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Power Government United States

US Government Opens Up 31 Million Acres of Federal Lands For Solar (electrek.co) 103

Posted by BeauHD from the more-the-merrier dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The Biden administration has finalized a plan to expand solar on 31 million acres of federal lands in 11 western states. The proposed updated Western Solar Plan is a roadmap for Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) governance of solar energy proposals and projects on public lands. It bumps up the acreage from the 22 million acres it recommended in January, and this plan adds five additional states -- Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming -- to the six states -- Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah -- analyzed in the original plan.

It would make the public lands available for potential solar development, putting solar farms closer to transmission lines or on previously disturbed lands and avoiding protected lands, sensitive cultural resources, and important wildlife habitats. [...] BLM surpassed its goal of permitting more than 25 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy projects on public lands earlier in 2024. It's permitted 29 GW of projects on public lands -- enough to power over 12 million homes. The Biden administration set the goal to achieve 100% clean electricity on the US grid by 2035.

US Government Opens Up 31 Million Acres of Federal Lands For Solar More | Reply

US Government Opens Up 31 Million Acres of Federal Lands For Solar

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  • Undeveloped land (Score:5, Informative)

    by piojo ( 995934 ) on Friday August 30, 2024 @11:57PM (#64750402)

    Some people might not realize the US has a lot of undeveloped land. For instance, there are huge swathes of desert in Utah and the nearby states where you can (with a permit from the BLM) hike and camp without ever seeing another group, assuming you make arrangements for someone to drive you in and out. There must be some farming (according to the occasional water trough) but mostly there are rocks, trees, and shrubs like sagebrush. There is nothing but the land and the sky. It is beautiful.

    So I hope the land the government is devoting to solar farms is either remote enough or close enough to cities that it won't be a significant loss to nature lovers.

    • Re:Undeveloped land (Score:5, Informative)

      by mmell ( 832646 ) on Saturday August 31, 2024 @12:07AM (#64750414)

      Well, they're locating it to put it next to the existing power delivery network, so I'd say the pristine regions you're concerned about should be safe. From TFA:

      closer to transmission lines or on previously disturbed lands and avoiding protected lands

      So pristine lands should be safe. Remember, this will be implemented by bureaucrats. The functioning of the bureaucratic mind is one of those things which no mortal will ever understand; or, understanding it will be driven instantly and irremediably insane.

    • Will China be able to manufacture 30 million acres of solar panels?

      • Will China be able to manufacture 30 million acres of solar panels?

        Not the relevant question you should be asking. You should be asking if we can even extract/export the raw materials to make the panels out of whatever country is going to potentially consume it for themselves instead. THAT, is the question that leads to bloodshed.

        • The raw materials are silicon and aluminum.

          Dirt is 25% silicon and 8% aluminum.

        • Re:Undeveloped land (Score:4, Informative)

          by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Saturday August 31, 2024 @08:02AM (#64750844)

          Not the relevant question you should be asking. You should be asking if we can even extract/export the raw materials to make the panels out of whatever country is going to potentially consume it for themselves instead. THAT, is the question that leads to bloodshed.

          The silicon needed to make soar panels comes from quartzite which is found on every continent. The US has large deposits in multiple states. Not sure why you think anyone would need to cause e bloodshed for quartzite.

          • Not the relevant question you should be asking. You should be asking if we can even extract/export the raw materials to make the panels out of whatever country is going to potentially consume it for themselves instead. THAT, is the question that leads to bloodshed.

            The silicon needed to make soar panels comes from quartzite which is found on every continent. The US has large deposits in multiple states. Not sure why you think anyone would need to cause e bloodshed for quartzite.

            The solar panel is but ONE component you have to worry about when building out millions of acres of solution. Now talk to me about the battery, with both current and future components we haven’t even thought about warmongering over yet.

            • The solar panel is but ONE component you have to worry about when building out millions of acres of solution. Now talk to me about the battery, with both current and future components we haven’t even thought about warmongering over yet.

              Battery technology is leaning towards iron-oxide or sodium ion as they are cheaper and easier to resource than lithium as both iron and sodium are common everywhere. Heck older lead-acid can still be used. Iron oxide and sodium ion are less dense than lithium ion but for an application like energy storage plants, that is less of a concern.

              And those are just chemical batteries. Other energy storage "batteries" are compressed air or molten salt technologies. I do not see anyone warmongering over compressed a

      • Solar panels aren't the only way to harvest solar energy... I've heard about solar farms where they deploy acres of mirrors to focus light on a collector mounted up high on a tower, for example.

        • Those things project a pretty fair-sized (invisible) kill zone in the airspace around the target. Something about the smell of partially cooked and rotting fowl might be just a little unpleasant to clean up on a regular basis, there might be OSHA concerns. Check the physics, I really think photovoltaic technology has a lot less question marks in this area. Not as efficient for overall energy generation, but just a little less horrific to the host ecosystem - in this case, largely arid regions where what

        • Solar panels aren't the only way to harvest solar energy... I've heard about solar farms where they deploy acres of mirrors to focus light on a collector mounted up high on a tower, for example.

          Those sites are mighty annoying to flying aircraft. Try flying westbound just south of I-40 and the railroad tracks on your way to an L.A. area airport; it is a MAJOR east-west air corridor.

          On a sun-shiny day those HUGE three solar collector-reflector power plants that are SW of the California-Nevada state line along I-15 can reflect VERY STRONG & concentrated sunlight back at the northside (shaded side) of an aircraft flying between 20,000 and 30,000 feet; aircraft start to slowly decend into the L.A.

    • Re:Undeveloped land (Score:4, Informative)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Saturday August 31, 2024 @07:02AM (#64750792)

      you can (with a permit from the BLM) hike and camp

      Actually, you rarely need a hiking permit and seldom for camping, either. Most BLM land only requires a camping permit for large groups or stays over 14 days.

      So I hope the land the government is devoting to solar farms is either remote enough or close enough to cities

      The Feds are making lots of land available, but profit-seeking capitalists will ignore the remote areas with mountains and trees, and build where the land is flat, clear, and close to existing powerlines.

      Solar can co-exist with other uses, such as grazing. In arid areas, the grass yield is limited by water, not sunlight. So, a 50% coverage by panels will result in more grass for the cattle as the partial shade reduces evaporation.

      • Shade reflection and the panels capture 20% of the solar insolation and ship it down the wires to another location. So panels cool the desert.

    • Hard to tell the difference.

  • shine baby shine (Score:3)

    by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Saturday August 31, 2024 @12:04AM (#64750412)
    It will be interesting to see what happens to any swaths of desert shaded by the panels.

    • Hence the constraints on where this will be done. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mmell ( 832646 ) on Saturday August 31, 2024 @12:57AM (#64750468)
      And just think, no cricket pumps, no smell, no tar and oil all over the place - and once it's in and connected, maintenance and replacement of equipment is a snap. A real "clean hands" kind of job, the sort of job I can train anybody of reasonable intelligence and physical competence to do successfully and well.

      • And just think, no cricket pumps, no smell, no tar and oil all over the place - and once it's in and connected, maintenance and replacement of equipment is a snap. A real "clean hands" kind of job, the sort of job I can train anybody of reasonable intelligence and physical competence to do successfully and well.

        It’s SO simple in fact, that we should see a *massive* drop in consumer costs due to no more drilling, no pumps, no smell, no tar (good thing we never found a use for that stuff), and no labor costs in getting raw material to convert into electricity at the site, right?

        I mean, once the taxpayers are forced to subsidize all panel deployment, there’s NO way they wouldn’t pass all that operational savings on to the consumer, which will be great for all of us, right?

        Right?

        *crickets replaced wi

        • If what you're complaining about here is fascism, then I'm with you, and just come out and say so. I know it's scary on this site with so many mod points assigned to libertarians, but it's the control of government by business that's ruining everything.

        • I guess we could dump oil around on the sites. Would that make you feel like we're getting our money's worth? Anyways your pull-quote doesn't say anything about money savings. Were you promised lower taxes from solar? And as a grown man, you believed that.

        • >> we should see a *massive* drop in consumer costs

          The cost of rooftop solar has declined quite a bit over the years and utility-scale has too. That plus the low price of gas has driven a great many coal plants out of business. Next it will be the gas plants.

          https://cleantechnica.com/2024... [cleantechnica.com]

          "The new edition of the study by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy
          Systems ISE on the electricity generation costs of various power plants shows
          that photovoltaic systems, even in combination with battery sto

    • It will be interesting to see what happens to any swaths of desert shaded by the panels.

      Jus curious, why do you think that will be interesting? Unless we’re going to do the whole underground city thing, guess I REALLY don’t see what you’re looking for with shaded sand.

    • As a reminder, every acre of land covered with solar panels is effectively an acre of deforestation when done in non-desert settings.

      An acre of shade deployed in a desert setting, let alone tens or hundreds of acres deployed in a desert setting would be interesting to watch, observe the impact to the environment ;how will all that shade effect the area?).

  • Is there any other usage - ranching, growing crops, summer camps for kids, housing for the homeless, anything - for which Washington would blithely fork over 31 million acres of public lands without controversy? No twenty years of trudging through a permitting process while searching for any endangered beetle that might be discomfited by paving over their land with shiny metal and supporting structures? nobody is going to claim that an ancestor considers some of those acres sacred?

    • You ain't just whistlin' dixie, pal. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mmell ( 832646 ) on Saturday August 31, 2024 @12:30AM (#64750446)

      Yeah, it's kinda like the mining corporations have been doing for decades - put a human on a chunk of dirt, improve it with a structure, keep a human living there for a while, file a claim for a deed based on the old Homestead act. You have no idea (or, more likely, don't want to hear) how much amazing land is actually already owned by corporations that have been snapping up chunks of American land - I can see where they might not appreciate this. It makes the scrub they own as valueless as it was yesterday. They'll have to keep holding it, waiting for it to become useful someday.

      So much land, so little controversy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        It is not only domestic corporations snapping up land. Foreign corporations are doing so as well, and their relationship with their home governments is very close.

      • That's not true at all as it pertains to solar on BLM land in the modern era

        At the start of the 20th century, individuals and companies could explore, develop and purchase US federal lands containing natural resources with relative ease. Under the General Mining Law of 1872, such resources were transferred to full private ownership for fairly nominal sums through a process known as âoepatenting.â

        Eventually, Congress decided that natural resources on federal lands should remain under federal owne

        • The facilities requested 50-year right of way (ROW) grants. The lifespan of the technology at Arica and Victory is expected to last 35 years and 30 years, respectively, before potentially being repowered.

          https://pv-magazine-usa.com/20 [pv-magazine-usa.com]... [pv-magazine-usa.com]

          Yes, Washington benefits from lease payments, just as for mining and oil drilling. But look at Imperial County, the next county south of this Arica project. It too is desert, and home to a lot of wind and solar development - but that development was held up for years because Greens objected to the transmission line that was to bring power from these projects to the San Diego metro area. The Green position is that transmission lines are evil even if they carry energy from Sacred Small Renewables.

    • Is there any other usage - ranching, growing crops, summer camps for kids, housing for the homeless, anything - for which Washington would blithely fork over 31 million acres of public lands without controversy? No twenty years of trudging through a permitting process while searching for any endangered beetle that might be discomfited by paving over their land with shiny metal and supporting structures? nobody is going to claim that an ancestor considers some of those acres sacred?

      Right now the only actual thing that has been accomplished, is people bragging about gigawatts worth of fucking permits.

      If this looks FAR too streamlined and efficient for Government work, then know the land hasn’t actually gone anywhere, and all of this talk is happening in an election year. Stop believing it to be true. Until they prove it with more than fucking permit talk.

    • I'm not from US so I can't really tell about what would be controversial or not, but a lot of your proposals would be hugely controversial by my place.

      * ranching, growing crops: the very purpose of public domain is that we DON'T farm it. I can name two reasons: 1) you would need to sell the land and is what public domain is supposed to avoid and 2) it leads to utter destruction of nature. Farmed land is still better than concrete, but that's about it. Low density herding of mountain goats can be respectful,

      • Really, solar (or wind) is the only reasonable industrial usage for natural land. It's the only usage that can make it useful to us humans without destroying it. It mostly works on its own, does not lead to human presence, does not disturb much the local wildlife. You probably need to trim any trees once a year, that's all. The controversy against solar comes from people who have something against green energy

        Solar is great in the built environment. Why not make use of all that rooftop area, especially when most of the usage is right there below, no transmission cost, reducing the amount that houses, malls and factories have to draw from the grid. But as a replacement for natural land? Because wind and sun are low-density sources, you have to pave over a lot of area to get usable amounts of power. Energy sprawl, just as ugly as urban sprawl.

    • No doubt there will be some of that in some of those places. But the amount of area involved means that there should still be significant quantities of suitable land available within it.

  • Finally a good use... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gustep12 ( 1161613 ) on Saturday August 31, 2024 @01:13AM (#64750486)

    of otherwise barren land and legislation to create net positive results. I think this is a great idea.

  • Enough? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rally2xs ( 1093023 ) on Saturday August 31, 2024 @09:13AM (#64750970)

    I saw an article where Elon Musk was saying that an area 100 miles by 100 miles, filled with PV solar panels would totally, completely, with appropriate batteries, 100% power the entire United States. I've seen this number before, so assume it is probably correct.

    Quick google search, 1 square mile equals 640 acres. 31 million acres is therefore 48,437 square miles. A 100 mile by 100 mile solar farm would be 10,000 square miles. So is this tract of Federal land 4.8437 times as large as necessary to power the entire USA? If not, what am I missing, I mean besides the batteries to smooth the delivery to 24/7/365?

    • In this case, perfect isn't theoretically possible. Close is possible, but is an outcome of negligible probability. Considering reasonable expectations for implementation and performance, I'd say relying upon "facts" from Mr. Musk will result in X being banned in Brazil for losing a pissing contest - oh, and what you're missing is the difference between theoretical ideal and practical reality. I recommend henceforth you consider critically all statements made by Elon Musk.

    • I saw an article where Elon Musk was saying that an area 100 miles by 100 miles

      Why rely on a verbal fart from a numbnuts? People other than Musk have been saying this sort of thing on and off for decades before he got in on the game. I don't like the way Musk seems to be able to suck up all the oxygen in the room just by being a performative twat.

      Anyway it's pretty easy to verify, more or less.

      First, switch from Freedom Units to nasty eurotrash units.

      100 miles is 160km or so.

      The insolation in a southern des

    • It's not built; it's been made available. And while a 100 x 100 mile square makes for easy math, in practice it will be broken up into irregular chunks for assorted reasons.

    • Consider that BLM land is a state, call it the state of BuLeMia. Now the gubment says, ok, you can put solar farms anywhere in the state of BuLeMia. It does not follow that the entire state of BuLeMia will be covered in solar farms.

  • Why are we not putting these over parking lits? (Score:3)

    by fortfive ( 1582005 ) on Saturday August 31, 2024 @10:30AM (#64751098)

    Shade for our cars, renewable energy, win win.

    • Tall structures have more wind load, takes a lot more concrete and steel. Also the disruption has costs. You can keep using a roof when you put PV on top, a parking lot not so much.

      • OK sure, it takes some additional planning, engineering, and installation effort. But the costs are at least partially offset by not having to build the transmission infrastructure from the remote solar farm back to the end users in the city. And the support structure could easily be built to shoulder multiple generations of panels, it would probably outlast the parking surface.

      • Tall structures have more wind load,

        What tall structures? 20 ft or so over the parking lot surface? And being horizontal, not all that much wind load.

        takes a lot more concrete and steel.

        A lot more than what? Not doing anything? Sure, but you don't get any power output from not doing anything.

        Also the disruption has costs.

        What disruption? Disruption to a parking lot? They're not used at night, mostly, so install the solar panels at night. No disruption during the day, no disruption from driving underneath solar panels 20 feet in the air.

        You can keep using a roof when you put PV on top, a parking lot not so much.

        Why not? Park under the solar panels, there shouldn't be

  • No, you can't ruin land for oil exploration or pumping, but it's ok to ruin land for giant solar farms.

    • How does a solar farm "ruin" the land? The land should be just fine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        An ecosystem is what it is in part because of how much sunlight falls on it. For example, the forest floor under old growth supports different amounts and types of species than young forest. Covering a bunch of land immediately converts it to a shady environment. Without giving native species time to move on or adapt.

        • So it changes the land. Change /= Ruin. It changes other things, too, such as making old, coal-burning electrical generating plants obsolete. You can't avoid changing things - the coal plant changes the air from good to bad. Eliminating or reducing that is better than not building solar PV in order to not change the land.

    • >> ok to ruin land for giant solar farms

      https://www.energy.gov/eere/so... [energy.gov]
      "As of March 2023, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory had identified 314 agrivoltaic projects in the United States representing over 2.8GW of solar capacity, of which most were focused on grazing and pollinator habitat, with relatively integrating crop production."

  • Covering roofs of big box stores/malls/warehouses, parking lots, and roads with solar panels. Far better to destroy our remaining wilderness

  • Wonder how many kickbacks Biden and Harris are getting from this. Nothing against Solar but leave our forest, farmlands and nature reserves alone.. Plenty of parking lots and rooftops for this crap. Same goes for drilling. Utilize our current capacity and leases..
  • Why not give tax incentives for installing them in parking lots? Provide shade for park vehicles and doesnâ(TM)t block vegetation from getting sunlight.

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