landscapes underscores the difficulty of pushing forward projects crucial to fighting climate change and meeting California’s ambitious renewable energy mandates.
The five lawsuits currently pending against five solar thermal projects licensed by the state and approved for construction on federal land represent a multiplicity of interests.
The Sierra Club, for instance, has petitioned the California Supreme Court to overturn a license issued for the Calico Solar Energy Project, which the environmental group argues would harm the imperiled desert tortoise and other wildlife. A labor group, California Unions for Reliable Energy, also filed a petition on similar grounds. Read more…
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Environmental groups are worried that a massive solar project in the Mojave will threaten protected wildlife, like this fringe-toed lizard.
Tessera Solar plans to plant 34,000 solar dishes — each one 40 feet high and 38 feet wide — on 8,230 acres of the Mojave Desert in Southern California.
Although the lengthy licensing process for the Calico solar farm remains in the early stages, several environmental groups are already raising red flags about the massive project’s impact on such protected wildlife as the desert tortoise, the Mojave fringe-toed lizard and Nelson’s bighorn sheep.
Calico is one of dozens of industrial-scale solar farms planned for the Southwest that have divided environmentalists over the need to promote renewable energy while protecting fragile desert ecosystems.
But the sheer size of the Calico project, as well as its location next to federal conservation areas, is drawing scrutiny from grassroots green activists and national organizations like the Defenders of Wildlife.
The solar farm would generate 850 megawatts of electricity for Southern California Edison.
Also jumping into the fray is a well-funded labor group that is pressing solar developers to employ union workers, and the Wildlands Conservancy, a Southern California non-profit that supports a proposal by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, to ban renewable energy development on hundreds of thousands of acres of the Mojave adjacent to Calico.
Most of the land for the solar farm would be leased from the federal government.