Eager to push its decarbonization agenda before its term expires in January, the Biden administration is speeding up the issuance for permits for solar projects, along with their supporting infrastructure, on millions of acres of federal land across the West.

In an Aug. 28 announcement, the White House said the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had identified 31 million acres (over 48,400 square miles) of federal land in 11 states deemed suitable for solar development.  The states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.

'Environmental Justice'

A press release issued by BLM brimmed with enthusiasm for the agency’s plans for solar development, putting it in the context of the White House’s larger energy agenda.

“The proposed Western Solar Plan builds on President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, which is working to transition the nation to clean energy, lower energy costs to consumers, create good-paying union jobs, tackle the climate crisis, and advance clean air and environmental justice priorities, with the goal of achieving a 100-percent clean-electricity grid by 2035,” the administration said.

“We’ve been really pushing ourselves to use our executive authority wherever possible to improve the federal permitting process,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian said in an interview, Reuters reported.

The accelerated permitting process would also cover renewable-energy infrastructure, such as generation interconnect, or gen-tie lines, defined by SelectROW, a land and right-of-way services company, as “a series of poles, wires, cables, anchors, and foundations connecting nearby power generation sites and substations.”  The system transmits an electrical current to a substation before the power reaches the grid to condition it for long-distance transmission to local power infrastructures.

Though not mentioned in the BLM press release, the renewable energy infrastructure could also include battery storage, needed to keep power flowing when the sun doesn’t shine and – in the case of wind turbines – when the wind doesn’t blow.

Washington Has the Final Say

Aside from the enormous amount of land in question, one of the things that makes putting solar and wind projects on federal land so attractive to renewable-energy enthusiasts, in and out of government, is the near absence of resistance by local communities.  Decisions to put up wind turbines and solar arrays on public land are made by the feds, not by local governments.  State and local officials, along with ordinary citizens, can submit comments to the BLM or rail at public hearings, but the final decision is made in Washington.

But in the world of private ownership of land, things are different.  Some farmers and other rural landowners, eager to boost their income, lease out part of their property to solar developers.  That, however, has triggered a backlash, with a growing number of counties in rural America throwing up roadblocks to what many see is an invasion by “Big Solar.”  “Of the 116 counties implementing bans or impediments to utility-scale solar plants, half did so in 2023 alone, USA Today reported in February.

Developers are eager to pocket the federal solar power subsidy, known as the Investment Tax Credit (ITC), without which putting up a solar plant makes no financial sense.  Their stake in the enterprise, like that of the leasing landowner, is clear.  But what about their neighbors?  Industrial-scale solar plants contain thousands of solar panels that occupy huge swaths of land, but they degrade after 15 or 20 years and must be replaced.  Touted as part of the “clean energy solution,” solar power is anything but clean.

'Ecological Wasteland'

“Construction of an industrial-scale solar power plant requires removal of trees, brush, and root balls prior to the installation of the arrays, creating an ecological wasteland,” Citizens for Responsible Solar points out.  “Grading, pile driving, blasting, electric cable trenching, and road construction will compact the soil, likely delaying agricultural use for years after the project’s end.”

“Uncontrolled runoff of water and topsoil is a well-documented byproduct of industrial solar site development,” the group adds.  “This massive increase in watershed sedimentation impacts all downstream rivers and estuaries.  Water contamination doesn’t stop with the end of construction.  Removal of all trees and deep-rooted plants, along with inadequate stormwater controls lead to long-term runoff and water contamination issues.” 

The environmental case for industrial-scale solar arrays is as weak as that for giant wind turbines, whether onshore or offshore.  Both have in common that they are intermittent sources of electricity and thus woefully inadequate for meeting the soaring power demands of our emerging AI-driven, 21^st-century industrial base. 

Loading up federal lands with millions of inefficient, chemical-laden solar panels, as the Biden-Harris administration plans to do, is throwing taxpayers’ money at a technology that can never deliver.

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Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).