COMMENTARY: Solar plan clashes with habitat for endangered sage grouse

The Western Solar Plan, spearheaded by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, would expand industrial-scale solar power development on 31 million acres of federal land in 11 Western states, including Nevada. Under the plan, renewable energy developers would be allowed to install hundreds of thousands of solar panels, hundreds of miles of transmission lines, and other solar power infrastructure on federal land deemed suitable for massive solar arrays.

Much of the land being eyed for taxpayer-subsidized solar projects is also habitat for the endangered greater sage grouse, a ground-dwelling, flightless bird best known for its males’ exotic mating dance. The grouse’s dwindling numbers are found in California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

“Sage grouse numbers have likely declined since the settlement of the Western United States,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says. “Declines have been documented since regular monitoring of the species began in the 1950s, which reflects the widespread loss, alteration or fragmentation of the vast sagebrush steppe on which the species depends. Since the late 1960s, numbers have declined by an average of 2.3 percent per year, according to the North American breeding bird survey.”

The BLM that developed the Western Solar Plan is the same agency responsible for issuing the Greater Sage Grouse Land Use Plan, an elaborate document laying out land-use restrictions designed to protect the bird’s habitat.

Environmentalists who back far-reaching decarbonization policies are shaking their heads at the Western Solar Plan.

“I think they are giving the developers way too much leeway. They’ve made this incredibly permissive for development at the expense of habitat,” Randi Spivak, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity policy director, told The Jackson Hole News &Guide.

Undeterred, administration officials see no conflict between protecting the sage grouse and pushing solar power.

“It will help responsible solar development to locations with fewer potential conflicts while helping the nation transition to a clean energy economy, furthering BLM’s mission to sustain the health, diversity and productivity on public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations,” BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said.

Spivak will have none of it. “In our transition to renewable energy, we cannot sacrifice biodiversity and habitat,” she said. “There is real tension here, and we need to be mindful of it, I don’t think this proposal fully does that.”

No stranger to litigation, the center has yet to say whether it will file a lawsuit to block the Western Solar Plan.

State and local officials throughout the West, farmers, ranchers and business leaders have been scrambling for years to develop plans to protect the sage grouse’s habitat. Their fear has been that the bird could be added to the endangered species list, triggering draconian land-use restrictions that could cripple the region’s economy. Now, their efforts could be undermined by the administration’s green-energy policy, which could threaten the sage grouse’s habitat.

Spivak and the Center for Biological Diversity are not the only environmentalists citing the threat giant solar arrays can pose to wildlife.

Naomi Fraga, director of conservation at the California Botanical Garden and research assistant professor of botany at the Clearmont Graduate University, worries about the effect land-intensive solar projects will have on the endangered desert tortoise.

“We know there have been significant impacts on desert tortoise,” she told Salon. “They’ve worked to translocate the desert tortoise, but there has been a lot of loss to desert tortoise habitat. In addition, it really increases invasive species in the landscape. It’s a whole disturbance, basically industrializing intact landscapes.”

In California’s Mojave Desert, state and local officials are allowing 3,500 endangered Joshua trees to be removed to make way for a vast solar project, which will provide intermittent power to residents of the central coast. The site is also home to the desert tortoise, which could find itself in the bull’s-eye of the Western Solar Plan.

In addition to the human toll of the green-energy transition, including child labor in Africa used to mine cobalt for batteries, a price is also being paid by wildlife inconveniently standing in the way of the green utopia.

Bonner Russell Cohen is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.