Mojave Desert Energy Landscape

In 2008, when Gov. Schwarzenegger mandated that the state deliver one-third of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, California lacked a vision for how to accomplish that goal efficiently, while protecting nature. Solar companies raced to secure permits to develop land in the Mojave Desert, creating a 21st-century “gold rush” with little guidance on how to protect important desert ecosystems or how their siting decisions would impact project risk. Proposals for clean energy facilities covered over one million acres of public lands in California’s deserts alone, many of which were in ecologically important areas. In response, The Nature Conservancy rapidly conducted an assessment to map areas of higher and lower conservation value in the desert, which can be used to understand which areas have high and low ecological conflicts that may slow development. As California leads on climate issues, with ever increasing goals, it is more important than ever to have a path to a clean energy future that protects natural resources and ensures that renewable resources reach the market faster. Proposals for clean energy facilities covered over one million acres of public lands in California’s deserts alone, many of which were in ecologically important areas. The map below shows renewable energy project application locations (red dots) in the California deserts in 2008.

Mojave Desert Ecoregional Assessment

Recognizing the need for a solution to meet California’s climate goals and protect biodiversity in the Mojave Desert, Conservancy scientists spearheaded an effort to assess and map the conservation values of the Mojave Desert Ecoregion, which spreads across California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

In conducting the assessment, the team advanced some key innovations in regional conservation planning. Previously, The Nature Conservancy’s ecoregional assessments typically only identified the highest conservation priorities, leaving other portions of the landscape unassessed. As a result, it was not clear whether those areas still had significant conservation values, or whether they could be a place of low-conflict for development. In contrast, the Mojave Desert Ecoregional Assessment provides a novel, wall-to-wall analysis. We categorized lands throughout the entire 32-million-acre ecoregion into one of four groups based on attributes such as biodiversity richness, intactness, and condition. As a result, the Mojave Desert Ecoregional Assessment not only provides information about places of higher conservation value, but it also identifies lands that have been degraded and converted, where renewable energy development would have less impact and would present less risk from an ecological perspective to developers and electricity buyers.

We then estimated the amount of solar energy that could be provided on lands that were suitable for development due to topography and previous disturbance. We demonstrated that California could easily meet the energy production goals it had in the desert without developing areas most important for protection of biodiversity.

The assessment was influential in helping direct development to already-disturbed lands, as part of California’s Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, and in the permanent protection of 6.5 million acres – an area larger than the state of Maryland – for conservation. The Nature Conservancy’s landscape-scale approach is now also being used to guide solar development on publicly-owned Bureau of Lands Management land in six southwestern states.

The Mojave Desert Ecoregional Assessment demonstrates the power of science-based planning to help reduce tradeoffs between conservation and other societal goals. The assessment is at the landscape-scale, and as such, should be accompanied by site-specific environmental review to ensure projects avoid and minimize impacts to lands and waters in the desert.

Solar Energy Development in the West Mojave

Covering 3.4 million acres, the western Mojave is experiencing intense renewable energy development pressure: it has very high solar resource potential, is in close proximity to the largest energy market in California, and is, in general, more ecologically degraded than the rest of the ecoregion. The western Mojave also contains important ecological values, including some species that exist nowhere else on Earth.

Conservancy scientists conducted an assessment of this region to highlight how facilities could be sited to have lower impact on the conservation values of the broader landscape. We did this by assembling, categorizing and mapping a wide range of existing information about the west Mojave subregion. The assessment serves as a first filter to more fully probe what environmental constraints on utility-scale solar energy development, including ecological values, may exist throughout the western Mojave subregion. The assessment used a set of Consensus Criteria identified by conservation organizations that proposes characteristics of lands that may be more or less appropriate for development of solar facilities based on ecological and other factors. Using this criteria-based planning method, we identified areas within the subregion that might, after more comprehensive site-level investigation, prove to be acceptable, low impact locations for utility-scale solar plants.

In addition to mapping areas of low and least conflict, we identified focal areas that we suggest should be avoided or subjected to further study because of their known or suspected resource values. The report also includes a description of a comprehensive mitigation program that could potentially produce a net improvement to the conservation status of species and habitats. Since completion of this assessment in 2012, interest in finding least conflict locations for solar in the West Mojave has increased and additional work has been done with more recent data.

To read more about our work in the Mojave Desert Energy Landscape, please visit our Storymap, “Conservation in the California Deserts”.