How and where can solar, wind and geothermal energy facilities be developed on 22 million acres of California desert land with the best protection of and least potential harm to native habitats? Desert Renewables Lives Again discusses the most recent plan to achieve both renewable energy development and conservation.
What is being called the biggest change in the California since the landscape-altering activities of the last century, the The Desert Renewable Energy and Conservation Plan (DRECP) was begun in 2008. The Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) analyzing impacts, mitigations and best land use practices for a large swath of Southern California public land slated for renewable energy development was released on 13 November 2015. The 30-day protest period for stakeholders and conservation groups ends on 14 December 2015, and then a Record of Decision will be issued and Phase 1 concluded (Phase 2 will cover private lands). The complete Phase 1 document can be downloaded here.
Primarily drawn up by the Bureau of Land Management, the document proposes establishing renewable energy Development Focus Areas (DFAs) on 388,000 acres of public land in the California desert. That's around 606 square miles, approximately the size of Los Angeles and Bakersfield combined. . . . only a fraction of that land would actually be developed for solar, wind, or geothermal; the agency estimates that actual proposed projects in the DFAs would cover about 157 square miles, with the permanent disturbance limited to 75 square miles. . . .
The DRECP includes Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), California Energy Commission (CEC), and California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). These agencies are working with other state and federal agencies that manage lands or programs in the desert, or that manage or regulate renewable energy development and transmission. Local governments, environmental organizations, renewable energy developers, utilities, and other interested parties are also participating in the plan’s development
The previous draft version of the DRECP released in 2014 was strongly opposed by environmental scientists because it called for development of two million acres that included a large amount of ecologically important habitats. It was such a massive document that stakeholders and conservation organizations would have been unable to meet the 90 day deadline for comment submission.
The draft DRECP [from 2014] is a mind-bendingly massive and complex document. . . . its six volumes comprise 6,030 pages divided up into 92 separate PDF documents, and that's not including the 24 appendices and a number of GIS map shape files. . . .
It proposes to manage a change in the Californian landscape that rivals some of the largest environmental changes in California in the 19th and 20th centuries, like hydraulic mining, or the plowing of the Central Valley's wetlands and meadows, or the damming of most of the state's major rivers.
The DRECP is so complex that the agencies drafting it ended up blowing their deadline by a bit more than two years.
To read the original document — a requirement for submitting a substantive public comment that meets criteria for consideration in the review process — would have required months of reading.
Ten minutes times ten thousand half-pages works out to just under 70 days of non-stop reading, or 210 days if you spend only eight hours reading a day, breaking to swallow ibuprofen, eat, and have incomprehensibly jargon-rich dreams.
Subsequently, the state and federal agencies responsible for drafting the DRECP decided to release the environmental documents for the 22 million-acre plan area in two phases: Phase 1 covering public lands and Phase 2 covering privately owned lands. It is the Phase 1 FEIS that has just been released.
The Phase 2 document covering private lands has not been finished yet, and reviewers are criticizing the Phase 1 FEIS for not considering the cumulative impacts on public lands from similar development on private lands. The two are being evaluated independently even though they really aren’t separate and the division into two Plans was only to make the information more accessible. The whole 22 million acre project area is a mosaic of public and private lands. Conservation lands and developments will be intermingled across this huge landscape.
Advocates of energy development and environmental conservationists are now reading and evaluating the Phase 1 FEIS, itself a massive document with 300 pages covering just the Preferred Alternative.
Some groups, like Conservation Lands Foundation are pleased with the increased conservation lands identified in the FEIS.
“The Bureau of Land Management has done an outstanding job of identifying key lands in the California desert to add to the National Conservation Lands," said Sam Goldman of the Conservation Lands Foundation. "Places such as the Silurian Valley and Amargosa River Basin in the California desert hold unique plants, animals, and vistas that make them well-deserving of their new status as permanent additions to the National Conservation Lands.”
The Center for Biological Diversity is more cautious.
"The final plan is an improvement from the draft but still falls short, and we urge further improvements to it," said Ileene Anderson with the Center for Biological Diversity. "We'll evaluate this plan to determine whether areas designated for development still include sensitive habitat for endangered species and the extent to which lands set aside for conservation are permanently and fully protected from a range of development threats.”
Defenders of Wildlife applauds a “paradigm shift in how renewable energy development is planned” and the concomitant benefits to desert wildlife, but note that other aspects are damaging to wildlife and need improvement. They say the fate of the West Mojave desert is threatened.
The West Mojave Desert is a checkerboard of public and private lands where development has already fragmented the landscape. Although it is a disturbed landscape, the West Mojave still has immense value to the future of desert tortoise, Mohave ground squirrel and other desert wildlife. The best available science shows that this region will serve as a critical refuge for desert plants and wildlife in the face of climate change. As the desert becomes hotter and drier, the West Mojave will continue to provide the right habitat conditions for desert wildlife to survive.
Unfortunately, while the new DRECP BLM Plan focuses millions of acres of conservation in the eastern part of the California Desert, the West Mojave’s future – and that of the Mohave ground squirrel — is far more uncertain. The plan would open up large areas of the West Mojave to renewable energy and other development.
The BLM Plan also doesn’t affect private lands in the West Mojave, even though these are just as important to wildlife as public lands. The BLM should integrate its plan with the planning that desert counties are already doing for renewable energy development and conservation.
The DRECP has its own webpage discussing the Plan and associated topics including a link to the Phase 1 documents. The 30-day protest period for comments and review ends on 14 December 2015.
The BLM proposed LUPA [Land Use Plan Amendment] and final EIS documents may be downloaded in .zip files, or as individual PDF files from the sections below. Please note that some of these files are extremely large and may require longer download times. . . .
Now that the Proposed BLM Plan of the DRECP has been released, there will 30-day protest period, after which the BLM will issue a Record of Decision. This will conclude Phase I of the DRECP. at will be followed by a plan-wide conservation strategy that is expected to be released later this year.