UpdatedThu, Feb 18, 2021 at 9:35 am PT
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The highlighted area is part of the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan. (Data Basin)
COACHELLA VALLEY, CA Federal officials Wednesday announced that President Joe Biden s administration intends to halt an effort by his predecessor that would have opened up millions of acres in the Southern California desert to mining, energy development and broadband infrastructure, a move activists said would have been catastrophic to desert wildlife populations.
Just days before former President Donald Trump s departure from the White House, the Bureau of Land Management announced a series of proposed amendments to the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan. The framework, finalized in 2016, designated nearly 11 million acres of federal land for conservation and recreation across the Southern California desert.
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This is the Jan. 21, 2021, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
The last story I wrote before Donald Trump was elected president, four years and two months ago, was about the Obama administration’s claim that it had approved 60 renewable energy projects on public lands, capable of powering up to 5 million homes. I scrutinized those numbers, finding they dramatically overestimated the outgoing president’s accomplishments.
When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton a few days after the story published, I started to wonder if I had wasted my time.
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A recently enacted U.S. energy innovation package has set a bold new goal for the U.S. Interior Department: the siting and permitting of 25 GW of renewable energy projects on federal lands by 2025.
Reaching that target would mean more than tripling the slightly more than 8 GW of total renewable generating capacity approved since 1978 by the Bureau of Land Management, an agency within the Interior Department.
Industry experts say the aspirational goal is possible, but it will require revamped environmental permitting processes and a major buildout of electric transmission capacity. The challenge could serve as a key test for President-elect Joe Biden s administration as he seeks to implement a $2 trillion climate and energy plan that aims to completely decarbonize the nation s electric grid by 2035.
Microgrid Knowledge – January 8
Smarter Grid Solutions has proposed building networked microgrids for the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Hoopa, California, a remote area where the tribe is subject to outages because of public safety power shutoffs. The project would network, behind the meter, a number of small microgrids located in critical buildings. The Hoopa Valley Tribe’s microgrid effort differs in important ways from Blue Lake Rancheria’s well-known tribal microgrid, also located in California. In the Hoopa Valley project, the assets are spread out, and there is no infrastructure on the tribal land that’s available for the tribe to use. If a community or tribe doesn’t own the infrastructure, another option is to network small pockets of energy, as Smarter Grid Solutions has proposed.