The future of Southern Nevada’s desert landscape is on the line right now, as the growing demand for solar farm development is pushing policy changes, but some locals are pushing back.
“Nevada is the crossroads of the Green Energy transition, and I think it’s really an open question right now about what the future of Nevada’s public lands is going to look like,” said Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity.
For most of the wide-open spaces in Nevada, the Bureau of Land Management is the responsible for how it’s used, and that includes large-scale solar.
“For these projects, there’s a sense to which this clean energy transition is like a speeding freight train, and no one really has control over it,” Donnelly said.
In recent years, Donnelly has been watching the agency closely.
“You know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was isolated projects that we were concerned about and isolated impacts to specific places of land, whereas now we’re talking about landscapes,” he said. “Now we’re talking about 10 projects from here all the way to those mountains there, wall to wall energy projects.”