Left out of my discussion yesterday of the big solar thermal proposal for the Ivanpah Valley—because I didn’t find out about it until just now—was the fact that the site that would be bulldozed for construction of the Ivanpah Solar Generating Station is of significant botanical importance.
As James M. Andre, Director of the University of California’s Granite Mountains Desert Research Center, says in his article “Will We Know What We Lost?”, in the December 2008 issue of Desert Report:
The nearly 10,000-acre Ivanpah solar energy development project, located in San Bernardino County near the California-Nevada Border, is (at the time of this article) close to approval and implementation. Prior to project surveys at Ivanpah Valley, there existed no database or herbarium records of rare plants in the footprint of the project. Results of project surveys there, however, documented 11 CNPS-listed rare plant taxa, including 80% of the known California occurrences of Asclepias nyctaginifolia.
A previously unknown type of manzanita, for instance, was recently discovered growing on a ridge above Andre’s Desert Studies Center sitting there unnoticed despite the presence of generations of botanists working below. Andre points out that this sort of thing is likely to be the case on many desert sites slated for development, as the California desert’s flora is, quite frankly, poorly known:
There is a broad misconception among the public (and to some extent among scientists and land managers) that we have completed our floristic inventory of the California desert, and that the remaining hotbeds for botanical discovery are limited to places like Indonesia and the Brazilian Amazon. Yet the California desert is, in fact, one of the remaining floristic frontiers in the United States. Numerous mountain ranges (e.g. Turtles, Dead, and Avawatz Mountains) have fewer than 100 herbarium voucher records currently housed in herbaria. The vast majority of herbarium specimens from the desert region are recorded along paved roads. New, rare, and localized endemics continue to be discovered, noteworthy range extensions are still frequently reported, and distributional limits of common taxa are poorly established. Even in areas of high research focus, such as the University of California’s Granite Mountains Desert Research Center, a new manzanita species was found growing on a ridge overlooking the laboratories below. Clearly, the Jepson Desert Manual represents only a work in progress rather than the final word on floristic diversity and distribution in our desert.
Larry Hogue has been asking whether we’d clearcut forests to put up big solar installations. It’s a fair question! And when we consider the fact that the California desert would seem to be every bit as unexplored, botanically, as a tropical rainforest or coral reef, the question arises: should we even consider paving them to provide power for people who still use incandescent light bulbs, or whose “standby-powered” electronics annually waste the equivalent output of 18 typical electrical power generating stations?
My answer: hell no.
Put your computer and your microwave and your television on a power strip that you turn off or unplug, replace your incandescent lightbulbs with LEDs, and learn how to cope with room temperatures above 72 degrees without turning on the AC, and get your neighbors to do the same, and then, maybe, we can talk about installing some big solar-generating facilities, as long as we focus on appropriate places near population centers, like this project in California’s Central Valley.
Yes, like the President Elect said, it’s gotta be about more than changing a light bulb in your house: industry, transportation and commerce account for 78% of total US power consumption. A lot of the reason for inefficient energy use is structural, in both the building and societal senses. In the household, building codes should be amended to mandate a wall switch that turns off power to all but one wall outlet, so that “standby power” can be cut off at the source easily. (Just plug your clock into the live outlet.) The building materials market is ready to explode with new photovoltaic materials, from tinted windows to siding and sidewalks.
Paving the desert should be the absolute last resort.
Isn’t there a way to design wind farms that are not only smaller and closer to where they are needed but also cause less disturbance of the ground? Do we have to go in and bulldoze everything flat before we put up a wind tower?
The same rules about habitat destruction apply for the large wind farms, and siting and design have to take careful account of migration patterns of large birds, but that’s doable, as far as I know. As I understand it, f’rinstance, the wind farms at Tehachapi Pass, on the verge of the Mojave desert, aren’t nearly as much a problem for wildlife as the better-known installation at Altamont Pass east of San Francisco/Oakland.