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.

Field biologists like Mike Sally live a windblown, nomadic lifestyle, surveying sites for renewable energy projects. (Photo: Sarah McBride)

By Sarah McBride

I’ve reported on bubbles in plenty of stocks and commodities, but my springtime visit to the Ivanpah Valley was the first I’d heard anyone talk about a bubble in field biologists. The guy who used those words, Alex Mach, is a field biologist himself — and he was only half kidding.

Mach is one of dozens of field biologists who are out in the desert working to protect threatened animals and plants from solar and wind development projects. They’ve tapped into the rich vein of desert tortoises, whose habitats coincide with many of the areas scientists say are best positioned for solar plants — including Mach’s worksite at the time, BrightSource Energy’s solar plant in Ivanpah Valley, near the California-Nevada border.

Biologists Alex Mach and Molly Thompson in Ivanpah Valley. (Photo: Sarah McBride)

But it’s not just tortoises. Kit foxes, kangaroo rats, and several species of lizards all need monitoring if an alternative-energy plant is headed into their habitats. I visited a small group of field biologists near Mojave, who were surveying to see if the rare Mohave ground squirrel lives on a proposed wind-farm site. (They asked me not to disclose the name of the big wind-energy company, because they didn’t have permission to show a journalist around.) They plan to spend months checking traps stuffed with oats and peanut butter. So far, they’ve found only everyday squirrels.

The work is so attractive the biologists don’t mind spending months at a time living out of their trucks. The paychecks are a factor, but they say the bigger draws are the community, freedom and chance to work outside.

Could Mach be right? Proposed plants are fighting for limited financing, which means we could be living through the field biology equivalent of tulipmania or the tech bubble.  At least your retirement savings likely aren’t invested in desert tortoises.

Sarah McBride is a former freelance journalist, now working for Thomson Reuters. Her companion radio feature to this post airs today on The California Report weekly magazine.

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.

It appears that almost 200,000 acres of Mojave Desert will be under federal wilderness protection now that Congress passed the Omnibus Land Management Act of 2009.

Much more was set aside throughout California, as I report in my radio story for The California Report.

Now, Senator Dianne Feinstein is eyeing almost a million additional acres in the Mojave off of old Route 66 between Ludlow and Needles.

There are currently 163 proposed renewable energy projects for federal lands in the Mojave Desert region. Nineteen of them are slated for the land Senator Feinstein wants to set aside. If energy companies can’t build on that land, it follows that they’ll try to build it in the land that’s left.

And that’s got a lot of people who live in the unprotected areas of the Mojave worried. Not only are most of the state’s large-scale renewable energy projects planned for this region, but as I explored in a recent two-part series for Climate Watch, there’s also a transmission corridor in the works to carry that power to Los Angeles.

Use the player below to listen to my conversation with Jim Harvey, who heads the Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy, about what all of this new land protection means for environmentalists like him.