This land is your land, this land is my land... This land was made for solar energy.
At least that’s the feeling I got from a top Obama administration official at the Atlantic magazine’s Green Intelligence Forum in D.C. this week.
David Hayes is Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior, and he’s spearheading an industry-focused campaign to highlight the best spots on U.S. public land for the development of solar power projects.
“This is a lot more fun than dealing with the BP oil spill,” Hayes said, as he began outlining the Interior Department’s approach for unlocking huge amounts of “stranded” renewable energy through transmission infrastructure while directing private business to places where siting gruntwork has already been done by the feds.
Nobody in the room doubted that moving forward with renewable energy on public land has to be more of a satisfying and future-oriented goal for Hayes than cleaning up tides of crude oil from America’s beaches.
And it makes sense to limit potential environmental problems with a minimal burden to entrepreneurs testing and deploying clean energy technology. So Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Hayes aim to make siting “smart from the start,” eliminating red tape and high survey costs for companies by directing them to locations the Interior Department has deemed ready-to-go.
To begin with, 24 areas in the western U.S. have been identified as well-suited for solar power development. That adds up to 770,000 acres of moneymaking potential through clean energy generation.
Just the day before, Salazar’s department approved the $6 billion Blythe Solar Power Project in California’s Mojave Desert. Palo Verde Solar, a division of Germany’s Solar Millennium, will develop 1,000 MW for grid connection by 2013. Blythe was given a leg up by the department’s priority treatment of clean energy projects on public lands, a power purchase agreement with Southern California Electric, and a landmark energy storage bill signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this September.
Blythe will be the largest solar power project in the world, and there are more in the offing on public lands. Take for example Ivanpah, the 392 MW solar thermal facility being built by BrightSource Energy. BrightSource counts Chevron and Google as its investors, and many industry observers expect the company to go public once Ivanpah is finished.
In Nevada, Salazar also recently okayed that state’s first large-scale solar project on public lands.
This being election season, you’re probably hearing a lot of talk about how Washington is broken. But over at the Interior Department, they’re moving from a year marked by the country’s worst-ever fossil fuel fiasco into a new drive to create green energy investment and capacity on U.S. public lands.
With this assistance for international and American companies with U.S. solar power operations, investors are sure to benefit as public power producers prove their mettle in vast, open areas.
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