RENEWABLE ENERGY: Impacts to wildlife weighed in push toward 'green' energy

RENEWABLE ENERGY: Impacts to wildlife weighed in push toward 'green' energy

Land Letter
February 5, 2009

RELATED TOPICS
Environment and Natural Resources

Ecosystems

*Environment

Scott Streater, special to E&E

Duke Energy Corp.'s proposed wind farm in Searchlight, Nev., is being touted for harnessing the power of the Mojave Desert wind to produce enough electricity for more than 280,000 homes. And though the proposal would provide clean, renewable energy, it could also result in significant harm to wildlife.

Similar conflicts between conservation and clean energy are expected to become more frequent in the near future. Already federal offices are flooded with renewable energy applications, and President Barack Obama has made the expansion of alternative energy sources like wind and geothermal power one of his administration's top priorities.

Sure enough, the conflict is in play with Duke Energy's proposal for a $600 million wind farm in Searchlight, located about 40 miles south of Las Vegas. The farm would sit on public land that is surrounded by the Piute-Eldorado Area of Critical Environmental Concern for the federally threatened desert tortoise. Furthermore, the proposed site is in an area of heavy bird migration, putting potentially hundreds of red-shouldered hawks and spotted bats at risk of being crushed by the whirling turbine blades that will tower more than 400 feet.

"A lot of those tortoises are going to wander into this project area, and there's going to be an obvious impact," said Kevin Emmerich, administrator of Basin and Range Watch, a volunteer conservation group in southern Nevada. "The amount of energy this wind farm will produce does not outweigh the environmental disaster it's going to cause."

The Duke Energy project -- which envisions 160 wind turbines along the low ranges and hills surrounding Searchlight -- is just one of hundreds of renewable energy projects proposed to be built over the next five years in a push to both wean the country off its dependence on fossil fuels and to reduce the volume of greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global warming.

Few argue against the need to expand the use of "green" energy. But critics note that industrial scale renewable energy projects can cause widespread environmental harm that is mostly overlooked by regulators and elected leaders in the headlong rush to build wind farms, solar arrays and geothermal power plants.

These concerns have placed environmentalists in the uncomfortable position of raising objections to the types of green energy projects they have lobbied the federal government for decades to promote.

"I'm not going to say anything bad about renewable power, but it needs to be done right," said Katie Fite, biodiversity director for the Western Watersheds Project. "We can't just say renewable energy is wonderful and it's going to save the world when we're building these huge plants that destroy land, that destroy wildlife and that destroy people's quality of life." Limited federal say

Wind turbines, if not properly sited, can kill tens of thousands of birds each year, including bald eagles, raptors and red-tail hawks; large solar arrays can wipe out endangered animals and rare plants and flowers. In addition, the thousands of miles of high-tower electric transmission lines that will be needed to bring the electricity to power-hungry customers threaten already shrinking habitat for the greater sage grouse and other species across the West.

The federal Energy Information Administration reports that power companies are planning in the next four years to build dozens of wind farms, solar arrays and geothermal plants with the capacity to produce an estimated 7,574 megawatts of electricity -- enough to power roughly 6 million homes for a year.

But the federal government has no say where these power plants will be located.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2002 developed voluntary industry guidelines to site wind farms in areas that affect wildlife as little as possible.

"But they're voluntary so industry can essentially ignore them if they want," said Albert Manville, a wildlife ecologist with FWS's division of migratory bird management, of the guidelines. An example is a planned 600-turbine wind farm along the Texas coastline that is home to thousands of migrating birds and is "probably the worst place to site a wind farm in North America," Manville said.

Congress in 2007 attempted to pass legislation that would have made the voluntary guidelines mandatory. But that legislation was killed after intense lobbying by the American Wind Energy Association, Manville said.

"It comes down to location, location, location in terms of wildlife impacts," Manville said. "Let's not create a whole different set of problems to address our carbon footprint." Effects to public land

Many of the planned alternative energy projects will be built on public land.

Currently, there are an estimated 20 wind farms, and solar and geothermal energy plants in operation covering 5,000 acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, and another three that have been approved and will cover an additional 3,000 acres in Arizona, California, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. All total, those existing and approved renewable energy projects promise 577 megawatts of capacity -- enough to power 460,000 homes.

But that is nothing compared with what is on tap. There are more than 400 wind farm and solar plant applications currently under consideration by BLM and the Forest Service that if approved would cover 2.3 million acres in seven Western states and generate an estimated 70,000 megawatts of electricity -- enough to power more than 50 million homes.

"We have a substantial potential future capacity with the projects we're processing," said Ray Brady, the manager of BLM's energy policy team in Washington, D.C. "The reality is that probably a smaller portion of those projects would ever be approved and built, but that's the potential."

BLM is currently conducting a programmatic environmental impact statement to study the effects of these proposed projects on federal lands and recommend policies to address them. And FWS is leading a federal advisory committee that since 2007 has been studying what steps the federal government should take to regulate the alternative energy industry.

But it will be many months before the advisory committee report or the programmatic EIS are completed, experts said.

"There's no silver bullet," Brady said. "Every type of development activity is going to have some impact." Concerns about wind energy and birds

Of all the renewable energy sources wind energy is by far the largest, with wind capacity growing a healthy 46 percent in 2007, according to the latest federal statistics. Even though wind energy provides a clean and affordable domestic energy source, there are environmental concerns surrounding the issues of bird mortalities, migratory bird routes and species habitat disruption. With so many permit applications pending to build more wind farms, interest groups are paying closer attention to the impacts to wildlife. Courtesy of USGS.

Studies show that wind energy has the potential to supply as much as 20 percent of the country's energy needs, but doing so will require building millions of wind turbines concentrated mostly in areas stretching from Texas to Oregon.

No one is really sure what impact such a build-out will have on the birds and bats that could fly into them, but Manville estimates that as many as 440,000 birds are killed by existing wind turbines each year.

A September 2007 report, commissioned by the Wildlife Society and written by Manville and other leading experts, concluded that in the rush to develop wind energy the environmentally negative aspects of the industry are often overlooked.

"There is a dearth of information on which to base decisions regarding siting of wind energy facilities, their impacts on wildlife, and possible mitigation strategies," according to the report.

Part of the reason for this is that "wind development on the broad scale we see today really is new," said Douglas Johnson, a research statistician and senior scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Johnson was one of the co-authors of the Wildlife Society report.

These issues are going to have to be addressed in the future or wind farms could create as many environmental problems as they help solve, according to the report. "Avoiding, minimizing, and mitigating harmful impacts to wildlife is an important element of 'green energy' and developers of wind energy sources should cooperate with scientists and natural resource agency specialists in developing and testing methods to minimize harm to wildlife." Solar panels and desert tortoises

Nowhere is the conflict between green energy and wildlife conservation more pronounced than in California, which in 2006 set an ambitious goal of producing 33 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources.

Energy companies have targeted the expansive Mojave Desert on the state's south end as ideal for solar energy. The area has thousands of miles of undeveloped, federally managed land that is baked almost year round by a scorching Southern California sun.

But the Mojave Desert is far from barren, which is why environmentalists are very concerned about a proposed solar array in San Bernardino County that would cover 4,065 acres. The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System project, as proposed by Oakland, Calif.-based BrightSource Energy Inc., would produce enough electricity to power nearly 200,000 homes.

Unlike wind farms, the area will need to be bulldozed flat, destroying habitat for the desert tortoise and rare plants like the Rusby's desert-mallow, the Mojave milkweed and the desert pin cushion, said Sid Silliman, leader of the Sierra Club Gorgonio Chapter's desert committee.

"People think the desert is just a barren place," Silliman said. "But the desert is a very rich ecosystem of plants and animals."

Yet, the Ivanpah project is one of more than 100 renewable energy projects proposed for the Mojave region, most of them solar projects. Just east of the Ivanpah project is another proposed 4,000-acre solar plant, said Kim Delfino, California program director for Defenders of Wildlife.

"The challenge we face with all these permits being filed in the desert is taking a step back and trying to figure out where are the best places to develop these projects, and where are the places that make little sense to develop because they would create great conflict," she said. The need for transmission lines

The new solar arrays and wind farms that will come online over the next decade or so will require construction of thousands of miles of transmission lines to bring power to customers hundreds of miles away.

For example, leaders in Wyoming and Idaho have a series of planned transmission line projects that when completed over the next nine years will move as much as 13,000 megawatts of electricity -- enough to power more than 10 million homes -- mostly from wind farms in the two states to energy-hungry population centers across the western United States (Land Letter, Aug. 21, 2008).

One of these projects, the $2 billion Gateway West transmission line, will string together more than 4,000 electric transmission towers across nearly 1,200 miles in Wyoming and Idaho. When completed in 2013, it will move enough electricity to power 2.4 million homes across the West. But the transmission lines will cut through hundreds of acres of BLM-managed lands and could negatively affect the habitat of the threatened sage grouse, which may soon be a federally listed endangered species.

Critics say the federal government needs to do more to route the proposed power lines away from the environmentally sensitive areas.

"If there was a real commitment to screening areas in advance, and not absolutely committing to construction in particular areas until good information on what's out there has been collected, a lot of the problems we see with projects like this could be avoided," said Bruce Pendery, program director and staff attorney for the Wyoming Outdoor Council. Migration and global warming

The construction of transmission lines, wind farms and solar arrays could also impede the ability of wildlife and plants to migrate north to escape the warming climate.

Scientists have calculated that for every increase of nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, the vegetation belt shifts 60 miles north or 550 feet higher. As that happens, thousands of species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians will use the 624 million acres of federal land as corridors to migrate north to cooler climates.

The conservation group Wildlands Project has spent more than a decade developing carefully plotted migration corridors connecting already preserved lands to one another. The group is working closely with BLM, the Forest Service and the National Park Service, as well as private landowners willing to voluntarily set aside a portion of their property as a migration route, said Kim Vacariu, the group's Western director in Portal, Ariz. (Land Letter, Dec. 18).

Vacariu said the conservation group's ultimate goal is to create a 5,000-mile-long wildlife corridor from Mexico to Alaska. But a network of electricity transmission lines and wind farms crisscrossing the landscape could ruin that effort.

"Hopefully the expansion of renewable energy is a good thing, but we've really got to be careful about how we go about it," he said. Searching for solutions

Experts say the best way to protect wildlife while expanding alternative energy production is to develop a master plan to direct wind farms and solar arrays away from critical wildlife habitat. And the only way to do that is to make proper siting of wind farms and solar power plants mandatory.

"If there's going to be this big push to put them all over the place, it's time to do some master planning," said Michael Morrison, an avian ecologist at Texas A&M University who has studied the effects of wind farms on birds.

One way to do so would be to renew congressional efforts to make FWS's voluntary guidelines for wind farms mandatory.

Another idea is to create incentives for the industry to avoid environmentally sensitive areas. One mechanism would be to allow the federal government to design a kind of "certificate of approval" for companies that make the effort to locate wind farms in areas that will have little wildlife impact, said Johnson with USGS.

"The industry wants the appearance of being green, and how green their reputation is depends on how neutral their wind development site is," Johnson said. "If they are going to kill zillions of bats and birds and say 'But hey, we're generating green energy,' that's not going to work.'"

Scott Streater is a freelance journalist based in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Comment

I believe the effects on desert wildlife should be a serious consideration, but cant really see it preventing a project that will provide 40,000 homes with clean energy. I also dont believe we can wait a couple years to look at EVERY possible scenario and its implications before moving. We have a window of oppurtunity now and I believe we should take it.