Abstract
In 2010, The Nature Conservancy completed the Mojave Desert Ecoregional Assessment, which characterizes conservation values across nearly 130,000 km2 of the desert Southwest. Since this assessment was completed, several renewable energy facilities have been built in the Mojave Desert, thereby changing the conservation value of these lands. We have completed a new analysis of land use to reassess the conservation value of lands in two locations in the Mojave Desert where renewable energy development has been most intense: Ivanpah Valley, and the Western Mojave. We found that 99 of our 2.59-km2 planning units were impacted by development such that they would now be categorized as having lower conservation value, and most of these downgrades in conservation value were due to solar and wind development. Solar development alone was responsible for a direct development footprint 86.79 km2: 25.81 km2 of this was primarily high conservation value Bureau of Land Management lands in the Ivanpah Valley, and 60.99 km2 was privately owned lands, mostly of lower conservation value, in the Western Mojave. Our analyses allow us to understand patterns in renewable energy development in the mostly rapidly changing regions of the Mojave Desert. Our analyses also provide a baseline that will allow us to assess the effectiveness of the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan in preventing development on lands of high conservation value over the coming decades.
Highlights
California has emerged as a world leader in the transition from fossil fuel use to renewable sources of electricity generation [1]
All three upgrades were in the Ivanpah Valley and were due to new tortoise fencing along Interstate 15 that improved the condition of habitat for tortoises within those hexagonally-shaped planning units (HPUs)
In the Ivanpah Valley, HPUs that were characterized as Ecologically Core by the Mojave Desert Ecoregional Assessment were disproportionately impacted by downgrades; these lands constituted 33.7% of the study area in 2009, but 69.9% of the 2017 downgrades occurred there
Summary
California has emerged as a world leader in the transition from fossil fuel use to renewable sources of electricity generation [1]. In 2015, California’s Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act (Senate Bill 350) codified the requirement that the state derive 50% of its electricity from renewable sources of energy by 2030 [2]. This followed the Federal Energy Policy Act (FEPA) of 2005, which called for the development of at least 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy generation on public lands by 2015. Due to these pieces of legislation, and other policy and economic incentives [1,2], solar and wind power generation in California has increased relatively rapidly (by 270%) since 2011 [3].
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