by Shane Henson — October 31, 2012—The Obama Administration is putting support behind a new program launched to spur the development of solar energy on public lands in six western states. The Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for solar energy development provides a blueprint for utility-scale solar energy permitting in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah by establishing solar energy zones with access to existing or planned transmission, incentives for development within those zones, and a process through which to consider additional zones and solar projects.
According to the Obama Administration, this action builds on the Administration’s historic progress to facilitate renewable energy development. Recently, with the authorization of the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project site in Wyoming, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) reached the president’s goal of authorizing 10,000 megawatts of renewable power on public lands. Since 2009, the Interior Department has authorized 33 renewable energy projects, including 18 utility-scale solar facilities, seven wind farms and eight geothermal plants, with associated transmission corridors and infrastructure. When built, these projects will provide enough electricity to power more than 3.5 million homes, and support 13,000 construction and operations jobs according to project developer estimates, DOI officials say.
The Solar PEIS establishes an initial set of 17 Solar Energy Zones (SEZs), totaling about 285,000 acres of public lands, that will serve as priority areas for commercial-scale solar development, with the potential for additional zones through ongoing and future regional planning processes. If fully built out, projects in the designated areas could produce as much as 23,700 megawatts of solar energy, said to be enough to power approximately seven million American homes.
The program also keeps the door open, on a case-by-case basis, for the possibility of carefully sited solar projects outside the SEZs on about 19 million acres in “variance” areas. The program also includes a framework for regional mitigation plans, and to protect key natural and cultural resources, the program excludes a little under 79 million acres that would be inappropriate for solar development based on currently available information, according to the Interior Department.
