Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [139]
Our times are stranger. Humans are refiguring their relationship with natural systems to both control more and destroy less at a time when local areas are increasingly part of global networks. We now create both the mechanical and natural worlds, but fully control neither. Perhaps it’s time for a new vision of the American relationship between technology and environment: the Turbine in the Anthrome.
chapter 27
Rehumanizing Environmentalism
THERE ARE TWENTY-FIVE or so desert tortoises crawling around a four thousand–acre patch of the Mojave Desert known as the Ivanpah Valley. A minor biological marvel, these reptiles are able to survive in temperatures of up to 140 degrees and go for a year without access to water. About a foot long, and maybe a dozen pounds, they don’t look like much.1 But this tiny little band of creatures, and others like it, may be the key lever that environmental groups use to prevent large-scale solar installations from blossoming in the vastness of California’s arid lands.
If ever there is going to be a place where solar energy works, the Mojave Desert is it. It is, as venture capitalist and solar enthusiast Bill Gross likes to say, the Saudi Arabia of solar. Even better, it’s close to the large electricity markets in southern California and Las Vegas. Looking at a map of America that’s rainbow color–coded for the most photons of sunlight available to be turned into electrons, the Mojave glows like a big red button that says to green-tech entrepreneurs, “Push here!”
But it so happens that of the 16 million acres of the Mojave Desert, 4.6 million of them are considered to be “critical habitat” for the tortoise. Putting a solar plant anywhere in—or near—that habitat requires extensive off-setting measures, if the plant can even be built despite preservationist opposition.
To make matters worse, the desert tortoise and solar developers have the same good taste in Mojave terrain. Both like “nice, broad valleys” that are relatively flat and receive huge amounts of solar energy.
It’s more than a theoretical issue. The presence of the handful of desert tortoises per square mile of land has been a huge issue for BrightSource, the descendent of Luz International, as they attempt to build a solar plant in the Ivanpah. The solar thermal power plant uses fields of mirrors to redirect the heat of the sun onto a boiler, which generates steam that drives a turbine. It’s a fairly well-established technology that can be deployed at the same size as fossil-fuel plants. At 400 megawatts of capacity, the plant would be like 100,000 or more average home solar–PV installations: That’s 40 percent more arrays than all of the solar panel installations ever put in by Americans.2 Ivanpah alone would nearly double the solar capacity in California, a state that’s told itself that it must receive 33 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. It’s nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which California is able to do that without large-scale solar power plants in the desert. Dozens of solar thermal companies are lining up to make sure that the state doesn’t have to.
Societies’ deployments of technology have surprised before, but it seems very likely that if California is going to put in thirty gigawatts of renewable energy, some big chunk of it is likely to be in the desert. Under the biggest deployment scenarios, something like forty thousand acres of Mojave may be developed for solar power in coming decades.3
The desert tortoise could quickly become the spotted owl of the solar energy industry. It is the creature that has both symbolic power for environmentalists who have been dedicated to its preservation for decades and statuary protections under the Endangered Species Act. The tortoises can act as a legal lever to protect whole swaths of the Mojave Desert from green-tech development, serving “as vulnerable symbols of biological diversity while at the same time standing