“Energy independence” has been the Republican energy policy since 1974-
Americans have a bad case of Alzheimer’s when it come to knowledge or remembrance of energy policy. Politicians usually give them a couple shots of rhetorical whiskey to make their memory even worse. This is my effort to help folks remember.
Gasoline prices spiked in the United States for the first [...]
Continue Reading →Another Solar Development, Another Lost Landscape ?
Chris Clarke gives a remarkable account of another landscape that has found its way into the cross-hairs of Solar Developers and Big Green, and of the locals’ abiding love for the land:
Solar Energy Development in the Carrizo Plain Draws Lawsuits – KCET – The Back Forty
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Continue Reading →Some current cooperation with the Sierra Club suggests so-
Solar companies need to do offsets to reduce harms, and hopefully at times they can improve wildlife habitat. Here is a recent hopeful story. Solar companies learn to play nice with environmentalists. By Ucilia Wang. Gigaom.
Continue Reading →Centralized corporate solar energy is green? not a chance!
Story on testimony by Frank de Rosa, First Solar executive. Arizona Daily Star.
This guy sounds just like an oil company executive with his complaints that they can’t just bulldoze wildlife and vegetation on our public lands. We need to kill this [...]
Continue Reading →Suggests government policy/subsidies – not free market – give wildlife conflicting, utility-scale projects an edge over distributed generation
NRG Energy CEO David Crane, lead investor in the controversial Ivanpah Solar Thermal Energy Project, discusses why giant utility-scale renewable energy projects are economically viable and what the future might look like for renewables with a [...]
Continue Reading →The Ivanpah solar thermal project consists of 5.4 square miles of high quality habitat for the Endangered Species Act protected desert tortoise, a fact that developers (and some investors) underestimated resulting in the temporary suspension of activities on phases 2 and 3 of the project site due to construction activities exceeding the incidental [...]
Continue Reading →Threshold Number of ESA Protected Desert Tortoise Killed In Construction of Solar Thermal Plant
We just received notice that the BLM has suspended construction of some of the the Ivanpah Solar Thermal Power Plant due to the project reaching its upper limit number of tortoise killed for the Biological Opinion and incidental take limits [...]
Continue Reading →Project already blading Mojave desert habitat
Google announces its private investment in Brightsource Energy, the proponent of the controversial Ivanpah Solar Thermal Project:
Google Solar Project: Google Invests $168 Million In Mojave Power Plant – Huffington Post
The commitment announced Monday is part of the financing that BrightSource Energy needs to build a solar [...]
Continue Reading →Wind and solar development could be very destructive to Nevada’s wildlife-
Energy development poses challenge to wildlife habitat. By Larry Johnson. Las Vegas Review-Journal.
And unsaid is the continuing bad idea of centralized energy generation, even if it is said to be renewable.
Continue Reading →Endangered Desert Tortoise Further Imperiled by Remote Solar Plant
For several months we’ve been covering the progress of the, now approved, solar power plant at Ivanpah near Las Vegas on the California side of the Nevada/California border. Initial construction has begun and biologists have rounded up as many desert tortoises as they can to [...]
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