Wu said she agreed that landscape-level planning isn’t sufficient on its own, while arguing it can be especially helpful for figuring out where to build new electric lines. Listening to Eddy and Wu hash out their differences during my panel - you can watch the full video here - I was pleasantly surprised to realize they had a lot of room for common ground. “There are often conflicts that can’t be seen at the desktop level that we miss.” From a solar industry perspective, Eddy told me again in Boise, the study left out several important factors that help determine whether an area is actually suitable for energy development - a problem that has plagued landscape-level planning in California and elsewhere, Eddy said. I wrote about that study when it was published - and later about Eddy’s response. can generate enough clean power to tackle climate change even if some of the region’s most ecologically valuable landscapes are placed off-limits to solar and wind farms - without causing electricity costs to spiral out of control. She’s a proponent of landscape-level planning, having previously led a Nature Conservancy study with the optimistic conclusion that the Western U.S. Wu is an environmental studies professor at UC Santa Barbara, and she was part of my panel in Boise. “We can achieve conservation and our climate goals, and employ a very large amount of renewable energy,” Grace Wu says. And it’s what the Biden administration is doing right now, updating a decade-old plan for solar projects on public lands in six Western states and potentially expanding it to include the rest of the region. That’s what the Obama administration did with the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, working with California to divvy up 10 million acres of federal land in the desert. But the basic idea is that instead of evaluating renewable energy proposals case by case, government agencies should start by studying entire landscapes, and work with conservationists and tribes to map out which places should be protected and which are most suitable for energy development. I usually avoid that term, because it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. lands and waters by 2030, with a goal of preserving biodiversity and intact landscapes.īuilding lots of solar farms, wind turbines and power lines isn’t necessarily in conflict with “30 by 30.” But doing both - while leaving room for farmers and ranchers, and respecting the sovereignty of Native American tribes - won’t be easy. Biden has pledged support for the “30 by 30” movement, which seeks to protect 30% of U.S. “And they’re waiting because we don’t have people and staff to do the work.”Įven with all the money in the world, though, federal officials would face the tough task of balancing clean energy development with other priorities on public lands - including conservation. “We have 120 projects waiting,” she said. In California alone, officials see a need for 70 gigawatts of climate-friendly energy over the next decade - and another 50 gigawatts by 2045, not only to replace all the fossil-fueled power plants on the grid today but also to fuel tens of millions of electric vehicles.Īgain, Stone-Manning told me, the problem is funding. So doable, actually, that I found myself wondering whether 25 gigawatts is far too low a target for federal lands. “There is lot of devil in those details,” she said. It sounds like a lot, but all that renewable power should require somewhere in the range of 150,000 to 250,000 acres, Stone-Manning estimated - just 0.1% of the 245 million acres her agency oversees. I also asked Stone-Manning about the Biden administration’s efforts to approve 25 gigawatts of climate-friendly energy on public lands by 2025 - a goal set by Congress. But it may be more feasible than other strategies to encourage faster development, such as controversial proposals to limit environmental reviews by revamping the National Environmental Policy Act. In practice, getting the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to spend an additional $30 million to speed up permitting for clean energy projects may prove difficult. “ get the people who are smart and good at what they do out on the ground doing the analysis on these projects that are stacking up.” “The biggest problem is having enough people to do the work,” she said. When I asked her how the notoriously slow environmental study process for solar and wind farms can be sped up, she urged Congress to approve Biden’s request to increase funding for her agency’s renewable energy program by 77%. Stone-Manning is a top official in President Biden’s Interior Department, where she leads the U.S. Part of my hopefulness came from Tracy Stone-Manning’s evaluation of what can be done to build more clean energy projects on federal lands.
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