Mojave Desert Blog

The Victorville City Council once again considered whether or not to support or oppose Senator Feinstein's proposed California Desert Protection Act of 2010 (CDPA 2010).  Once again --for the third time--the Council decided to delay taking a vote on the matter, citing the need for more information.  Several citizens present at the meeting voiced support for the legislation, and one citizen from Victorville opposed the legislation.  Although ultimately whether or not a city council opposes or supports the bill will not directly impact the legislation, the measure of local support for the legislation will be used to indirectly bolster or erode the legislation's chances when it comes to a vote for committee debate in Washington.  For that reason, if you support the legislation you should contact your local officials and let them know. For the City of Victorville, you can obtain the councilmember's email addresses on their website .

Today the California Energy Commission (CEC) posted another update on its consideration of BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS). The CEC Staff assessed that even though the proposed solar site presents significant negative impacts to visual resources, and significant cumulative impacts to land use, and traffic, the staff deemed that the need to develop renewable energy to combat global warming was an "overriding consideration".  Note that the CEC Staff no longer considers the site to pose any significant impact to biological resources.  Per my previous post , the CEC deemed proposed mitigation conditions and BrightSource Energy's altered footprint to sufficiently off-set the likely loss of special status plants and animals. To the CEC's credit, the document did warn other energy companies not to take Ivanpah's "overriding consideration" assessment as a condition that would apply to other solar projects.  The CEC ci

According to an addendum to the California Energy Commission's (CEC) Draft Environmental Impact Statement for BrightSource Energy's proposed solar site in Ivanpah,  CEC staff declared that the altered site proposal to avoid special status plants (see previous post ) fully compensates for damage to biological resources.  The staff previously concluded that the Ivanpah proposal did not fully account for the harm it would cause to an array of desert wildlife, to include the rare Rusby's Desert Mallow, Mojave milkweed, desert tortoises,  and potentially bighorn sheep.  The addendum does concede, however, that "on-site" mitigation for special status plants -- which would involve leaving some plants located on the site intact and keeping solar structures away from them--would likely fail and result in the loss of many of the protected plants. The significance of the updated CEC assessment is that BrightSource's altered proposal is a step closer to being approved s

The California Energy Commission (CEC) released the Staff Assessment and Draft Environmental Impact Statement (SA/DEIS) this week for the Abengoa Solar Project.  Overall the assessment lines up with what was a relatively good site location by Abengoa Solar--disturbed agricultural land. The mitigation plan calls for roughly 120 acres of land to be purchased and set aside for conservation, which is far less than the thousands of acres required to mitigate the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the eastern Mojave Desert.  Biological surveys of the site only spotted one desert tortoise, but they did identify several species of special status birds, such as the western burrowing owl and LeConte's thrasher. Of more concern to the State of California, however, is the projects proposed pumping of over 2,000 acre-feet of water per year to cool the plant, which amounts to over 700 million gallons of water a year (see previous post ). Interestingly, the CEC determined that the pump

The recently published Staff Assessment and Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Blythe Solar project provides some insight to the Renewable Energy Action Team (REAT), which is the inter-agency task force addressing expedited renewable energy permitting process and environmental mitigation.   The REAT consists of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), California Department of Fish and Game (DFG), and the California Energy Commission (CEC).  If this inter-agency team can implement its policy tools quickly enough, it could have a positive effect on efforts to mitigate damage done by industrial-scale energy development in the desert, but the current proposed schedule for REAT calls this into question. In order to achieve the goal of expedited renewable energy permitting while preserving sensitive habitat and species in California's deserts, the REAT plans to produce a Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP).  According to the CEC Staf

The California Energy Commission (CEC) recently released it's draft Staff Assessment and Environmental Impact Statement for the Blythe Solar project, an industrial-scale site that would disturb approximately 7,030 acres of Colorado Desert.  The site is just west of Blythe and would sit in the middle of the Palo Verde Mesa next to the McCoy Mountains.   In summary,  the environmental impact statement points out that the most significant impacts of the site would be the loss of desert washes--which are important to the maintenance and sustainability of desert aquifers--and the loss of desert tortoise and Mojave Desert fringe-toed lizard habitat. The up-side is that the plant is near populated and agricultural areas, reducing its impact on uninterrupted wilderness, and would produce up to 1000MW of renewable energy once all four proposed portions of the site are online.  However, the substation that would be required would decimate dozens of acres of dune habitat, on which 57 Mojave

I just finished watching the USGS-sponsored desert tortoise documentary titled "The Heat is On: Desert Tortoises and Survival," which I highlighted in my last post .  It's definitely worth downloading or viewing online if you want to learn more about the science behind the recovery efforts, and the array of threats that the tortoises face.   You can check it out at the USGS website .