Meditations on solar, Joshua trees, and the movement to kill clean energy

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A sign in Norwood opposing a proposed solar installation nearby. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Does it make sense to kill 3,500 Joshua trees to clear the way to power 180,000 homes with carbon-free energy from the sun? That’s a question I’ve been pondering as I peruse the public comments on the Biden administration’s Western Solar Plan and in the wake of a debate that’s erupted over the social-media-waves regarding this very question. 

The kerfuffle was sparked late last month after the Los Angeles Times’ Melody Petersen reported that renewable energy developer Avantus had begun clearing thousands of the iconic desert trees to make way for the 530-megawatt Aratina solar-plus-storage project on a swath of the Mojave Desert in southern California. Even worse: They were apparently shredding the trees onsite or using other measures to hide the apparent act of agave-cide (Joshua trees aren’t trees at all, but members of the agave family). This stirred up a lot of anger and concern, naturally. 

But the real brouhaha broke out after another LA Times journalist, Sammy Roth, wrote a column about hard clean energy choices developers and regulators must make to tackle the climate crisis, concluding: “Hence the need to accept killing some Joshua trees in the name of saving more Joshua trees.”

Joshua tree in the Mojave Desert. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Now, I think Roth is one of the best Western energy journalists out there, and I admire his ability to embrace the complexity of the energy transition. He rightly points out that human-caused climate warming poses an existential threat to Joshua trees and other species, and to fight climate change we’ll need to displace fossil fuel generation with cleaner energy sources, such as solar and wind. Roth is right on when he argues this will require utility-scale energy development, and when he dismisses the simplistic solution of merely putting solar panels on residential rooftops. And critics accusing him of being a pawn of corporate energy developers (or a member of the “climate cult religion”) are way off. 

But bulldozing pristine public land and killing thousands of Joshua trees (or desert tortoises or sage grouse or pronghorn) to make way for a solar development that will purportedly save Joshua trees from going extinct? Okay, sure, if the choice were really that stark — if it was a desert-flora version of the trolley problem: where a bystander must decide whether to direct a runaway streetcar onto a track where it would kill several people, or onto another where it would kill just one person — then maybe that argument would fly. That’s not quite the situation here, however. In the trolley problem, there are only two choices, both horrible; in the Joshua tree-solar problem there are myriad options, some better than others. 

I first caught wind of the proposed Arantina project many months ago, when I stumbled across a news piece about opposition from nearby residents, who were worried about dust kicked up during construction and potential impacts to views and property values. I frequently encounter these sorts of stories with another one of my gigs compiling an energy newsletter for the Energy News Network. Nearly every utility-scale solar proposal out there runs into opposition from someone, especially those planned for relatively undisturbed public lands. 

But this one stuck out because of where it’s located. First off, it’s not being built on public land, but rather 2,300 acres of private land in eastern Kern County amid a county landfill, a major highway, and a rail line. The residents worried about dust and views live in the communities of Boron and Desert Lake (a more accurate monicker would be Desert Dry Lake, but hey). To its credit, Avantus responded to the concerns by setting the project further back from the towns, where they would be less visible. Of course, this also put them a bit deeper into the desert, possibly endangering more Joshua Trees in the process and bringing up additional concerns among locals, most notably that stirring up the desert may also disperse the fungus that causes valley fever.

The towns, recently featured in the LA Times for their cheap real estate, would be within a half-mile of the solar facility, so their concerns are understandable. And yet, less than a mile in the other direction looms Rio Tinto’s massive, open-pit Borax Mine, which spans more than 13 square miles, where house-sized machinery extracts some one million tonnes of refined borates and consumes more than 300 million gallons of water annually — in a friggin’ desert! Not only that, but right next to the mine is the Southwest’s largest liquefied-natural-gas processing plant, a potentially explosive situation, if you know what I mean. 

And they’re worried about a photovoltaic installation’s dust and harm to views and property values?

I’m not saying the presence of the mine or the apparent lack of concern about it invalidates townspeople’s concerns about the solar installation, nor does it justify the solar project’s harm to Joshua trees. I just find this apparent contradiction — one that I’m seeing more and more often in relation to renewable energy — curious.

Another interesting note in all of this is that in 2022 Avantus, the solar installation’s developer, purchased grazing rights on 215,000 acres of public land elsewhere in Kern County and retired them as part of the Onyx Conservation Project. The project is sort of a prelude to the BLM’s public lands rule, which opens the door to conservation leases on public lands that can be used by energy developers to mitigate, or make up for, impacts they wreak elsewhere. In theory, at least, the Onyx project will protect thousands of Joshua trees — along with a variety of other wildlife — which would then “offset” the killing of all those other Joshua trees near Boron. 

It’s great that Avantus retired grazing in — and eliminated a lot of impacts on — a huge piece of the Mojave Desert. And it certainly earns the company some social capital. But I’m not sure it mitigates the harm done to the Joshua grove near Boron. Can you really “offset” a shredded plant by simply not cutting down another one that may have continued living unharmed for another century or more? Wouldn’t it be easier to put the solar installation in a place where there aren’t so many Joshua Trees? 

A utility-scale solar installation when it was under construction near Red Mesa on the Navajo Nation. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

A few years ago, if a story showed up in the media about opposition to a utility-scale solar project, the pushback likely was inspired by the harm these projects — and scraping the desert bare of flora, fauna, and topsoil — do to relatively undisturbed public lands, wildlife, and ecosystems. In the past year or so, however, opposition to “clean” energy like wind and solar has not only grown, but also changed in nature and motivation. 

Now it seems like almost every utility-scale solar and wind installation proposal garners pushback from somewhere, whether it’s on private or public land, previously disturbed or not. In Arizona, Idaho, and Colorado, livestock operators and state lawmakers are rising up against solar because it may impede upon public land grazing allotments. Others don’t like public land solar because it wrecks their view or gets in the way of OHV-riding or other recreational pursuits.

Last year, a company called OneEnergy proposed building a 100-megawatt utility-scale solar array on about 640 acres of private and state-owned land southwest of Norwood, Colorado, in green-leaning San Miguel County. The developers said it would create some 300 construction-phase jobs and generate millions in tax and lease revenue and clean power for thousands of homes. They also planned to make it an agrivoltaic project, meaning livestock grazing would continue underneath the solar panels. Local opposition was vociferous, however. Most critics said they supported renewable energy, just not there — or anywhere else in their immediate vicinity. The county responded by imposing a moratorium on large-scale utility development in unincorporated areas to allow it time to develop regulations for such projects. The six-month moratorium has been extended twice, so far, and is set to end in November. 

This sentiment is becoming more widespread, making for a tough row for utility-scale clean energy developers to hoe. Residents of La Plata County pushed back on a proposed commercial photovoltaic installation on private land last year. That project is also in limbo. In 2022, Delta County rejected a proposed solar array on private land because it would take the parcel out of agricultural use. It later approved the plan after the developers rejiggered the project to allow for sheep grazing among the panels. Soon thereafter, though, the county enacted its own moratorium on large-scale solar. Similar moratoria are popping up in rural, conservative counties from Washington to Idaho to Arizona — where Mohave County banned solar installations while clearing the way for a natural gas plant expansion next to a retirement community. 

Sometimes there are legitimate environmental concerns driving the opposition, even when the projects lie entirely on private land. But other times the reasoning isn’t so solid. Many lament the potential “loss of agricultural land,” even if the parcels in question haven’t been farmed due to economics or water scarcity or just poor soil health, and their owners’ only way of remaining in agriculture is to earn some money by leasing land to solar developers. Others bring up the age-old “property value” argument — which sounds absurd coming from just about any corner of the West, where property values could use a bit of de-inflation. Besides, if proximity to radioactive waste and Superfund sites hasn’t devalued properties (e.g. Moab or Silverton), how can a bunch of solar panels do so? 

An official of another Colorado town told me plans were scrapped to install solar panels on a piece of town land after the local pickleball mob protested, saying they needed the land for their courts. And up in Ophir — where avalanches and extreme weather can not only shut off access, but also take out the only utility lines serving the place — residents voted to nix a solar-powered microgrid with battery backup that would have enabled them to weather extended outages. This is the same town that voted in 2018 to work toward transitioning to 100% greenhouse gas-free electricity. And now they’ve turned down a project with state and federal funding that would have helped them meet that goal, while also giving them independence from a tenuous power grid, because it would have meant putting up some solar panels in their open space.

Look, if you’re pushing back on a solar project in the Nevada desert because it will displace or kill tortoises or Joshua trees, or if you’re battling a green-energy-carrying transmission line that slashes through an ecologically and culturally significant river valley — I’m right there with you. But if you’re worried that your cattle might be disturbed by a turbine as they trample the landscape and chomp vegetation on public land, or if you prioritize pickleball over PV panels? Forget about it. 

This is when I understand Roth’s frustration: No matter how hard the solar and wind developers try to site their projects responsibly, someone comes up with some reason — legitimate or otherwise — to try to kill it, thereby delaying the very necessary clean energy transition. Sometimes this means the facility just doesn’t get built; other times it can actually push the development from a reasonably suitable location to one that may be farther away from people, but where there’s more potential for environmental harm.

It’s not just the opposition that’s frustrating. The industry plays a part in it, too. Quite often developers don’t try to compromise or site their projects responsibly. In fact, they’re more likely to behave a bit like the oil and gas industry: As if they’re entitled to put their installations wherever suits them because they are producing something we all need, consequences be damned. That’s because solar and wind companies, like most businesses, are generally in it to make money — we live in a capitalist system, after all. And it’s often cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to site these things on public lands in the desert than to try to piece together a puzzle of private land parcels or brownfields. 

The best way to prod a developer to site responsibly is through strong, clear regulations that guide development toward previously disturbed areas with lower conflict potential and away from culturally or ecologically significant lands at the outset. The Obama administration tried that in 2012 with its Western solar plan; now Biden’s Bureau of Land Management is working to update and improve the plan. The agency’s preferred alternative would leave 22 million acres of BLM lands open to development, while putting more than 200 million acres off-limits. Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University, isn’t so impressed, summing it up like this in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists piece: 

The Bureau of Land Management’s Western Solar Plan update inverts the original intent of the planning process from one that sought to avoid wildlife and cultural resource conflict to one that prioritizes transmission developer and utility interests on these publicly owned landscapes. 

Nevertheless, industry is pushing to make it even less restrictive, urging the agency to remove slope restrictions (which prohibit development on slopes over a certain steepness), to allow clean energy development in areas of critical environmental concern (I think not!), and to further streamline permitting. They invariably say the 2012 plan, which is currently in place, is too prohibitive, even though dozens of massive solar installations have been permitted and built on public lands in the 12 years since it was implemented.

No matter how the plan turns out, however, it won’t have much bearing on projects like Aratina, since it’s on private land (which is where public lands advocates generally would like to see these installations — Joshua trees notwithstanding.)

***

Even in Boron, the developer could have gone in a different, less-destructive direction while still bringing clean energy to the grid. The Borax mine is surrounded by waste piles, old reclaimed mining zones, and other disturbed areas that offer up plenty of solar-appropriate land. It might have been slightly more complicated to work out deals with the mining company and to level some of the piles, but building there would have sparked far less conflict and killed little if any vegetation. They could have shared dust-control duty with the mine. And I think the viewshed would be just fine.

In northwestern New Mexico, developers are building the San Juan solar project on private land near the shuttered San Juan Generating Station coal-fired plant. It’s massive, and has impacts of its own, but is far better for everyone than the pollution-spewing power plant was.

On another project altogether, the developers of the SunZia transmission line that will carry wind power from New Mexico to the Phoenix area could have routed the line along I-10 rather than up the ecologically and culturally significant San Pedro River Valley. Yes, it may have cost a bit more, and may have spurred its own opposition (from motorists worried about their freeway viewshed?), but the bigger-picture costs would have been far less. The BLM, however, failed in its mission to site such projects where they do the least harm, and now SunZia is getting battered with legal challenges (albeit so far unsuccessful ones). 

Avantus, the same company behind Aratina, is proposing the 2,000-megawatt solar plus 2,000-megawatt battery storage Buttonbush installation on private farmland in the Central Valley. That’s a massive amount of energy — one of the largest such installations in the world if and when it’s completed. Somebody will probably protest it, since it will represent a loss of farmland in a major agricultural zone. Yet it’s also a place wracked by drought and climate change, where groundwater pumping has depleted aquifers and water shortages are the norm. While a solar facility still uses water for dust-control and cleaning, it generally uses far less than most crops. And besides, the landowners wouldn’t sell or lease their fields to solar folks if they felt they were most viable as farmland. 

This is where the value choice is made: Is it better to lose some farmland that would be fallowed anyway? Or 3,500 to 4,200 Joshua trees? 

Blanketing every home rooftop in Los Angeles with solar panels is an admirable goal, but also logistically near-impossible. Either you’d have to convince millions of homeowners to fork out the cash for their own panels — which is now less financially rewarding since state regulators slashed net metering incentives — or a developer or utility would have to lease rooftop space from millions of individuals. It ain’t gonna happen. 

But covering every warehouse and big box store rooftop and parking lot with solar panels? That’s an entirely different story. Parking lots and commercial structures span some serious acreage, and just as Avantus is piecing together 132 private parcels in the Central Valley for its Buttonpush project, so could a developer work with hundreds of industrial or commercial urban landowners to cover rooftops and parking lots with installations. Yes, I’m suggesting utility-scale, front-of-the-meter developments spread across the built landscape. Of course, behind-the-meter developments, where each landowner installs their own array, works, too, but it doesn’t play as well into the vertically integrated utility, centralized power model that currently dominates.

The federal, state, and local governments need to fashion strong regulations and incentives to help guide developers to make the right choices. And the environmental groups that push back on utility-scale development on public lands must also present — and fight for — more suitable, and realistic, siting options. This means urging regulators to compensate rooftop and community solar at retail rates or higher, but it also means rejecting knee-jerk opposition to utility-scale solar based on frivolous or ideological concerns.

I like to think I’m an optimist in these matters, and it is heartening to see places like Silverton and Rico continue to work on establishing solar-powered microgrids (Silverton may put their solar panels on a mill tailings disposal pile), to see community solar taking off in New Mexico, and to see solar installations directly replacing coal facilities, as is also happening in New Mexico. But then I read about Wyoming and Utah lawmakers interfering in markets to keep coal plants running, and about the huge strain data centers’ and AI’s electricity demands are going to put on the grid, and I get discouraged. We can build all the solar and wind we want, but until we can slow capitalism’s never-ending hunger, its incessant need to continue to grow and to consume, we won’t solve the crises we face.

I’ll leave you on a slightly brighter note with some numbers I gathered a while back for a dataviz piece in High Country News. And after that, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section about all of these issues!

44,800 megawatts: Potential generating capacity if solar canopies covered Los Angeles County’s 18.6 million parking spaces.

15,400 megawatts: Potential generating capacity if solar panels covered all 3,495 miles of California’s aqueducts and canals.

21,363: Number of big-box stores in the Western U.S.

31,035,098 megawatt-hours: Estimated total annual energy output if solar arrays were installed to cover all those stores’ rooftops, enough to power 3 million homes. 

1,155 megawatts: Estimated generating capacity if solar panels covered all 370 miles of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, as LA officials propose.

37,500 Gigawatthours per year: Energy output of solar canopies if all of Phoenix, Arizona’s 12.2 million parking spots were covered. 

139: Number of desert tortoises relocated to make way for the Yellow Pine Solar Project in southern Nevada in 2021. Within a few weeks, 30 of them were killed, possibly by badgers.

4,200: Estimated number of Joshua trees that will be destroyed or moved when solar industry giant Avantus develops its Aratina project near Boron, California. 

215,000 acres: Grazing leases bought and retired in the Mojave Desert in California by Avantus to protect wildlife habitat and Joshua trees. The Onyx Conservation project is a partnership with federal and state land management agencies to “offset” the impacts of the company’s developments elsewhere in the region.

1.3 million: Estimated number of Joshua trees destroyed by the 2020 Dome Fire, thought to be exacerbated by climate change, in the Mojave National Preserve in California. 

14,905,215 megawatt-hours: Estimated total annual energy output if solar arrays were installed on all of California’s 10,260 big-box store rooftops. 

16,477,306 megwatt-hours: Total energy output of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in 2020. 

2,602 megawatts: Potential generating capacity if solar panels covered every rooftop on Arizona’s 2,288 big-box stores.