It looks like the desert where Nevada-California border intersects Interstate 15 is about get another 3,800 acres of solar panels.
Silver State North
This week the Interior Department approved two huge solar power projects — the 300-megawatt Stateline Solar Farm Project will be about two miles into California and the other 250-MG Silver State South project will be near Primm — both on federal public lands, according to Greenwire. Both projects are owned by First Solar, which has already built the 50-MG Silver State North facility. For that facility the company expected to get $50 million in federal tax credits.
Nevada Sen. Dean Heller has introduced a bill to extend those tax credits.
First Solar has secured power purchase agreements with Southern California Edison Co. for the electricity produced at both plants.
A group calling itself Defenders of Wildlife has already announced its intent to sue the Interior Department over both solar projects, claiming a violation of the Endangered Species Act due to their effect on the Mojave Desert tortoise habitat.
They’re paving over the desert with glass panels.
4TH ST8 
They paved paradise to put up a solar farm.
Wonder how Joni Mitchell would react to that?
That’s the tune I was humming.
Panel all of Nevada and it wouldn’t provide enough energy to keep the hotels and casinos here running but it will make friends of politicians that care damned little about the desert, to say nothing of the forests and grasslands. Perhaps they will put up acres and acres of panels to keep Washington DC in lights, they would really be effective there with all the clouds, rain and snow. Turn off the carbon based energy there and they’d have to break out candles most days.
I know there HAS to be a Reid connected to THIS story!
I would wager Rory Reid’s law firm is involved. They hand most of the renewable projects.
Does Rory move like a pregnant high jumper like his dad does?
Up until this green crap the energy utilities were based on supplying for long term, now it’s about the infusion of a tremendous amount of money for the start up, it matters not that solar panels have a brief span of usefulness.
This is ridiculous, we need to get them to put this on our roofs! It just makes soooo much more sense! We need to come together
Who is paying for the transmission lines? I called Heller’s office, for all the good that will do.
“Who is paying for the transmission lines?”
Take a wild guess.
As Sarah says, the sane place to put solar is on urban roofs. We have thousands of acres of suitable flat roofs wherever there are retail stores, in close proximity to where power is most needed, that would cause no further impact to the environment.
The notion that solar has no impact is totally wrong. The desert is far from lifeless (in fact it’s the most packed with living creatures of anywhere outside of a swamp) but it is a very fragile place. Solar facilities effectively create scorched earth zones that will never recover, even if the facility were removed. But it’s out of sight of the pretty resorts frequented by urbanites, and out of sight, out of mind, right?
I lived downwind from a major new facility in the Antelope Valley. We’d formerly never seen blowing dust in that part of the desert. After the facility was built, we had blowing dust all the time.