Public lands being developed for renewable power
Interior secretary defends record
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar told a National Press Club audience April 24 in Washington, D.C. that the Obama administration has made great strides toward developing renewable energy on federal lands.
Most of the discussion centered on recent headlines like gasoline prices and the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill, for instance. Salazar also defended the Obama administration’s highly touted “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, and oil and gas drilling, in which the Interior Department has a major say.
Salazar also touted renewable energy development occurring on large tracts managed by Interiors’ Bureau of Land Management.
“Renewable energy production has doubled over the past three years,” Salazar said. “And on public lands, we’re well on our way to meeting the president’s goal of permitting 10,000 MW of large-scale renewable energy projects by the end of the year,” he said.
At the federal level, Obama policies were given credit for breaking logjams on site development on public lands and waters.
“At the beginning of 2009, not a single, large-scale solar energy project had been approved for construction,” he said. “Offshore, Cape Wind had been a process disaster languishing for eight long years in a process that had no end.”
He said 29 utility scale solar, wind and geothermal projects have been approved on federal lands in the West that will provide over 6,500 MW of clean power. Cape Wind has been approved and an offshore program has been put in place along the Atlantic Coast.
“None of this would have happened if we hadn’t ensured that government reviews are coordinated and done in a timely basis,” Salazar said.
He bemoaned Washington gridlock and the inability of any meaningful energy policy to be adopted. Salazar said public consensus has had produced some progress in renewable energy.
“The states have been bringing in more wind, more solar, more biofuels,” Salazar said.
He cited federal proposals, currently stalled in Congress, to promote development: permanent tax credits and a national clean energy standard.
“There has been great progress in the past three years, from industry, investors, governments, scientists and stakeholders all deserve credit,” he added.
This being political season, Salazar didn’t resist poking fun at “the imaginary, fairly tale world of energy” promoted by administration opponents.
“Every day there’s a plan released to bring back $2 gasoline. Or, you would think there’s a secret agenda out there to shut down energy production,” he said.
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Comments
Energy production from public lands
Mark, your comment compels a response from a different perspective. Energy production is an important use of land; historically, before the onset of the fossil fuel extraction era, it was common for human societies to allocate as much as 1/7 of all acreage to energy production. These societies relied on the current budget of energy flows, not the one-time capital stock that we are rapidly running down in our own era. The fossil hydrocarbons that have fed our energy requirements over the past century represent literally hundreds of millions of years worth of stored energy. Our overwhelming dependence on them cannot possibly continue much longer, and the transition to the next energy paradigm is certain to take decades -- so there's no time to lose. Careful use of a modest fraction of our BLM lands for energy production, as Salazar is promoting, is an important step we must take. It can help to foster technology development and acceptance for the inevitable transition away from fossil hydrocarbons. We must face up to the fact that these resources are becoming more scarce and environmentally costly to extract, and the clear consensus of accredited experts (as opposed to corporate energy interests) is that we cannot sustainably rely on them without unacceptable environmental damage.
A couple of counter arguments
The "clear consensus of accredited experts" proponents never mention there are accredited experts who disagree with the position that we cannot sustainably rely on resources. Yes we are using them up but the present movement to green technologies is not decreasing the usage of these resources because we have to keep fossil plants running to stabilize the output and make up for the poor capacity factors and sudden changes in output from wind and solar. Had we put the money just the US taxpayer has been forced to put into these as yet immature technologies (after 50 years you would think they should have grown up but not quite), newer, more efficient fossil power technologies would have replaced substantial numbers of older coal fired facilities while simultaneously knocking huge bites out of the amount of CO2 emitted.
Secondly, the United States is just that--a union of states by the agreement of the states. The federal government expropriated the lands under BLM management from the various states to preserve them for development. If the federal government now wants to allow development, the lands should be returned to the states and the states control such development.
Is this not a bit of a conflict?
From what I understood, the Federal government expropriated these lands from the states in which they are located in order to preserve them in their natural condition for future generations to enjoy by "protecting" them from development. Now the Feds are turning around and effectively giving these lands to wind and solar developers to erect uneconomical power technologies that will be a drain on the taxpayers and that will effectively blight the landscape, alter the ecology of the areas, and become a potential death trap for birds and bats. These facilities will also require hundreds of miles of transmission lines to reach the load centers causing further damage to the federally "protected" lands and to private property they cross and resulting in still more avian mortality.
Meanwhile, electrical generation developers trying to build newer, more efficient fossil fuel or nuclear plants much closer to load centers have to contend with purchasing or leasing the land upon which to build and a shipload of redtape resulting from rampant proliferation of new regulations designed to make the technologies more expensive so the feds can boast that the green technologies are now competitive.
I forget the source of the quote but it goes something like "That government governs best which governs least."
Mark Wooldridge