Measuring the Renewable Energy Land Grab
One thousand square miles. That's how much public land energy companies want to bulldoze over the next few years in California for massive solar and wind facilities, according to the Bureau of Land Management ( BLM ) list of pending and approved wind testing and solar applications. That is more than two times the size of Los Angeles, over four times the size of San Francisco, and more than 14 times the size of Washington D.C. But what would 1,000 square miles of solar and wind projects get us? Will it stop climate change? Not nearly. The proposed projects would generate 13.7 gigawatts of energy. That is less than a quarter of California's total energy generation capacity . Building fields of glass and metal the size of the cities they are meant to power does not make sense. There is a lot of political momentum pushing these massive projects at the expense of investing in distributed generation (such as rooftop solar) which would spare our wildlands for future g