Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [146]
Despite the continuing opposition, in March of 2010 the California Energy Commission recommended that the Ivanpah plant move forward. “The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) project is iconic of the coming transformation of the electric generation system in California, and perhaps the country as a whole,” the CEC’s staff explained. 34 Although BrightSource had to make considerable concessions, they will be able to build their plant. That is a good thing. Brightsource broke ground in October 2010 at a star-studded event featuring California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. “Some people look out into the desert and see miles and miles of emptiness,” Schwarzenegger said. “I see miles and miles of gold mine.”35
There is no turning back on the enormity of human civilization’s impact on the globe. Now is the time to recognize that even the wildest Amazonian and Mayan jungles are feral landscapes that have been permanently and massively altered. “We’ve got to stop trying to save the planet,” Ellis wrote in a WIRED Science article. “For better or for worse, nature has long been what we have made it, and what we will make it.”36
Viewed as an anthrome, as a human space, the Mojave already has seen massive alterations. For one, there are already nine solar electric generating stations built by BrightSource’s predecessor Luz International. A couple of them cover 250 acres of land near Kramer Junction. Most traditional accounts of the solar plants emphasize how massive the plants are. “The rays captured on the huge, rain-gutter-shaped mirrors fire sleek tubes of synthetic oil, which in turn generate enough turbine-driving steam to power more than 100,000 homes,” wrote Paul Pringle for the Dallas Morning News in 1989. One expects them to dominate the desert landscape, but in context, there was little dissonance between the plants and their surroundings. They were not out of scale.
Maybe it’s because just down the road, one of the world’s largest boron mines has made a hole in the earth that’s bigger than the mirror field and five hundred feet deep. Maybe it’s because on the way to Kramer Junction we drive past the giant logistics companies near Victorville, with their million-square-foot warehouses connected to the entire world by plane and train, the road-facing flanks of the buildings perforated with hundreds of semi-bays for trucking plastic toys and lawn furniture the last mile of the journey. Maybe it’s because on the drive back to the coast, we pass through the haze-filled San Joaquin Valley, in which a few mechanically enhanced hired hands create food on a truly impressive scale: miles and miles of fields feed just a tiny slice of our hunger for almonds. The whole enterprise is tawdry and sublime at the same time.
Out there, in the Mojave’s industrial context, where lots of things are happening on the scale of the global economy, having 250 or 2,500 acres of mirrors making steam to turn a turbine is not that weird. Nature-loving city people don’t go to the human areas of the Mojave for a reason: That country is big, mechanical, and fast. It is the opposite of what people wander into the wilderness for. But that’s where these solar plants are going, out where the land is cheap, where energy and stuff are made and moved. The Ivanpah solar power plants may seem huge, but they will eventually take up only 0.025 percent of the Mojave. In the geography of infrastructure and on the scale of the global climate, a million square meters of mirrors may be defined as small and beautiful—or at least sublime.
People conceive of the American wilderness, Bill Cronon argued, as “the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where