concentrate the Sun’s energy to make steam, also require approval from the California Energy Commission (photovoltaic projects, like the Chevron array, are under the eyes of the state’s Pubic Utilities Commission and county governments). State energy commissioners have approved seven major solar installations in the California desert since July. Several of these are still pending BLM approval.

BLM director Robert Abbey uses the catch phrase “smart from the start” to describe his agency’s new approach to site permitting, which he calls “streamlined without cutting corners.” Abbey says the Bureau is still sifting through a backlog of 180 pending applications, nationwide.  He said his agency manages about 23 million acres “with solar potential,” across several western states, about half of that in California.

The Tessera project, shown in some CEC filings as SES Solar Two, could deliver more than 700 megawatts of solar-thermal power when completed late next year. It will occupy more than 6,000 acres of BLM land, and a few hundred acres of adjacent private land. Chevron’s Lucerne Valley project is significantly smaller, rated at 45 megawatts, with a footprint of about 400 acres in the Lucerne Valley of San Bernardino County.

Asked about opposition from environmentalists, Salazar said the projects had won support from several major organizations, including Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

In a press release, NRDC attorney Johanna Wald wrote that: “the process provided valuable lessons that careful planning, siting and designing up front will lead to renewable projects that are smart from the start.”

Salazar told reporters that transmission lines are already available for all of the Chevron project’s output and a little less than half the expected output from Ocotillo, and that he looks forward to seeing “thousands of megawatts of renewable energy sprouting” over the next few years.

At solar-thermal plants, mirrors concentrate solar energy on a central tower, where steam is generated to run turbines. (Image: BrightSource Energy)

Prepare for a solar building boom in the deserts of Southern California. After spending years in the environmental review process and clearing other bureaucratic hurdles, approvals for clean energy producers are picking up steam.

State regulators have now given the green light to four major solar power projects in as many weeks. The most recent was on Wednesday, when the California Energy Commission gave the nod to a 370-megawatt solar-thermal array known as the Ivanpah project (the CEC does not have authority over photovoltaic or “PV” solar arrays). Developed by Oakland-based BrightSource Energy and built by Bechtel Corp., it will consume more than 3,500 acres near the California-Nevada border, in the northern Mojave Desert.

In recent weeks the CEC has also approved applications for three other projects in Kern, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. The four projects combined will be rated to deliver almost 1,900 megawatts of power, or the equivalent of two typical commercial nuclear reactors (an important distinction being that nukes run 24/7, while solar plants generate power about 14 hours a day). Projects representing about 1,000 more MW of solar-thermal energy come up for final decision before the end of the month.

BrightSource CEO John Woolard told me that after more than three years in the review process, the wait was worth it.

“Ultimately I think the process works,” Woolard told me in a brief interview after the CEC’s approval of Ivanpah. “Hopefully it’ll work faster or more expeditiously for people behind us. But I can tell you that it’s the most through and complete process I’ve ever gone through.”

Not thorough enough for some environmental groups, it would seem. At the final hearing, Eileen Anderson of the Center for Biological Diversity called it “a sad day.” Her ally Barbara Boyle, at the Sierra Club, agreed.

“We’ve been spending countless hours meeting with developers and with the agencies to try and site these projects right,” Boyle told me.
“We’re working real hard to make that process better in the future but for right now we have quite a few projects that are going to have serious local impacts and it’s disappointing,” she said. Boyle said she thought environmentalists had a deal with BrightSource to shift some of the solar arrays away from sensitive habitat for rare plants and the threatened desert tortoise–but were disappointed that the company didn’t change its original layout after all (though at one point in the process the project was downsized by nearly 500 acres).

Energy Commissioner Jeff Byron concedes that Ivanpah will have some “significant impacts” on the environment but that those will be outweighed by the benefits.

“Southern California–the desert, the Mojave, represents the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy,” said Byron. “There’s geothermal, wind and solar there, so–this is a start. It’s a substantial start.”

State regulators are under pressure to meet a goal to get one third of the state’s electricity from renewable sources, within 10 years. The state’s Air Resources Board is likely to issue its own regulation this week, making that goal a legal mandate for utilities.

Well hidden among the coast ranges of San Benito County, there’s a valley where, as one ecologist put it, “the hammer is hitting the anvil.” Mike Westphal of the Bureau of Land Management’s Hollister field office was describing the current tension playing out in Panoche Valley between two environmental goals: the mandate to combat global warming with a transition to renewable energy, and the desire to conserve the habitat of endangered animals, as well as California’s remaining ag land.

Solargen argues that Panoche Valley is a rare combination of great sun, proximity to population centers, and existing transmission lines to get the power there. (Photo: Craig Miller)

As part of our collaborative series: “33 x 20: California’s Clean Power Countdown,” Quest Senior Editor Andrea Kissack and I have been exploring the effort by Solargen Energy to develop Panoche Valley as a utility-scale solar power array (the state defines “utility-scale” as any facility that produces 200 megawatts of electricity or more).

Like many developers, Solargen CEO Mike Peterson is racing to break ground by the end of this year, in order to cash in on up-front stimulus money from the federal government. He says Panoche Valley presents a rare alignment of attributes for solar power: high solar potential (he says 90% of the Mojave), relative proximity to population centers, and existing transmission lines to get the power there. Peterson told me that the lines already in place have enough available capacity to handle his 420 megawatts of solar power, though a spokeswoman for PG&E says that question is still under study.

Meanwhile, some farmers and wildlife advocates have opposed the plan, saying big solar “farms” are better placed on “degraded” land. Ron Garthwaite, who runs Claravale organic dairy, says “This is just not the place to put it. There’s other places which have no ag value and which have less of a natural value where they could put it.”

Standing at the valley's north end, BLM ecologist Mike Westphal points to where 2,000 acres might be covered in PV solar panels. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Westphal, whose agency is not directly involved in assessing the project, sees the valley as a rare microcosm for the once unspoiled habitat of the San Joaquin Valley, just over the hill. “What we really need to think hard about is do we want to risk ecosystems to get energy,” he told me, scanning the valley from Shotgun Pass at the north end.  “That’s what’s going on here in Panoche Valley is we’re making this equation: how much do we want to risk the continued endangerment or extinction of this ecosystem in order to get more energy? That’s the crux of this conflict here.”

In this video clip, BLM ecologist Michael Westphal gives Craig Miller an overview of the valley, looking south from Shotgun Pass.

Solargen is shelling out for a $1.3 million-dollar environmental impact report, which Peterson says does not include measures such as the two dozen biologists and a detachment of scat-sniffing dogs, trained to track down the droppings of other critters for DNA analysis. The results help determine what species are there. Peterson says the total tab in “preparing and preparing for the EIR” now tops $7 million.

In Part 2 of our Panoche Valley “case study,” Andrea Kissack will have a closer look at the wildlife issues. That report runs next Monday, June 28, on Quest Radio.

As for the Governor’s ambitious goal to have renewable energy sources account for one third of the state’s electrical generation by 2020, Peterson describes the process as “surprisingly harder than you would expect.” He says he ponders how to “get this done in a way that is able to meet the mandates, but also be a good steward to the environment, and try to make people happy. And we won’t be able to please everybody.”

He’s right about that. Dairyman Garthwaite says of the state’s quest for renewables: “Just because somebody in Sacramento says something, doesn’t mean that it can happen–or should happen. I mean there’s all kinds of political things involved in that, there’s lobbyists involved in that. People want to make money.”

Climate Watch intern Chris Penalosa mapped some of California’s larger solar projects in development, below.

View Utility Scale Solar Projects in California in a larger map

Historic water marker on the shores of Lake Powell, April 2010 (Photo: Gretchen Weber)

People have been talking about “peak oil” for decades now, debating when oil production will peak and then start to decline as remaining resources become scarcer and harder to access.   Less attention has been given to the idea of “peak water,” which is the subject of a new analysis by the Oakland-based Pacific Institute.  The concepts of peak oil and peak water aren’t entirely analogous for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that, overall, water is a renewable resource.  But there are limits to what water is renewable, and how fast supplies recharge.  While the world is not going to run out of water, the report authors argue, in parts of the world including the southwestern US, we’re likely long past the point of peak water.  That matters a lot, said study co-author Meena Palaniappan, because unlike oil, which is shipped across the world, water is still a local and regional issue.

“We’re not going to run out of water,” said Palaniappan, “but we’re going to see a change.  We’re at the end of cheap, easy access to water.  We’re going to have to go further, pay more, and expect less in terms of fresh water.”

The report divides peak water into three types: peak renewable water, the total annual supply of water from sources such as rainfall, rivers, and groundwater sources that are refilled relatively quickly; peak non-renewable water, which includes groundwater aquifers that either do not refill or do so extremely slowly; and peak ecological water, past which, the value of ecological services provided by water is greater than the value it provides in direct human services.  Or simply, it’s the point where taking water causes more ecological damage than it’s worth.

“The goal is to find the sweet spot, where we can maximize the human value water provides as well as the ecological value,” said Palaniappan.

In the western US, we are definitely past peak ecological water, said Palaniappan.  As evidence of this, she cited the Central Valley aquifer, which is being pumped down far faster than it can recharge and the Colorado River, which supplies Southern California with much of its water, and no longer reaches the ocean most years because every drop of it is appropriated for human use.

Last week, I was in Salt Lake City to talk with Terry Fulp, the Bureau of Reclamation‘s Deputy Regional Director of the Lower Colorado Region.  He said that after 10 years of drought on the Colorado, each of the seven states that draw from it are still getting their allotted water supply, and the reservoirs are about half full.  The Colorado River system, which supplies water to more than 30 million people, has a huge storage capacity, equal to four times the river’s annual flow, Fulp said. But increasing demand due to the drought and to population growth have the Bureau looking ahead at the challenges the system may be facing in the not-too-distant future.

“The supply and demand curves basically have crossed,” said Fulp.  “If you look over the last 100 years, the water supply has been above the demand, but demand has been growing, and essentially, today they have met.  We’re operating on a tight margin, a very tight margin, so the question is about projecting what we think the future will look like twenty years out.”

Like Palaniappan, Fulp says that conservation is critical and may become increasingly so in the near future. But even so, he said he doubts the demand for Colorado River water is going to decrease. The supply may, however.  Long droughts are common in the paleorecord, and water managers are planning for an additional 10-15% reduction in flow due to the effects of climate change.   This matters a great deal in a system where just about every drop is spoken for.  Fulp says that developing methods for accessing new water supplies, such as groundwater and desalinization plants, needs to be central to a long-term water management strategy for the region.

A thermal solar array of the type planned for southern California. Photo: BrightSource Energy

A major hurdle is the permitting process for large “utility-scale” solar and wind installations, described by the Governor’s own senior advisor as “tortuous.” In the months ahead, we’ll take you through some of the obstacle course in a multimedia series called “33 x 20: California’s Clean Power Countdown.” A collaboration of Climate Watch and Quest, KQED’s science and environmental initiative, the series of radio reports and web features explores the promise and pitfalls of the state’s 33 x 20 plan.

The series begins Monday with Lauren Sommer’s review of California’s clean power legacy and an assessment of the present push. Future reports will look at a solar siting case study in central California, as well as prospects for major development of wind and geothermal sources. California currently leads the nation in solar generation but trails Texas and Iowa in the race for wind power. See Lauren’s interactive map for an overview of how California stacks up against other states in its ambitions toward renewable energy.

Future reports will examine the potential impact of large-scale power generation on deserts and tribal lands and the progress toward what some consider the “holy grail” of energy technology; large-scale storage of electricity. In June, Quest Senior Editor Andrea Kissack and I will team up for a kind of case study in one company’s ambitions; the 4,700-acre photovoltaic array planned by Solargen Energy for Panoche Valley in San Benito County.

Northern California listeners can hear the radio series as part of KQED’s Quest radio service (airs Mondays during NPR’s Morning Edition on KQED and KQEI in Sacramento) or statewide on The California Report. You can follow the entire series and see the related web features as they appear on our “33 x 20″ series page.