JOHNSON VALLEY, Calif. — If the vast creosote-covered plain that is California's Mojave Desert represents to some the grand potential of America's renewable-energy future, Jim Harvey sees something else.

"Their model is 'You must kill land to save land,' " said Harvey, a Web- page designer and homegrown activist who sees the Obama administration's push for green energy here as a destructive force poised to swallow his beloved desert. "How does that make any sense?"

Pushed by federal stimulus money on one side and pulled by renewable- energy mandates on the other, the Mojave is about to come alive with solar energy.

Nowhere else in the country is there such a concentration of proposed renewable-energy projects on such a scale: Sixty- six projects would cover 577,000 acres of Southern California desert with a collection of photovoltaic panels, sun-focusing mirrors and sci-fi solar collectors atop 70-foot poles.

But as a showcase of the use of public lands to lead a revolutionary shift toward renewable energy, these projects cut both ways, underscoring hurdles that include a dire shortage of transmission capacity and potential for years of litigation.

And here, as elsewhere, it is increasingly clear that some of the most significant opposition to the country's biggest green- energy projects may come from, well, the greens.


Environmental concerns

In the wind corridors that sweep the Great Plains, environmentalists are concerned about the impact of the massive wind turbines on migratory birds in Texas and sage grouse in Wyoming. Scientists at the National Park Service are warning that solar-energy projects in southern Nevada could drain the warm-water caverns of the endangered electric-blue pupfish.

Sunray Energy Inc. has placed a solar-power plant in Doggett, Calif., which sits in the Mojave Desert.
Sunray Energy Inc. has placed a solar-power plant in Doggett, Calif., which sits in the Mojave Desert. (Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post)

And in the Mojave, some of the biggest solar projects have run into opposition because of their heavy water use, the impact they could have on the endangered desert tortoise and other habitat concerns.

"To knowingly run out and destroy pristine habitat in the name of saving the environment is ludicrous," said April Sall, the conservation director for the Wildlands Conservancy.

Sall and other critics have gained some influential allies. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is expected to submit legislation this fall to establish a national monument in the heart of the Mojave, setting aside up to 800,000 acres and stopping or curtailing 17 solar and six wind projects.

All of this is puzzling to the companies, which believe they are answering the call for a bold new-energy future.

"I got into this business because I feel it's the right thing to do for the future of this country," said Paul Whitworth, co- founder of Lightsource Renewables, a company that has already put one solar project on the back burner because of a combination of lack of transmission capacity and Feinstein's national monument proposal.

"It's not 'We're either going to have a solar plant or we're going to have this piece of desert left alone,' " Whitworth said. "It's 'We're either going to have a big solar plant out here in the desert or we're going to have brownouts and blackouts.' "

In some ways, the Mojave is the perfect laboratory for the dream of commercial-scale solar power. The rawhide-colored land is literally sun- baked, with an average of 340 days of sunshine a year and temperatures that can surpass 120 degrees during summer.

To some eyes, it is an unpitying terrain of rock and scrub.

"If we cannot put solar-power plants in the Mojave Desert, I don't know where the hell we can put it," an exasperated California Gov. Arnold Schwarz- enegger told an audience at Yale University last year.

But unlike small, rooftop solar plants that dominate in some European countries such as Germany, the utility-scale projects proposed for the Mojave require a vast footprint, in some cases spreading across 45 square miles of desert, scraping the landscape and dividing habitat.


The proposed technologies include enormous fields of sun-tracking mirrors that focus sunlight on top of 300-foot towers, superheating the surrounding air to as much as 800 degrees. They are nicknamed bird-zappers by environmentalists because birds and bats passing near the towers can be cooked in flight.

Scale "is just awesome"

"The scale of these things is just awesome," said Joan Taylor, a field representative for the Sierra Club.

The Sierra Club is an example of the divide the Mojave's solar projects have created within the conservation community. The group's professional staff supports many commercial-scale solar projects here as critical in the fight against global warming. Many in its powerful volunteer arm oppose their impact on habitat.

"It's that compromise thing. The minute you get into compromise, historically it's always a problem for conservationists," said Taylor, who wants the solar projects phased in more slowly and limited to already disturbed land. "We don't need to sacrifice the values of protecting habitat and biodiversity in order to combat global climate change."

As grand as the vision of tens of thousands of acres of solar fields garnering the power of the sun to light California's cities is, the Mojave's solar projects face obstacles similar to those plaguing the development of renewable-energy projects across the West.

Unlike coal-fired power plants, which can be built near transmission corridors, renewable projects need to be constructed where the power source exists, in places often remote and rural.

Power lines near Mojave are already near their limit, and little electricity will leave the area without massive new lines that are as controversial as the projects themselves.

Three environmental groups recently appealed the Bureau of Land Management's approval of a line that would carry solar-generated electricity from the Imperial Valley to San Diego. And Green Path North, a proposed transmission line to Los Angeles, has run into bitter opposition as well.

Many who live in the Mojave seem to relish the hardships of life there and resent the rush of development in the name of curbing global warming.

"Somehow you get this 'How dare they' feeling," said Betty Munson, whose house hugs the shade of a rocky ridge here, where a solar plant on 17,000 acres is proposed. "We're not talking about the amount of room that's taken for a natural-gas plant or the amount of room taken for an oil well. We're talking about thousands of acres being scraped off, and it can never come back."

It is the same kind of anger that has stopped other massive development projects on the West's public lands, from gold mines in the Rockies to the logging of old-growth forest on the Pacific Coast.

"I'm not surprised by the amount of public interest and input. Clearly we're talking about federal lands that we manage for the public," said Ray Brady, who as head of the BLM's energy-policy team was only last year facing public uproar over aggressive oil and gas drilling during the Bush administration.

"Every site location that is proposed," Brady said, "is going to have some resource conflict."

This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, the map accompanying it had incorrect labelling of Arizona.