Faced with growing urgency over the need to address climate change, coupled with technological advances that will enable solar energy development in more places, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is working to balance solar development and conservation in the U.S. West.
The BLM, which stewards more than 245 million acres across the country, announced in late 2022 that it would be updating its Western solar plan. The previous plan, completed in 2012, covered Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah. The current planning effort has been expanded to cover those six states plus Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. After conducting an extensive public scoping process, the BLM released a draft solar programmatic environmental impact statement in January 2024 for public review and comment.
Climate change is wreaking havoc across the globe, from increased drought and wildfires in some places to more rain and flooding in others, along with a rise in the frequency, duration, and intensity of extreme heat events—all of which can devastate communities. The U.S. must do its part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through generation of clean, renewable energy, yet building large solar facilities on public lands also poses risks to wildlife, water sources, and communities.
The BLM solar plan is critically important for advancing renewable energy development and protecting the environment. The draft plan would locate solar energy projects away from sensitive habitats and cultural sites, placing them instead on degraded lands near transmission lines.
American public lands include critical wildlife habitat, sources of clean water for communities, and abundant outdoor recreational opportunities that contribute billions of dollars to local economies in the West. These places are also homelands of Indigenous peoples who maintain connections to their ancestral lands and waters and the cultural and sacred sites they harbor.
Unfortunately, developing solar facilities often irrevocably alters the landscape. For example, in some cases, projects have disrupted wildlife migration corridors, putting species at risk. The good news is that only approximately 700,000 acres—about 0.4% of BLM land in the 11-state planning area—will be needed over the next 20 years to meet the nation’s renewable energy goals, according to the BLM’s draft environmental impact statement (EIS). In addition to that, the California Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, a separate and previously completed planning process, identified 283,000 acres for solar development. Further, the BLM found that there are over 325,000 acres of non-BLM-managed land in the 11 states that also could be used for solar development.
By using best available science regarding the needs of wildlife, habitat, and ecosystems, along with input from Indigenous peoples and other communities, the U.S. can responsibly site solar projects and conserve natural resources. The primary underpinning to a successful solar plan is an up-to-date scientific inventory of rare plants and animals, wildlife habitat and migratory corridors, cultural sites, riparian areas, and historic sites and recreation trails, among other things. These values must be carefully mapped and analyzed to ensure that solar development is steered away from vulnerable sites.
The BLM’s draft solar plan takes steps in that direction and identifies degraded lands and those near existing transmission lines as places for solar applications.
But several of the specific exclusion criteria—conditions that determine whether an area should be available for solar development—in the draft are tied to outdated BLM management plans for how the agency will balance conservation and development. Many of those plans are more than three decades old and therefore lack current data to accurately inform exclusions. As a result, ecologically important areas may be inadvertently considered for development.
There is ample space on BLM lands for responsibly sited solar energy facilities and conservation of natural and cultural resources. By updating the exclusion criteria, the amount of land made available for solar development in the final plan will be right-sized and closely aligned with the acreage needed to achieve our nation’s renewable energy goals.
Laurel Williams works on The Pew Charitable Trusts’ U.S. conservation project.