Bulldozing Desert for Solar Power

 *Disclaimer* I wrote this a little over a year ago before Trump won the election. There's a good argument to be made that in light of that this is not the most pressing environmental issue to be discussing, but especially with the AI data centers etc that are increasing the strain on wildlands, particularly desert land, the point remains relevant. 

The solar energy boom is well on its way. A recent article in The Economist claims “installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years,” and solar will likely be “the biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s” (The Economist, 2024). In most ways, this is great news: we are in a global energy crisis, fossil fuels are destroying our planet, and over its full life cycle, solar power emits a tiny fraction of greenhouse gas relative to fossil fuels (Mehedi et al., 2022). Under these circumstances, many feel that we ought to be pushing solar as far and as fast as possible. I for one am not so sure.

As a wildlife biologist and life-long nature-lover, I approach this topic with a particular bias. This past winter, when the Bureau of Land Management announced their ambitious “Western Solar Plan” to convert roughly 700,000 acres of public land across the west for solar development, while earmarking 22 million more acres for potential leasing (Streater, 2024), I was trepidatious. A few months later as the project developed and my social media was flooded with footage of trucks packed with bulldozed Joshua trees, I was angry. Taking a step back, I wondered if I had any right to feel this way. We all know there is no perfect, easy solution to the climate crisis, and that trade-offs are inevitable. The question is are these particular trade-offs justifiable?

Firstly, if you think deserts are inhospitable wastelands that might as well be cleared for any purpose, let alone one as urgent as renewable energy development, let me disabuse you of that notion. The Mojave Desert, for instance, supports a complex ecosystem made in part by over 3300 plant species, roughly 700 of which are found nowhere else on earth (Dunlap et al., 2024). To the untrained eye, the generally small shrubs, cactuses, and yuccas that populate these arid landscapes may seem insignificant, but many live for hundreds of years and support a wide array of unique animals. Bulldozing such ancient and special land is the aesthetic equivalent of burning down the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with its similarly aged artifacts. These are ecosystems that, once destroyed, won’t return to any kind of fully-fledged state for thousands of years, in the unlikely event they return at all.

Beyond the visceral tragedy of such loss, deserts also turn out to be crucial carbon sinks. Desert carbon sequestration has often been overlooked, as these ecosystems lack the well-characterized organic carbon-storing mechanisms that are prevalent in forests and wetlands. Ignoring arid lands in this way is a mistake, as new research has shown that calcites, a byproduct of the respiratory processes of desert plant root-systems, are an effective form of carbon storage. One report estimates California’s deserts alone can sequester roughly 262 million tons of carbon (Allen et al., 2024). Bulldozing old-growth desert will not only destroy the potential for future sequestration but also release stored carbon into the atmosphere as soils are disturbed and calcites dissolve upon exposure to air.  

If it turns out the BLM’s western development plan is the best or only way to transition to a renewable energy grid, these and the myriad other good reasons for preserving desert may be insufficient. In the face of challenges as daunting as global climate change, we must occasionally make hard choices after all. Luckily for the desert, there are many better ways to make this transition. If you spend any time online following critics of the BLM’s plan, you are sure to encounter the repetition of a simple idea: until every parking lot and rooftop in American is topped with solar canopies, we shouldn’t be converting public lands. At first glance, this seems like a no-brainer solution, and that’s how it mostly turns out to be. Parking lots tend to be in urban centers, and therefore closer to energy-consumers than remote desert plots, foregoing the need for costly and destructive transportation methods such as underground cable networks. Solar canopies create shade for parking lot customers, cutting down on heat island effects and attracting people trying to beat the heat (Ralston, 2023). Parking lots are also extremely low value for wildlife use (Davis et al., 2010).

So why isn’t every parking lot in America converting and storing energy from the sun? As is the case with many unactualized but frustratingly obvious solutions, the stumbling block boils down to cost incentives. It turns out that developing and managing many small-scale solar farms versus one massive remote plot is logistically and financially challenging. Building solar panels on already developed land requires building structures to support them, which can amount to 40% higher upfront costs than ground-mounted solar (Blok, 2023). Despite these challenges there are options that make such investment more enticing: government incentives such as the EPA’s Green House Gas Reduction Fund can significantly cut down on building costs. Solar canopies can also be profitable long-term by providing EV charging ports and high-value shaded parking. In 2020, Evansville Regional Airport in Indiana spent $6.5 million to build a solar canopy that covered 368 parking spots, which in one year brought in $310,000 in parking fees (Fella, 2020). 20 years to make up those upfront costs may seem daunting, but economists will tell you that investing in long-term projects generating 4-5% returns can be more than worthwhile (Conniff, 2021). 

It is true there are serious hurdles in the way of developing wildlife friendly solar farms. The last few decades of renewable energy development have felt as if pressure has been building against a dam of high prices, and recently as cost incentives have started making sense, cracks in that dam have allowed solar to flood down lines of least resistance. After all the work in technological development and government policy to bring us to this point, the idea of redirecting that stream towards temporarily costlier alternatives can understandably be unappealing. Overcoming these challenges comes down to our values. As urban sprawl chips away at our dwindling wild lands, does it make sense to mow-down up to 22 million more acres of biodiverse desert when other good options exist? Ask anyone who has watched sage-grouse lekking in Nevada’s Ruby Valley, or camped under the stars in Utah’s Canyon Country, or felt the shade of a thirty-foot tall, two-hundred-year-old saguaro cactus, and I am confident they will tell you this land is absolutely worth preserving.  

 

Citations:

Allen, M., Barrows, C., Barrows, C., Boyd, S., Flanagan, P., Kobaly, R., McCulloch, A., & Taylor, J. (2024). The California Desert’s Role in 30X30: Carbon Sequestration and Biodiversity. In Desert Report. https://assets.nationbuilder.com/mbca/pages/3434/attachments/original/1707332189/C_Sequestration_Desert_Sector_Report_Revised_2.7.24.pdf?1707332189

Blok, A. (2023). Solar parking lots are a Win-Win energy idea. why aren’t they the norm? CNET. https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/solar-parking-lots-are-a-win-win-energy-idea-why-arent-they-the-norm/

Conniff, R. (2021). Why putting solar canopies on parking lots is a smart green move. Yale E360. https://e360.yale.edu/features/putting-solar-panels-atop-parking-lots-a-green-energy-solution

Davis, A. Y., Pijanowski, B. C., Robinson, K., & Engel, B. (2010). The environmental and economic costs of sprawling parking lots in the United States. Land Use Policy, 27(2), 255–261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2009.03.002

Deshmukh, S. S., & Pearce, J. M. (2021). Electric vehicle charging potential from retail parking lot solar photovoltaic awnings. Renewable Energy, 169, 608–617. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2021.01.068

Dunlap, A. A., Sovacool, B. K., & Novaković, B. (2024). ‘A Dead Sea of Solar Panels:’ solar enclosure, extractivism and the progressive degradation of the California desert. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2024.2388051

Evans, S. (2017). Solar, wind and nuclear have ‘amazingly low’ carbon footprints, study finds. Carbon Brief. https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low-carbon-footprints/

Fella, L. (2020). EVV Completes Construction on Largest Solar Covered Airport Parking Canopy in the Midwest. Evansville Regional Airport. https://flyevv.com/index.php/about-evansville-regional-airport/news/evv-completes-construction-on-largest-solar-covered-airport-parking-canopy-in-the-midwest

Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund | US EPA. (2024). US EPA. https://www.epa.gov/greenhouse-gas-reduction-fund

Mehedi, T. H., Gemechu, E., & Kumar, A. (2022). Life cycle greenhouse gas emissions and energy footprints of utility-scale solar energy systems. Applied Energy, 314, 118918. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2022.118918

Ralston, W. (2023). Why not cover ugly parking lots with solar panels? WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/france-solar-panels-parking-lots/

Segini, N. (2024). The government has a new solar energy plan. What’s in it?. The Wilderness Society. https://www.wilderness.org/articles/blog/government-has-new-solar-energy-plan-whats-it

2023/2024 Solar Programmatic EIS Information Center. (n.d.). Bureau of Land Management. https://blmsolar.anl.gov/solar-peis-2023/

Streater, S. (2024). BLM plan aims to dramatically expand Western solar. E&E News by POLITICO. https://www.eenews.net/articles/blm-plan-aims-to-dramatically-expand-western-solar/

The Economist. (2024). The exponential growth of solar power will change the world. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-power-will-change-the-world