Deployment of Solar Energy on Public Lands

Posted on | February 17, 2010 | Comments Off

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and the Director of the Bureau of Land Management Bob Abbey testified on “The deployment of solar technology on the public lands” before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The text of Secretary Salazar’s prepared testimony is below:

Chairmen Boxer and Sanders, Ranking Members Inhofe and Bond, and Members of the Committee, I am pleased to appear before you today to discuss deployment of solar technology on the public lands and the Department of the Interior’s role in building a new energy future. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you about these important issues.

During the first year of his Administration, President Obama has led the United States toward a clean energy future. A primary reason for delivering this change is that the United States cannot afford to fall behind in the energy technologies that will shape this century. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on imported oil – our oil dependence poses risks to our national security.

I see many reasons for hope. Renewable energy development is one of President Obama’s highest priorities, and the United States has come far in development of renewable resources this past year under the President’s leadership. As the President mentioned just last week in Ohio, new jobs are being created and many more are coming in the clean energy sector. And I know that America’s abundant natural resources will help us rise to meet the challenges we face.

The great promise of solar energy and other renewable resources has led us at the Department of the Interior to change how we do business. For the first time ever, environmentally responsible renewable energy development is a priority at this Department. Until now, our deserts, plains, forests, and oceans have been largely unexplored for their vast clean energy potential.

The possibilities are immense, and the opportunities are great. The Department oversees 20 percent of the Nation’s lands and 1.7 billion offshore acres. The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab estimates the wind potential off the East Coast of the United States in the Atlantic Ocean to be more than 1,000 gigawatts, greater than our entire national electricity demand. Turbines are already springing up to capture the energy of the wind that blows so hard across the Great Plains. We have huge solar potential in the deserts of the Southwest containing an estimated 2,300 gigawatts of energy capacity, not far from the great cities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix. Geothermal energy opportunities are bubbling up across the country. We have great opportunities to increase hydropower production through improvements in efficiency, by adding power generation units to existing facilities, and through pumped storage.

During the past year, we offered new areas for oil and gas development, but instituted reforms to ensure we are offering leases in the right places and in the right way. Importantly, and relevant to today’s hearing, we have also opened the new renewable energy frontier – not just for solar power, but also for wind, geothermal, and hydropower – on America’s lands and waters that will help power our clean energy economy.

As we open this new energy frontier, new development and new technology deployment on public lands will help solve key challenges in reliability, storage, and transmission of renewable energy and ultimately could mean lower costs to the private market in meeting energy demands.

Solar energy is the most widely available source of energy on earth.

There are two ways that solar energy can be converted to electricity. The first, known as “concentrated solar thermal,” uses the sun to heat fluid, producing steam that is used to power an electric generator. This technology generally uses mirrors arranged in an array that concentrates the sun’s rays to heat the fluid, and is often used for large, utility-scale projects. The second system uses photovoltaic cells – what most would identify as solar panels – that are made of special materials that change sunlight directly into electricity. Because of this property, they are available for many different uses, such as powering calculators and lights; small arrays can power a home; and large arrays make up large power plants. New and more efficient generations of these cells are being developed. It is a truly exciting technology that holds much promise.

The amount of sun available for the creation of solar energy depends on several variables, including the time of day, time of year, and the location. The Department manages a significant amount of the public land in the southwestern United States, and because of the amount of sunlight that region receives it is an ideal location for the development of solar energy on a utility-level scale.

I mentioned that we cannot afford to fall behind. Over the past year, as we have worked to make the President’s vision a reality, there has been much discussion in the media about the development of these technologies in other nations. We have heard that China is now the world leader in the manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines, and it has targeted the development of renewable and low-carbon energy as a priority. A number of European countries, including Spain and Germany, have developed aggressive policies that have led to expanded development of renewable, specifically solar, energy.

The Department’s vast land ownership and the breadth of our management responsibilities over those lands has put us in a unique, and important, role with regard to the domestic development and transmission of solar energy. The possibility of capturing the sun’s abundant energy and making it usable as a clean, non-polluting source of power; the potential of American ingenuity to drive more efficient applications; and the promise of additional jobs for the new energy economy are ensuring that we at the Department are moving quickly to responsibly develop this tremendous energy potential on our public lands.

Renewable energy was the subject of my first Secretarial Order, back in March 2009. That Order made facilitating the production, development, and delivery of renewable energy, including solar energy, on public lands and the Outer Continental Shelf top priorities at the Department. I have pledged that these goals will be accomplished in a manner that does not ignore, but protects our signature landscapes, natural resources, wildlife, and cultural resources.

I believe that actions speak louder than words.

We are redoubling our efforts to evaluate existing applications for renewable energy projects, including solar projects. The BLM is currently processing approximately:

•128 applications for utility-scale solar projects that involve approximately 77,000 megawatts and 1.2 million acres of public land;
•95 geothermal energy drilling applications;
•257 applications for wind testing rights-of-way; and
•24 applications for wind energy projects.
We have opened Renewable Energy Coordination Offices in California, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona and established teams in six other states—Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon/Washington and Utah—that are charged with expediting the required reviews of ready?to?go solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass projects and supporting the prompt permitting of appropriate transmission-related projects on our public lands.

We worked with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to develop and enter into a Memorandum of Understanding that resolved jurisdictional concerns that had resulted in the delay of renewable energy projects on the OCS. We have also put in place long-awaited offshore renewable energy rules, creating the first-ever framework for offshore renewable energy development, which we expect to result in the development of significant offshore wind energy potential. We subsequently awarded four exploratory leases for wind energy production on the OCS offshore of New Jersey and Delaware.

Finally, just last month I announced that the Minerals Management Service will establish an Atlantic renewable energy regional office this year – this will be the first federal office specifically supporting renewable energy development on the OCS. I have invited the governors of Atlantic coast states that are considering the development of offshore wind energy projects to meet at Interior Headquarters next month to explore how to support and coordinate the development of this new industry. As the Department explores the potential for renewable energy in offshore areas, wind energy production in the Atlantic offers great promise and this meeting will allow us to exchange ideas and chart a coordinated path forward to advance further, appropriate development of the resource.

These and other accomplishments are moving us toward increased production and use of renewable energy and our goals of reduced dependence on oil and curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Specifically with regard to solar energy, I have visited solar energy projects in both the East and the West, and met with the employees of innovative clean energy sector companies making necessary components like next-generation thin-film solar photovoltaic modules. We, along with these entrepreneurs, are ensuring that solar development remains at the forefront of the clean, renewable energy frontier.

Over the past year we have worked diligently to prioritize the development of renewable energy on our public lands and our offshore waters and, as a result last June I, along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, announced the identification of 1,000 square miles, 24 tracts of Bureau of Land Management-administered land, in the West as Solar Energy Study Areas. We are fully evaluating these areas for their suitability – from both an environmental and resource perspective – for the large-scale production of electricity from solar energy.

And, along with DOE, we are preparing a Solar Energy Development Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, due for public release in late 2010, that provides a landscape-scale plan for siting solar energy projects on our public lands in the Southwest that have been identified as having the best potential for utility-scale solar energy development. The BLM has identified approximately 23 million acres with solar energy potential, including the 24 Solar Energy Study Areas, which are being reviewed as part of this process to evaluate the environmental suitability of solar energy development across the West. The Solar Energy Study Areas alone have the technical potential to generate nearly 100,000 megawatts of solar electricity, enough to power millions of American homes. The public comment period on these solar study areas closed in September 2009, and we are evaluating the comments we received.

We believe that landscape-scale planning and zoning for solar projects on our public lands will provide a more efficient process for permitting and siting of this type of development.

To further make our goals a reality, we have announced 34 “fast track” renewable energy projects. Fast-track projects are those where the companies involved have made sufficient progress in the environmental review and permitting process that they could potentially be cleared for approval by December 2010, thus making them eligible for economic stimulus funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Fourteen of the 34 fast-tracked projects are solar energy projects. These include several different types of concentrated solar thermal technologies – like solar engine, parabolic trough, and power tower – and photovoltaic cells, and are located in Arizona, California and Nevada. All are currently undergoing detailed environmental impact reviews, and if ultimately approved, some 5,000-6,000 megawatts of new capacity, in California, Arizona, and Nevada, could be permitted for construction by the end of this year. Moreover, our analysis indicates that tens of thousands of jobs could be created in the development of these projects alone.

In this same vein, California Governor Schwarzenegger and I announced last fall a Memorandum of Understanding between the State and the Department that will expedite the process of siting, reviewing, approving and permitting renewable energy projects on Department-managed lands in California.

Finally, we must recognize that the development of transmission capacity for this new energy production is a crucial element. Developing solar and other renewable energy resources, which are often located in remote areas, will require new transmission capacity to bring this clean energy to the population centers where it is needed. The Department has already identified and designated more than 5,000 miles of transmission corridors on the lands it manages to facilitate the siting and permitting of transmission lines in the right ways and in the right places, and we are processing more than 30 applications for major transmission corridor rights?of-way on the lands we manage, with 7 applications in Idaho, California and Nevada that could add more than 1,000 miles of new transmission, on the “fast track” to potential permitting this year.

The Obama Administration also continues to cut through bureaucratic barriers. In October 2009 the Administration announced that nine federal agencies, including the Department, had signed a Memorandum of Understanding designed to expedite the siting and permitting of electric transmission projects on federal lands. This agreement commits the participating agencies to close coordination and a number of procedures to improve the federal process under existing authorities, including establishing a single point of contact for all required federal authorizations.

Renewable energy development presents tremendous opportunity, but meeting the potential of that opportunity requires tremendous work.

I am proud of the work already underway at the Department of the Interior, and I look forward to continuing this work as it bears fruit.

Thank you.

Preserving World’s Biodiversity Vital for the Economy

Posted on | February 16, 2010 | Comments Off

United Nations, New York, NY — Saving the world’s myriad diverse species, which are being lost to human activity at an unprecedented rate that some experts put at 1,000 times the natural progression, is vital not just for environmental reasons but for the economic well-being of humankind, a senior United Nations official said today.

“Without preserving biodiversity and preserving our natural habitat, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) just cannot be achieved,” UN Development Programme (UNDP) Environment and Energy Group Director Veerle Vandeweerd warned, referring to targets set by the 2000 UN summit to slash a host of social ills, from extreme poverty and hunger to maternal and infant mortality to lack of access to education and health care, all by 2015.

Stressing the importance of the UN naming 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity, she cited former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who in 1993 said that the library of life is on fire. “And 17 years later the library of life, which is our biodiversity, is still on fire,” Ms. Vandeweerd told a news briefing in New York.

The reason why UNDP is “so involved in biodiversity and why we think it is so important is indeed because biodiversity is not about greenness, biodiversity is about the economy, and biodiversity is about the life of people at the community level.

“The loss of biodiversity and the degradation of natural resources impact first and foremost the poor and the women and the vulnerable and we should not forget that three quarters of the world’s population depend on natural resources for their daily living and their daily survival, from the food, the shelter, the recreation, everything; three quarters of the world population is directly related to biodiversity on this planet.”

In launching the Year, the UN has stressed that the variety of life on Earth is vital to sustaining the living networks and systems that provide health, wealth, food and fuel.

“Humans are part of nature’s rich diversity and have the power to protect or destroy it,” the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which is hosted by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), says in summarizing the Year’s main message, with its focus on raising awareness to generate public pressure for action by the world’s decision makers.

The Convention, which opened for signature at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, entered into force at the end of 1993 and now has 193 Parties, is based on the premise that the world’s diverse ecosystems purify the air and the water that are the basis of life, stabilize and moderate the Earth’s climate, renew soil fertility and pollinate plants.

Yet human activity is causing this diversity to be lost are irreversibly at a greatly accelerated rate. As an example, Ms. Vandeweerd cited marine species. “In fact, the last frontier of the world lies in the ocean and it’s sad to see that we are destroying our oceans so quickly before we even know which biodiversity is harboured in the ocean,” she said.

“The deep sea biodiversity is something that we are just coming to know, is already being destroyed by all kinds of fishing. We are still discovering new species in the deep sea every single day and before we even discover them we are killing them.”

UNDP is working in two key areas in the field of biodiversity: to unleash the economic potential of protected areas (22 per cent of Earth) to help communities there achieve more sustainable livelihoods; and in the rest of the world to insert biodiversity in the economic sector such as agriculture, forestry, mining and tourism.

“For us there is no doubt that the Year of Biodiversity hopefully should become a year when we pay much more attention to biodiversity and conservation… where the world will pay at least as much attention to biodiversity as to climate change,” she concluded.

Too Dependent On Electricity

Posted on | February 14, 2010 | Comments Off

Inspired by my friend and colleague’s blog post, Snowed Under in our Green House, I decided to focus this blog on the main event of the larger Washington metropolitan area this week—the massive snowstorms and blizzards. Due to the inclement weather, the area was virtually paralyzed for days. Many schools systems, businesses, and government agencies remain closed.

While we were snowed in at home, the power went off intermittently. One day we were without power for a span of 15 hours! During that long stretch without electricity, we had no heat and, of course, no functioning appliances. Our only lifeline to the outside world was a battery-operated radio. I must note that thanks to the green repairs we made to our home last year, the temperature in the house stayed relatively stable even without heat during that blackout. While it did cool down after 12 hours without power, it was nothing that an extra layer of clothing couldn’t handle.

While we were snowed in, I realized how dependent we have become on electricity for home entertainment. We take for granted the fact that we cannot use our television sets, computers, the Internet, electronic toys, rechargeable batteries, wireless technology without electricity. As a family we rediscovered some traditional forms of entertainment like board games to pass the time. My youngest even read several books on her own initiative. Not a bad lesson during the blizzard of 2010.

Nonetheless, I would like to leave you with some advice for future snow and ice storms. Try to have the necessary supplies well in advance so you don’t have to venture out unnecessarily during inclement weather. Use generators and other combustion appliances wisely. Stay safe.

Climate Engagement

Posted on | February 11, 2010 | Comments Off

NOAA Awards Grants — Coastal residents, businesses and decision-makers around the country will consider how their communities can adapt to climate change through eight newly awarded NOAA National Sea Grant College Program grants.

Each of these $25,000 climate engagement mini-grants will support projects focused on preparing for changing climate conditions. The projects will be led by principal investigators from local Sea Grant programs and NOAA Regional Collaboration Teams in eight regions including Alaska, the Pacific Islands and sections of the mainland United States.

“Since our Sea Grant researchers and extension agents serve the local coastal communities in which they live, Sea Grant is well-suited to connect NOAA science to the needs of local coastal communities,” said Leon Cammen, Ph.D., director of the NOAA National Sea Grant College Program. “Issues related to climate change are a Sea Grant priority.”

The Mini-Grants will fund projects in the following regions:
* Alaska Region – To produce a short video on the effects of climate change on Alaska and how Alaska marine-dependent communities can plan for adaptation. The video will be a focal point of community workshops around the state and will be shown on statewide television and on the Internet. Principal investigators: Paula Cullenberg, Alaska Sea Grant Marine Advisory Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Amy Holman, NOAA Alaska Regional Coordinator.

* Central Region – To sponsor the Native Peoples and Native Homelands II Workshop to give NOAA and Sea Grant opportunity to engage Native American, Alaskan and Hawaiian people on climate variability and impacts on tribal communities. Principal investigators: Bethany Hale, NOAA Central Regional Coordinator and Penelope Dalton, Washington Sea Grant at the University of Washington.

* Great Lakes Region – To create training modules to prepare leaders of coastal communities around the Great Lakes to develop climate adaptation plans necessary to keep their communities safe and productive into the next century. Principal investigators: Rochelle Sturtevant, Great Lakes Regional Sea Grant Extension Educator of Michigan Sea Grant and Elizabeth Mountz, NOAA Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management.

* Gulf of Mexico Region – To present a week-long training session for local government, Sea Grant and NOAA staff on how local communities can adapt to impacts of climate change such as sea level rise, increased flooding and more extreme weather events. Following the workshop, participants will be able to continue collaborations through a discussion forum on the NOAA Coastal Storms Web site. Principal investigators: Buck Sutter, NOAA Gulf of Mexico Regional Team leader; Karl Havens, Florida Sea Grant College Program at the University of Florida; and LaDon Swann, Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium.

* North Atlantic Region – To establish a regional network of “climate ambassadors” through training for staff of NOAA’s North Atlantic Regional Team and Sea Grant extension agents. Sessions will cover the latest science as well as climate information and tools available from NOAA. The initial trainees will hold local training sessions in their home states. Principal investigators: Peyton Robertson, NOAA North Atlantic Regional Team leader and Sylvain De Guise, Connecticut Sea Grant College Program at the University of Connecticut.

* Pacific Islands Region – To prepare a Pacific Climate Change Impacts Resources Guide. Funding supports production of two stand-alone chapters of the guide planned for educators. The guide is for use in a larger effort of climate outreach and education activities. Principal investigators: Darren Okimoto, University of Hawaii Sea Grant; Eileen Shea and Lynn Nakagawa, NOAA Integrated Data and Environmental Applications Center/Pacific; and James Weyman, NOAA National Weather Service Climate Information System.

* Southeast and Caribbean Region – To establish a regional network of climate extension and outreach professionals and strengthen the network’s ability to provide information, tools, and assistance related to climate change impacts and adaptation. This project will bring extension and outreach personnel together to share information and will maintain a network for on-going communication. Principal investigators: Charles Hopkinson, Georgia Sea Grant Program at the University of Georgia; Jessica Whitehead, South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium; Stephanie Fauver, NOAA Coastal Services Center in Charleston, S.C.; and Geno Olmi, NOAA Southeast and Caribbean Regional Coordinator.

* Western Region – To present a workshop to engage recreational fishers, resource managers, scientists, and environmentalists in assessing and planning for climate change impacts on West Coast fisheries. The workshop will be the first step toward implementing a climate change plan for West Coast fisheries. Principal investigators: John Stein, NOAA Western Regional Team leader and Penelope Dalton, Washington Sea Grant at the University of Washington.

The Climate Engagement Mini-Grant Program is modeled after the NOAA Stakeholder Engagement Mini-Grant program, which distributed grants in 2009 to fund regional pilot projects engaging communities in issues of interest to both NOAA and local residents. The goal of the new program is to leverage NOAA and Sea Grant resources to help coastal communities adapt to climate change.

Sea Grant is a nationwide network of 32 university-based programs that work with coastal communities. The National Sea Grant College Program engages this network of the nation’s top universities in conducting scientific research, education, training, and extension projects designed to foster science-based decisions about the use and conservation of our aquatic resources.
NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.

The Sea Level Is Expected to Rise / Image Courtesy of Quest Expedition 2001