WASHINGTON —The Bureau of Land Management is updating its 2012 Western Solar Plan to increase renewable energy development on public lands in the West, loosening key technical criteria for prospective projects and adding five states to the area covered by the plan.
BLM officials speaking at a public meeting at the Interior Department on Friday said a new, expanded solar plan for the region could include Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming, along with the six states already covered by the plan: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.
The BLM is proposing to expand the Western Solar Energy Plan to include Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming. | Department of the Interior
The 2012 plan also excludes projects from public lands with slopes greater than 5% and where solar insolation — the amount of energy that can be produced — is less than 6.5 kWh per square meter per day.
“These criteria were developed based on early limitations for the prior prevalent technology, concentrated solar, rather than the current prevalent technology, photovoltaic systems,” Leslie Hill, counselor to the director at BLM, said. “So we’re interested in whether the BLM should continue using technology-based criteria to exclude lands from solar development. “
Such criteria are “static, inflexible.” Hill said. “So, they don’t change as technology or technological feasibility changes.”
In addition, Hill said, “the BLM has more experience evaluating potential solar development on public lands. More is known about avoiding or minimizing resource impacts from solar projects, and solar development demand has [grown] beyond the Southwest and California.”
The Washington event was the first of 12 in-person “scoping” meetings the BLM will hold in the coming weeks to gather public input on changes the agency should consider to the plan to increase solar development in the region. In addition to the D.C. meeting, in-person sessions will be held in each of the eleven states being considered in the plan.
“We’re mindful of balancing the needs of clean energy with our responsibility to manage important environmental, cultural and historic resources on our public lands,” BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in opening remarks at Friday’s scoping session. “As we work through this process, BLM intends to work with states, tribes, local governments and the public.”
Based on input from these and other stakeholders, the BLM will draft a “programmatic environmental impact statement” (PEIS), which “will predominately evaluate the environmental effects of potential modifications to improve and expand the BLM’s utility-scale solar planning,” according to a December announcement in the Federal Register.
Individual projects on federal land must undergo an extensive environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Hill described a PEIS as a “broad, high-level NEPA review.”
“We won’t be analyzing specific solar energy projects,” she said. “However, the analyses in this programmatic EIS will allow for greater efficiency in preparing NEPA documentation for individual projects by reducing repetitive analysis.”
The scoping period will end on Feb. 28. BLM is planning to release a draft of the PEIS this summer, with another comment period to follow, Hill said.
41 Projects Permitted
Beyond the need to update a 10-year-old plan, the main impetus for the new PEIS is the Biden administration’s drive to deploy more solar on public lands as part of its “all-of-government” approach to counter or slow the mounting impacts of climate change.
In his 2021 executive order on tackling the climate crisis, President Biden ordered the Interior secretary to review siting and permitting processes for renewable energy projects on public lands with the goal of increasing “renewable energy production on those lands … while ensuring robust protection of our lands, water and biodiversity.”
But even before Biden took office, the Energy Act of 2020 set a 25-GW target for renewable energy development — solar, wind and geothermal — on public lands by 2025. BLM says it has permitted 41 solar projects, 23 of which are in operation, totaling about 3.7 GW. The remaining 18 projects, totaling 5.5 GW, are classified as “pending construction.”
California leads the West, with 11 projects in operation and eight pending construction.
Under the Western Solar Plan, BLM created “solar energy zones” (SEZs) totaling 284,918 acres across the 97.9 million acres the agency classified as available for potential renewable energy development. Project development was encouraged in these areas, which were considered to have low potential for environmental or other permitting conflicts.
More than 78 million acres were excluded from development, based on a range of environmental and other criteria, such as whether the land provides critical habitat for endangered species or includes “traditional cultural properties and Native American sacred sites.”
Another 19 million acres were labelled “variance” areas, in which solar development was allowed, based on a careful and detailed environmental review to assess for “anticipated conflicts with sensitive and high-value resources.”
Other solar energy, exclusion and variance zones have been designated in smaller regional plans, such as the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, which covers 22.5 million acres in seven counties in Southern California, and the Restoration Design Energy Project in Arizona.
The BLM is also seeking input on whether to include these smaller regional plans in the review for the PEIS.
‘Smart From the Start’
Only two people spoke at Friday’s in-person session, but they represented some of the conflicting interests BLM will need to integrate into its review.
Ben Norris, senior director of regulatory affairs for the Solar Energy Industries Association, raised three issues that would help increase solar development on federal lands, beginning with an increase in the amount of land open for new projects.
Norris supported the expansion of the Western Solar Plan into new states, but he said, “The solar industry is also concerned about the large disparity between lands available for oil and gas leasing and lands available for solar. At least 30 times as much onshore acreage is open to oil and gas as compared to solar.”
SEIA also supports the elimination of the current technical criteria for excluding land from solar development — the 5% slope and 6.5 kWh/m2/day insolation requirements. The approval process for projects in variance areas should be streamlined, he said.
“Most solar development on BLM land occurs in these variance areas, which highlights the need to expand existing priority areas, and the current variance process can be complex, time-consuming [and] resource intensive,” Norris said. “A more efficient variance approval process with increased transparency will reduce permitting times and increase regulatory certainty.”
Nathan Marcy, senior renewable energy and wildlife policy analyst with Defenders of Wildlife, said his organization supports “well-planned” development of solar on public lands, provided it does not “worsen the biodiversity crisis through impacts to sensitive species.”
He called for BLM to use a “smart from the start” approach to renewable energy development on public lands, which first identifies “areas with sensitive resources that are not compatible with solar energy development.” All current environmental criteria for exclusion zones should be maintained and possibly expanded to “consider additional criteria, in particular regional habitat connectivity” — maintaining corridors for wildlife to move through existing habitats.
In designating new solar zones, Marcy said, “We urge the BLM to strongly consider mine lands, brownfields and other disturbed sites. We would also stress the importance of locating SEZs near transmission infrastructure as the lack of access to transmission has limited their effectiveness thus far.”
