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from— www.solardoneright.org
U.S. Public Lands Solar Policy—WRONG from the START
This press release from solardoneright.org was issued in early April. Please follow the link following the statement to read the entire document, 'Wrong from the Start.'
the
2005 Energy Policy Act," said the report's lead author Janine Blaeloch,
Director of Western Lands Project and a co-founder of SDR. "But the
Act doesn't order Interior to put solar plants on public lands. It just
says that Congress thinks ten gigawatts of public lands solar would be
a good idea. There's no mandate."
The
11,000-page PEIS identifies 24 Solar Energy Zones (SEZs) in six
southwestern states, covering 677,000 acres of public lands - more
than 1,000 square miles — much of it with immense ecological and
cultural value. The administration's "Preferred Alternative" would
allow development on more than 20 million acres outside the SEZs, an
area the size of the State of Maine.
"Despite
all the damage public lands solar development will cause, the Obama
administration's PEIS ignores sensible alternatives such as
conservation and distributed generation," said Kevin Emmerich of Basin
and Range Watch in Nevada, an SDR member group.
"The PEIS charts a path of needless harm to the southwestern environment."
"The
Interior Department wants to generate 10 gigawatts of solar on public
lands by 2015," added Ceal Smith of the San Luis Valley Renewable
Communities Alliance, the SDR member group in Colorado.
"It
would be faster, cheaper for ratepayers and would create many more jobs
if we focused on massive distributed solar generation in our vast urban
land-
NEW REPORT BLASTS ADMINISTRATION'S PUBLIC LANDS SOLAR POLICY
APRIL
4, 2011 - The Obama administration's mammoth environmental impact
statement for its public lands solar program is fatally flawed, has no
legal justification, and should be scrapped, a leading solar energy
advocacy group says.
Solar
Done Right (SDR), a coalition of conservation and energy policy groups
and advocates, released a report today that blasts the administration's
public lands solar policy, saying that the alternatives detailed in the
draft Solar Energy Development Programmatic Environmental Impact
Statement (PEIS) targeting
public lands as the first development priority for renewable energy is "a grave mistake in need of reversal."
The report, "US Public Lands Solar Policy: Wrong From The Start," details
the
serious environmental damage that such wholesale energy development on
public lands would cause, and the inefficiencies inherent in remote,
utility-scale power generation.
According
to the report, massive solar power plants and the transmission lines
they require would do irreversible, long-term, ecological damage to
these lands, threatening rare species and consuming scarce groundwater,
while doing little to reduce the nation's carbon emissions, with some
desert projects even releasing carbon deposits that have been
sequestered for many thousands of years.
Perhaps
most startlingly, the report challenges the administration's claim that
its hands are tied by renewable energy provisions in the Energy Policy
Act, passed by Congress in 2005.
"The push for public lands solar has been justified as following a mandate in
scapes. It makes no sense to bulldoze our valuable, intact and irreplaceable public lands first."
READ THIS!!!!!!!
U.S. PUBLIC LANDS SOLAR POLICY: WRONG FROM THE START
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