Many solar farms designed to generate electricity without emitting vast amounts of the climate-altering greenhouse gases the way fossil fuel operations do have been installed where their presence clashes with other environmental values, such as protecting endangered wildlife. A study published in October in Nature found that 51% of utility-scale solar facilities are located in deserts, 33% on croplands, and 10% in grasslands and forests. Just 2.5% of U.S. solar power has been installed in urban areas.
As Richard Conniff writes at Yale Environment 360, this approach is understandable but problematic. Building large solar facilities on undeveloped land costs less and can be done more quickly and managed more easily than installing it on thousands of rooftops or parking lots canopies.
But that doesn’t necessarily make it smarter. Undeveloped land is a rapidly dwindling resource, and what’s left is under pressure to deliver a host of other services we require from the natural world — growing food, sheltering wildlife, storing and purifying water, preventing erosion, and sequestering carbon, among others. And that pressure is rapidly intensifying. [...]
Despite the green image, putting solar facilities on undeveloped land is often not much better than putting subdivisions there. Developers tend to bulldoze sites, “removing all of the above-ground vegetation,” says Rebecca Hernandez, an ecologist at the University of California at Davis. That’s bad for insects and the birds that feed on them. In the Southwest deserts where most U.S. solar farms now get built, the losses can also include “1,000-year-old creosote shrubs, and 100-year-old yuccas,” or worse. The proposed 530-megawatt Aratina Solar Project around Boron, California, for instance, would destroy almost 4,300 western Joshua trees, a species imperiled, ironically, by development and climate change. (It is currently being considered for state protected status.) In California, endangered desert tortoises end up being translocated, with unknown results, says Hernandez. And the tendency to cluster solar facilities in the buffer zones around protected areas can confuse birds and other wildlife and complicate migratory corridors.