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Clearing Up the Record on Solar Energy on Public Lands

2012-02-10T22:05:25Z

Johanna Wald, Senior Attorney, San Francisco

This week, Los Angeles Times published the first article of a long-awaited series about the impacts of large scale-solar projects on the Mojave Desert. Unfortunately, the first story failed to provide a fully accurate picture of the reality and efforts underway to ensure we have a robust and successful national solar program.

As I have discussed in my blogs, I’ve spent my entire career – almost 40 years – protecting America’s public lands. My mission at NRDC was straightforward: to preserve our forests and rangelands, wilderness areas, wetlands, free-flowing rivers and beaches from destructive activities such as coal mining, oil and gas drilling, road construction and other commercial development. But our changing climate is changing everything, including our conservation goals. We are faced with hard choices. Those choices entail trade-offs, but I have confidence we’re going to be able to strike the right balance.

About three years ago, I learned two things: The first one was that climate change was already having real impacts on the lands and resources that I have been working for so long to protect, and the second was that that there were more than 100 pending applications for renewable energy projects, both wind and solar, in areas of California that I had devoted a lot of time and effort to protecting.

And I had an epiphany – I realized that everything that I had worked for in my career was threatened directly by climate change or by unmanaged renewable energy development. So I switched not only the focus of my work but how I did it in order to facilitate environmentally responsible renewable energy development.

I did it not through litigating but through consensus building efforts, involving conservation groups, utilities and solar energy companies, federal and state regulators and many other stakeholders. And when I saw through those efforts what good could result, I embarked on an exciting and yet challenging undertaking to help develop a robust national solar energy program that would provide a balanced approach to protecting important landscapes and wildlife while helping the solar industry to succeed.

In 2009, the Bureau of Land Management saw a 78 percent increase in applications for solar energy projects on public lands, from 107 to 223 that were pending review, and only 2 projects had progressed to the stage of environmental reviews. Funding made available during this time through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act helped “fast-track” the permitting of nine large-scale solar projects for development on public lands, including BrightSource’s Ivanpah project.

But despite the Los Angeles Times’ suggestion, NRDC was never involved in moving that project forward. Rather, our only engagement was to submit detailed comments to the BLM and to the Interior Department in the public review process before the agencies made their final decision on permitting it. (See full comments here).

It is true that many of the first projects that came out of the gate, Ivanpah included, raised serious concerns about the immediate and long-term environmental impacts on public lands, wildlife and other natural resources. Here are some reasons why this happened:

In the absence of any policy or guidance from the BLM as to what were appropriate sites for solar development, companies got a free hand in selecting the sites they wanted to develop on public lands
The selection process for these sites unfortunately didn’t incorporate environmental and cultural heritage considerations – something that Interior, BLM, environmental and conservation groups and many other stakeholders have been working to ensure are an underlying aspect of the siting process going forward
BLM had no history of dealing with this new type of energy resource, which is very different than oil and gas. On the contrary, the agency had little expertise in permitting these types of projects
Insufficient and inconsistent environmental reviews at the front end of the planning process and major investments by solar developers made it difficult to ”fix” these projects and in many cases resulted in costly modifications to lessen some of their impacts

The Los Angeles Times comparison of solar to oil and gas development on public lands is also misreported as is the important progress by Interior and BLM in prioritizing environmentally responsible development on public lands. In fact, my colleague Jessica Goad from the Center of American Progress has detailed in a blog some of the key facts that the article overlooked. Here’s a summary from her excellent post:

The 21 million acres is the amount of public land that could be made available to solar energy development in six western states – AZ, CA, CO, NV UT, NM – rather than the amount that will be eventually leased. These preselected lands have the fewest environmental conflicts and high solar potential
Of the 21 million acres of land that BLM proposed to make available for solar projects, Interior announced in October 2011, in response to more than 100,000 public comments, that it would give incentives and preference to projects sited within 285,000 acres of ‘solar energy zones’
All in all, 7 solar projects were given the green light on public lands in California as of the end of 2011, totaling approximately 28,000 acres. And an Interior Department analysis suggests that the most solar that would likely be developed on BLM land in six western states over the next 20 years is 214,000 acres
In a report released in May 2011, the Interior stated that, “currently, 38.2 million acres of public lands are under lease for oil and gas development, of which 16.6 million acres are active and 21.6 million acres are inactive”
According to a Wilderness Society analysis, over 50 million acres of public lands are already available to oil and gas in five states – CO, NM, MT, UT, WY

While some have called for a complete ban on large scale solar projects on public lands in favor of deployment of much smaller power generation options such as rooftop solar, the reality is that small-scale generation, by itself, even with an aggressive target, is not sufficient.

NRDC’s detailed analyses of this issue have revealed that along with greatly increased energy efficiency, energy conservation and roof-tops and other important measures, we need large scale projects to meet our climate goals. Even though we need large scale projects, however, we still must make every effort to ensure that these projects are built on appropriate places. Simply put, we need a broad portfolio of solar power projects – big and small, urban and rural, and on appropriate private and public lands – to meet our current climate goals.

Designing a solar program that balances the nation’s need for increasing solar production from public lands and the need to protect the publicly owned resources of those lands is a tall order. We believe that a ‘solar energy zones’ approach – which the Interior Department recently endorsed – is the right way to go.

Interior’s solar zones based approach would guide solar projects to the appropriate places – areas with high solar potential – helping minimize impacts to wildlife and sensitive lands while reducing risk and uncertainty for investors. A solar program like the one Interior has proposed is a major step toward achieving the right balance, and we look forward to continue working with Interior and the BLM, conservation groups, the solar industry and utilities to develop a strong and comprehensive final program.

The planet is changing and we must change with it. The traditional conventions –including some traditional conventions of the environmental community – must yield to the new realities. Our greatest challenge today is to make the hard choices that will provide the greatest environmental benefit for all and result in the fewest impacts to wildlife and wild lands.

Moving Forward with a Balanced Approach to Solar Development on Public Lands

2011-10-24T21:50:39Z

Johanna Wald, Senior Attorney, San Francisco

Secretary of Interior Department Ken Salazar this week is expected to announce an important milestone towards adopting a program for managing solar energy development on public lands in the West. The Department Interior and the Bureau of Land Management will publish a supplemental to their draft Solar Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS), which was released for public comment in December 2010. For more than a year now, NRDC has been working closely with renewable industry representatives as well other environmental groups and Interior and BLM to achieve a balanced and environmentally responsible approach to solar development that we need to meet the challenge of climate change.

To NRDC, responsible renewable energy development means Interior needs to establish a program that is based on guiding solar development to appropriate places – places with high quality solar resources, low natural resource conflicts and the needed infrastructure in place or planned, rather than permitting solar projects – typically thousands of acres in size – to be strewn sporadically across our public lands.

Guiding development to appropriate areas or “solar zones” will clearly benefit the environment by minimizing development impacts. But it will also benefit the solar industry too. Identifying appropriate areas in advance will help minimize the controversies that have surrounded many of the first “fast track” solar projects Interior permitted on the public lands in the past year. By locating projects in less controversial areas, permitting and construction of projects will happen faster and developers’ ability to get financing for projects will be enhanced. Pre-identified zones will allow transmission planning for renewables to be more strategic and expedited, also reducing costs and impacts associated with such development. A zone-based approach will give developers more certainty for their projects and support the sustainable growth of the nascent solar industry. And most importantly, sustained growth of the solar industry and speedier construction of solar projects will enable us to mount a measurable and meaningful response to climate change.

Of course, identifying solar zones is not enough to build a comprehensive solar program. We need Interior and BLM to establish a program that balances the nation’s need for development of solar energy with the protection of the public lands and wildlife. Other key elements of such a program should include a process for adding new zones when the need arises and some limited flexibility to build projects outside of zones, including both new and pending proposals, given that the impacts of building outside pre-selected zones will be greater. But zones are absolutely key – they are the foundation for building a national program that’s “Smart from the Start.”

Solar generation at the utility-scale level represents a new paradigm for how this nation can generate electricity—all the more reason to establish a system that is based on lessons learned and that does not repeat the mistakes of the past that have allowed largely unrestricted development of fossil fuels on our public lands. We are at a unique crossroads for the management of public lands, in that we have the opportunity to create a program that prioritizes the siting of energy projects in appropriate areas, while also committing to minimize the impacts of these types of projects on our nation’s public lands. So that’s why after DOI releases its supplemental PEIS this week, the first thing we’ll be looking at in our review is what they say about zones. As Interior and BLM take this next step in building a balanced solar program, we are committed to continuing to work with both DOI and BLM, and the solar industry to make sure that this new solar program meets our shared goals for smart and efficient siting and permitting, protection of unique and sensitive natural resources, and getting renewable energy online faster to combat climate challenge and move forward with building a clean energy economy.

Interior Must Improve Permitting Process so Development Goes Ahead in the Right Places

2011-01-21T19:11:37Z

Johanna Wald, Senior Attorney, San Francisco

As my colleague, Leila Monroe of NRDC’s Oceans Program has blogged, the Interior Department has been very busy recently when it comes to renewable energy – both on and offshore. Earlier this week, Secretary Ken Salazar was blogging about the solar projects and megawatts (MW) his Department had permitted on public lands in the West. This news update and the fact that Secretary Salazar was blogging inspired me to write this post.

The Department and its Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have indeed set records – both in the absolute number of MWs permitted as well as the size of the approved projects. We are moving into a new era of energy production on public lands and indeed throughout the country. This new era brings many changes for folks like me who have worked on public lands issues their whole careers. We no longer have the luxury of picking between the obvious good and unmitigated evil. We are faced with hard choices, and those choices entail trade-offs. Our challenge today is to make the choices that provide the greatest environmental benefit in addressing climate challenge and result in the least possible environmental impact.

That said, it is clear to us that the permitting process for these renewable projects needs improvement so that we limit development to appropriate areas. The good news is that a consensus is emerging not only that improvements are needed, but what some of those improvements are at least for the short term, i.e., for projects permitted this year.

Late last year, the California Desert and Renewable Energy Working Group (CDREWG), a unique collaboration of environmental, renewable industry and utility representatives that NRDC was a founding member of, sent the Secretary a suite of recommendations for improving the permitting process in 2011. Earlier this month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 also submitted some recommendations. Both sets of recommendations include the following two key points:

That the Secretary adopt screening criteria to identify the projects for processing in 2011 that have the greatest technical and financial viability and the fewest environmental conflicts, i.e., projects that are likely to be permitted and built with a minimum of time and controversy.
That the quality and consistency of environmental review documents be improved.

The CDREWG also recommended that the Secretary:

Ensure early and ongoing input from stakeholders, including input into screening of 2011 projects.
Reduce speculative applications.
Improve coordination within and between state and federal agencies.

The adoption of these recommendations will help improve the permitting of individual projects. But for the longer term, the Interior Department and BLM must stop trying to generate renewable energy on a project by project basis. This is the approach they have taken up until now and is the same approach as that taken by the BLM’s oil and gas program – an approach that has caused extensive environmental damage, extensive controversy and extensive litigation in the Intermountain West. Rather than allowing renewable energy companies to identify the sites for their projects, we need the BLM to designate appropriate areas – renewable energy development zones – and then restrict development to those zones.

This approach will have multiple benefits: it will allow the agency to focus its resources on the low conflict places, provide certainty to developers and, last but not least, minimize the impacts of development. Directing development to zones will limit the proliferation of projects across the landscape, minimize the development footprint and reduce the need for new transmission and infrastructure.

This very approach was included as an option in the draft programmatic solar environmental impact statement that the Interior Department and BLM released in December 2010. The bad news is that it wasn’t their preferred option – which is to open 22 million acres, including the proposed zones, to potential solar development. During the comment period which ends March 17th, NRDC and our partners will be working extremely hard to convince the Interior Department that the “zone only option” is the key to doing solar development right.

NRDC approves first solar project: Lucerne Valley Project

2010-08-17T16:40:17Z

Johanna Wald, Senior Attorney, San Francisco

We share exciting news this week as environmental groups, including NRDC, support our first utility scale solar energy project – the Lucerne Valley Solar Project near Victorville in San Bernardino County. This is the first solar power project, and the second renewable energy project that we believe strikes the balance between meeting our clean energy needs and protecting important resources on our public lands – the first was the transmission line that will bring renewable resources from the east Mojave desert to the Los Angeles metro area along the Interstate 10 corridor.

The Lucerne Valley project cleared its final environmental review on Friday, and the pay-off in renewable energy and jobs will be significant. When completed, according to the project proponent, the Lucerne Valley complex will generate 45 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply 20,000 California homes with clean, renewable power. And along with the electricity, it will also generate jobs. San Bernardino County has been hit especially hard by the recession. Property values have plummeted, and unemployment exceeds 14 percent. The Lucerne Valley Solar Project will provide a big boost to the local economy during the construction phase, maintain a respectable permanent payroll during its operation and contribute substantially to the local economy.

There’re also some things the project won’t do: it won’t spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like coal or gas-fired power plants. And unlike nuclear power plants, it won’t produce lethal radioactive waste.

But no project is without impacts including this one. The project will cover 516 acres – that’s 516 acres that will be devoted just to this use. It’s possible for wildlife habitat to coexist with certain farming or ranching uses – even in some timber or oil and gas operations. Unfortunately, that’s almost never the case with large solar projects. They are, in every sense, industrial sites. Virtually all the space is taken up by solar panels or supporting infrastructure; there’s simply no room for habitat.

However, the site fulfills most of our criteria for a responsibly sited solar project. It has low wildlife and scenic values. It contains no designated critical habitat for listed species and no special management areas. Though it is undeveloped, it contains some disturbed land. It supports several old buildings, as well as graded roads. Mineral exploration has been conducted on the parcel. It is relatively close to an urbanized area and it is located in a Bureau of Land Management-designated development corridor. With or without the solar project, this land has been approved for some kind of intensive use. And, the BLM, in response to public comment, adopted measures to minimize the project’s impacts for nearby residents and visitors.

We need to move toward the construction of an energy infrastructure that is sustainable and clean, and helps us build a clean energy economy. The Lucerne Valley project puts us on that path.

Hard Choices and Trade-Offs

2010-07-28T17:47:34Z

Johanna Wald, Senior Attorney, San Francisco

Is there any word more laden with catch phrases than “change?” We are told it is inevitable. That it is necessary. That it is hard. All this smacks of cliché, of course—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

We are now seeing change manifested on the global scale: the planet’s climate is changing, driven by emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This change is inflicting severe stresses on human communities and natural ecosystems; addressing it will demand a tremendous commitment in both political will and economic resources.

That will require changes in human behavior. I’m not just talking about the way we consume or drive – I’m also talking about the way we view conservation, about balancing environmental goals that could well conflict with one another.

I am now experiencing the stresses associated with change on a professional level. I’ve spent my entire career – more than 30 years – as an NRDC attorney whose passion is protecting America’s public lands. My mission was straightforward: to preserve our forests and rangelands, wilderness areas, wetlands, free-flowing rivers and beaches from destructive activities such as coal mining, oil and gas drilling, road construction and commercial development. The work was gratifying. My colleagues and I had clear goals, and we pursued them relentlessly. We had some setbacks, but we also had many victories.

But our changing climate is changing everything, including conservation goals. We no longer have the luxury of picking between the obvious good and unmitigated evil. We are faced with hard choices, and those choices entail trade-offs. Our challenge today is to make the choices that provide the greatest environmental benefit and result in the least possible environmental impact.

It is increasingly clear that we must greatly reduce the burning of fossil fuels if we are to ameliorate the effects of climate change and avoid associated catastrophes such as the Deepwater Horizon oil blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico. Energy conservation must be at the vanguard of this strategy – more efficient cars, appliances, factories and lighting fixtures. But energy conservation alone won’t get us through the bottleneck. If we are to make this transition and still maintain a technologically advanced and civil society, we have to develop an alternative energy infrastructure. This will involve multiple approaches. We can’t rely on a single one; we need a diverse portfolio.

Certainly, small-scale local generation – projects that involve solar photovoltaic panels and thermal collectors on city rooftops – will be part of the solution. But we also need large projects. And in the case of utility-scale solar and wind projects, they will be very large indeed, involving thousands of acres. There can be no real multiple-use scenarios for such sites. Certain types of agriculture – even oil or gas extraction – can include wildlife habitat if properly planned. This generally is not the case for utility-scale solar projects. The land typically must be graded, and the solar arrays packed closely together. Electricity generation is the sole benefit of such projects. Wherever they are located, they will be industrial zones – without, to be sure, any accompanying air pollution. There will be other major land-use impacts resulting from the transmission lines that link these projects with the cities where the electricity is needed.

It is therefore essential that we site these projects with the greatest possible care. And clearly, some areas are better than others. As an example, a good choice for large solar arrays may be retired agricultural lands of the western San Joaquin Valley. Some of these lands are tainted with salt and selenium, and are no longer suitable for crop production. Their potential for wildlife habitat is marginal at best. Lands already exploited for fossil fuels are also good candidates for alternative energy projects.

Some sites, however, must be sacrosanct – off-limits to energy development under any circumstances. These include our national parks and reserves, wilderness areas and roadless areas, and unique and sensitive wildlife areas. We must also establish and protect corridors that link these priceless national treasures to maintain their ecological resilience and stability. We have done our utmost to protect our public lands from helter-skelter fossil fuel development, and we have to do the same to ensure they are protected from unwise renewable energy schemes.

But we must also move ahead with ambitious renewable energy projects as well as energy conservation, energy efficiency and other measures. We face many difficult decisions, but we will have to pick among them as wisely as we can. There is no reasonable alternative. As the planet changes, we must change with it. The traditional conventions – and those include some traditional conventions of the conservation community – must yield to the new realities.

Transmission Planning Must be Improved

2009-05-04T17:08:23Z

Johanna Wald, Senior Attorney, San Francisco

On February 7, 2009, the New York Times carried a story on the obstacles facing new transmission lines. According to the story, the Interior Department took a year to approve one line "crossing a wild river and required a $5 million contribution to a national park." That one year delay raised the costs of the line in question by an additional $12 million.

I am not familiar with the line described in this story but I assume that the river in question was a congressionally designated Wild and Scenic River. If so, I am not surprised that the permit process took a year to complete and the transmission company shouldn't have been either. Proposing something as intrusive as a transmission line in such an area is virtually guaranteed to take a long time to approve.

Case in point: the Sunrise Powerlink. The route of this transmission line, ostensibly to bring renewable power from Imperial County to San Diego, originally ran right through Anza-Borrego State Park, California's largest state park, and through part of the state-designated wilderness area in that park, also the state's largest wilderness area. At first the proponent, a utility company, insisted that there were no alternatives to that original route. Then they said that, while there were some alternatives, all of them too involved going through Anza-Borrego. After approximately two years the permitting agencies, which included the Department of the Interior, approved an alternative route that they -- not the utility -- had identified. This route did not go near the park and had fewer environmental impacts.

The Sunrise Powerlink is a perfect example of why transmission planning needs to be done differently than it has been done in the past. Working hard from the beginning to identify a route that has minimal conflicts maximizes the chance that the permitting process will proceed with minimal delay and controversy. In contrast, selection of a route like the original Sunrise Powerlink guarantees both controversy and delay.

Development of our Google Earth layer is one of the things NRDC is doing to help avoid future Sunrise Powerlinks. We believe that new transmission will be necessary to access the renewable energy we need to help save the planet, but like everything else, the new lines must be done right.

Developing New Energy Right

2009-04-27T19:07:58Z

Johanna Wald, Senior Attorney, San Francisco

The West's renewable energy resource potential is huge. According to the Western Electricity Coordinating Council the wind potential alone exceeds the total U.S. energy demand. According to National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the solar potential of the southwest is more than six times the country's energy demand. In my home state of California, after the great bulk of sensitive lands were accounted for, our renewable potential was some 500,000 MW, an order of magnitude greater than our peak demand. If military reservations were counted in this calculation, the number would be even greater.

What's so important about these numbers? They mean that we have enough renewable resources to do their development and any needed transmission right!

More specifically, they mean that we don't need to look to places with unique and sensitive resources to site renewables generation projects. We can avoid those places - many of which have been identified by land managers and/or legislators at both the state and federal level - and look instead for areas where development would pose fewer conflicts. And, we can think about transmission when we are identifying those renewable areas, to avoid situations in which proponents of a new line asserts that it "must" go through a protected place in order to access renewables.

NRDC's new Google Earth layer is designed specifically to help identify places where development isn't appropriate as a first and necessary step towards identifying where it is. We need to develop our renewable resources if we are to address the challenge of climate change, but that development must be carried out in an environmentally responsible way. If it is done right, informed environmentalists will, I believe, stand up in support.

Siting Decisions Will Require Still More Information

2009-04-22T16:18:34Z

Johanna Wald, Senior Attorney, San Francisco

NRDC's new Google Earth layer does an unprecedented job of identifying places where renewable energy development is inappropriate. But it's important to recognize the limitations of what we've done. We have not - I repeat not - greenlighted any lands for development. While we've taken some lands off the table, we are not saying that those that remain are places where development should occur. Why? There are three main reasons.

First, determining whether development of a particular area is appropriate requires more resource information than we presently have. This is particularly true of wildlife information. Our Google layer has very little such information because it is currently unavailable - at least in GIS form. Neither generation projects nor transmission lines can be sited without knowledge of where endangered, threatened and rare species can be found, and where their habitat areas are, including key areas essential to their survival, like migration corridors. We hope to add more such data to our map in the future but, even after we do, that won't be enough.

Second, decisions about whether a particular area is appropriate for development need to be made in a public and transparent process, in which wildlife experts, local residents and a host of others can participate fully.

Lastly, such decisions cannot be made in the absence of thorough environmental review. Renewable energy projects and green transmission lines, just like other energy projects and lines, have undeniable environmental impacts. While we hope to add more information of all kinds, in addition to wildlife data, our map will never substitute for detailed consideration of the resources of a particular area and the potential impacts of development on them.

Ideally, decisions about siting green projects and green lines should be made on a regional basis through a process that not only involves multiple stakeholders and careful environmental review, but also provides a way to compare potential development areas at the landscape level in order to determine which of those areas are best and why. Hopefully our map will help concerned citizens advocate for the initiation of such a process and arm them with information to be effective advocates in it.

Finding Lands to Avoid

2009-04-13T18:02:22Z

Johanna Wald, Senior Attorney, San Francisco

The citizens of this country own millions of acres of land that are managed on our behalf by federal agencies. Millions of other publicly-owned acres are managed by state agencies. The federal lands in particular include places that are world famous - like Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon National Parks. Other places are lesser known but equally spectacular like the California Desert Conservation Area and Anza-Borrego State Park, also in California. Many of these lands and still others are of tremendous ecological significance, including the lands that are key to the survival of innumerable plant and wildlife species.

These unique and sensitive areas have been allocated to a variety of different land systems, each with its own managing agency. At the federal level these systems include, in addition to national parks and national forests, national wildlife refuges and lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, an agency in the Department of the Interior. The acronyms of the management agencies would make a dizzying alphabet soup. And, to make things even more complicated, all of these land systems are subject to different management prescriptions which impose different levels of protection. Under the circumstances, it's probably not that surprising that lots of energy projects, including renewable energy projects, and transmission lines, including lines purportedly for renewable energy, have been proposed for some wildly inappropriate places.

NRDC's brand new interactive mapping tool brings together for the first time ever the federal lands and some state lands in Google Earth format so that anyone and everyone can see where they are. What's more, we've simplified the complex statutory and regulatory schemes that apply to these lands into three categories - lands that are protected from energy development of all kinds, including renewable energy, lands on which energy development will be subject to strict limits, and lands that should be avoided to minimize controversy and speed development of renewables project. Our maps are not complete yet and we are not saying that lands outside these categories are appropriate for development (more about these topics in other posts). Nonetheless, we hope our maps will go a long way toward our goal of helping generation projects and lines get properly sited and impacts to sensitive wildlife and their habitats, vulnerable ecosystems and other unique and sensitive resources minimized.

Finding the Path to Green Energy

2009-04-06T17:01:48Z

Johanna Wald, Senior Attorney, San Francisco

Until recently I've spent my entire career at NRDC - more than 30 years! - advocating for protection of America's public lands from damaging human activities like coal mining, oil and gas drilling, road building and the like. Yet, for almost two years now, I have been hard at work trying to facilitate development of renewable energy resources and needed transmission lines in the West - which necessarily means on public lands. How come this huge change my friends and colleagues are all asking.

The answers are simple - but I'll admit they took a while for me to see them.

Climate change is the biggest challenge facing our planet today. To address that challenge we must access renewable energy resources as well as do all the other things many of my NRDC colleagues have been advocating for decades - like conserve energy and increase energy efficiency. Many of the nation's best renewable resources are located on public lands and hundreds of applications have been filed with federal land managers to build generation facilities to convert those resources to electricity. To convey that electricity to the people who need it will take new transmission lines or at least upgrades in many cases. All of these activities - just like all other forms of energy development - will have environmental impacts. But the thing to understand and remember is that global warming too has environmental impacts and those impacts are being felt right now in our national parks, our national forests and other federal lands. As with the work on energy development I've done in the past, the key is to make sure that these generation projects and any needed transmission are appropriately sited and operated.

The Western United States holds significant sources of renewable energy - solar, wind and geothermal resources. The nation and these states need to develop this energy to solve both the economic crisis and the climate crisis that we now face. But the West is also home to remarkable wilderness and stunning landscapes, diverse wildlife, fragile ecosystems and irreplaceable cultural resources. Finding sites for new renewable energy projects and electricity transmission lines where development will do the least damage to the West's unique and sensitive resources will be a major challenge, but one that can and must be met.

Right now, federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management are developing policies for siting and operating renewable energy projects and transmission lines on federal lands. In some states, there's been a virtual land rush with literally hundreds of applications for large-scale renewables projects, mostly solar, pending before the BLM, and the first environmental reviews of those projects will soon be made public. California and the Western Governors' Association have each instituted multi-stakeholder processes aimed at facilitating renewables development, while eight western states have laws requiring utilities to generate increased amounts of electricity from renewables. To bring this new power to the people who need it, new transmission lines will be needed. Clearly, all this development - while urgently needed to reduce our reliance on electricity generated by fossil fuel, especially coal - will have significant impacts on the lands involved, whether federal, private or state. Equally clearly, some places are better suited than others for renewable projects and new transmission lines.

To help find the balance of meeting our energy needs while protecting sensitive resources, NRDC today launched a brand new Google Earth interactive mapping tool that provides maps of 13 states in the western United States to help environmental activists, transmission planners, renewable energy generators, regulators and others identify areas where land uses, like energy development, are legally restricted. Other data layers highlight areas that should be avoided in energy development, including habitats critically important to wildlife and lands proposed for inclusion in the federal wilderness system. Users exploring specific geographic areas (such as those proposed for energy development) can easily see how little land is legally off-limits as well as many of the other areas with unique and sensitive resources that deserve special protection. With Matthew McKinzie, NRDC's resident GIS genius who actually created this site, I'm going to be blogging about its many features going forward.

Once these unsuitable places are off the table, the task of identifying where renewable development is appropriate can be taken up. With this information, we can work together to make sure renewables development is carried out in an environmentally responsible manner - on non-sensitive, non-controversial places. Avoiding development on sensitive and controversial lands and appropriate areas will help secure widespread support and prompt approval of projects. Going to non-controversial areas will help ensure that renewable resources are brought on line as quickly as possible.