Feds OK Huge, Controversial Solar Project Near Mojave Preserve

Looking south across the Soda Mountain Solar Project site | Photo: Michael E. Gordon, all rights reserved

A solar project that has spurred intense controversy for its likely effect on the Mojave National Preserves desert bighorn sheep has won approval from the federal government.

The Soda Mountain Solar Project, slated for more than four square miles of public lands along the north boundary of the Preserve, was formally approved Tuesday by the U.S. Department of the Interior. The project, owned by the engineering firm Bechtel, has been a flashpoint for opposition from environmental groups, who say the project would block a crucial bighorn migration route between the Preserve and the Soda Mountains to the north.

Unusually for a solar project on public lands, the Interior Department approved Soda Mountain without the projects having secured a willing buyer for the 350 megawatts of energy the plant would produce at its maximum output. The project site, a few miles southwest of Baker along Interstate 15, also lacks available transmission lines to connect the project with energy users in Californias cities.

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The Interior Departments formal Record of Decision (ROD) approving the project was actually signed by Bureau of Land Management director Neil Kornze on March 25, but wasnt made public until Tuesday after a week of swirling rumors about its impending release.

The ROD is the next-to-last step in formal greenlighting of the project; all that remains is for the BLM to grant a formal Right of Way to Bechtel to begin building photovoltaic panels and ancillary infrastructure on more than 2,813 acres of the Mojave Desert, much of it on undisturbed, old-growth Mojave upland habitat. The RODs approval of the project is based on the BLMs analysis of the projects environmental effects, which was published as Soda Mountains Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) in June 2015.

That Environmental Impact Statement assumed that Bechtel would be able to use existing transmission lines on the site to get power from Soda Mountain to Los Angeles. But those transmission lines belong to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which announced in June - the same week as the Soda Mountain EIS was released - that it wouldnt be buying power from the project. LADWP said that the project would be too environmentally destructive to justify their becoming a customer.

Some observers speculated at the time that that was a convenient bit of PR with the advantage of being plausible, and that LADWPs real reason for agreeing not to buy Soda Mountains power was that it would just be too expensive. The Southern California Public Power Authority, a consortium of municipal utilities to which LADWP belongs, has also demurred from agreeing to buy power from Soda Mountain, saying that it would be too pricy.

Those demurrals make ;it highly unlikely that Soda Mountain will be able to use LADWPs transmission lines, and so the project would need to build new transmission to sell power to other California utilities. That new transmission corridor would affect a significant acreage of the California desert, but those effects arent discussed in the EIS - an omission thats basically a classic invitation to a lawsuit.

And without that transmission, its unlikely the project will ever obtain a contract with a utility to sell its power, a necessary precursor for most companies involved in building solar power plants. (Its hard to get loans to cover costs of a project with no projected income.)

The BLM hasnt just approved Soda Mountain: Its managed the broader desert solar planning process over most of the last decade to ensure that Soda Mountain survives as a project. The Soda Mountain site isnt recognized as suitable for solar either in the massive, labyrinthine Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP) or in the even larger-scale Western Solar Plan. But the BLM has worked, since 2007 or so, to ensure that the project is grandfathered in to all larger-level solar planning documents. Thats threatened to erode both agency and public support for those planning efforts: if the wildly inappropriate Soda Mountain Solar Project gets explicitly shoehorned into a renewable energy plan against the advice of scientists, why trust that the rest of the plan is based on sound science?

Not only is there no particular demand for Soda Mountain Solars power, but the project has been met with opposition from elsewhere in the Interior Department. Soda Mountains southern boundary approaches within a third of a mile of the Mojave National Preserve. (Thats far closer than the two-mile buffer around National Park lands mandated by San Bernardino County as it works to come up with its portion of the DRECPs planning matrix for private lands in the county.) As a result of the potential serious impact on the Preserve, the National Park Service has objected to the project as pointedly as Interior Department Policy Allows. It probably didnt help matters when early BLM public maps of the Soda Mountain Solar Project site omitted any reference to the Mojave Natonal Preserve. In formal comments on the Soda Mountains EIS, the National Park Service wrote:

We have asserted consistently since 2007 that the Soda Mountain Solar project is proposed for an inappropriate location.

Among the problems NPS has expressed with Soda Mountain is that - in the words of the above-mentioned comments - the projects footprint would reduce essential desert bighorn sheep foraging areas and adversely impact lambing success in the South Soda Mountains, potentially increasing the local extinction risk of the Soda Mountain population.

The National Park Service said the Soda Mountain Solar Project would hurt the preserves bighorn sheep. The BLM approved the project anyway. | Photo: Chris Clarke

You may be wondering why the BLM would approve a project so pointe

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