By Susan Kraemer

Seventies-era environmental legislation mandated a very narrow focus on local environmental impacts, without accounting for the bigger picture of climate change. This narrow focus has actually created a hindrance to the adoption of more solar energy in particular, while leaving gas plants unaffected in one of the biggest energy markets.

White House action

At the federal level, the Obama administration is now looking at reforms that would for the first time streamline environmental permitting and take climate change into account in granting permits by any federal agencies or in granting leases on public lands. The Bureau of Land Management, part of the Interior Department, is the nation’s biggest landlord, controlling 20 million acres of ideal solar potential, mostly west of the Rockies.

In the latest of a series of moves by this administration to take executive action on climate change, the Obama administration is proposing that all of the federal agencies involved in permitting must consider the impact on global warming before approving any major projects, in a refinement of the ‘70s era National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

The White House Council on Environmental Quality does have jurisdiction over issuing standards for how agencies should address greenhouse gases, so this executive action could potentially bypass the last six years of Republican Senate filibuster - and the more recent House Republican majority - that has stymied action on climate.

“Reform has been underway for quite some time in California and at the Federal level,” SolarReserve SVP Tom Georgis tells CSP Today. “There are numerous stakeholder processes and reform initiatives involving the regulatory bodies, the utilities and industry.”

Reducing overlap

Under the new federal streamlining, the state version of NEPA in California, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), would also be blended with NEPA rules, which duplicated much the work needed for permitting in California, which has the largest renewable market in the US outside Colorado.

The process for permitting large scale solar is extremely rigorous and thorough, according to SolarReserve, which spent a significant amount of money permitting their Rice Solar Energy Project, in Riverside, California with the California Energy Commission (CEC).

“The CEC Application for Certification is the critical permit for us but we also have a federal nexus with our transmission gentie crossing federal land so we therefore had to undergo an equally expensive and arduous NEPA process,” says Georgis.

“In the early stages of Rice, we had hoped there would be greater collaboration between local, state, and federal agencies. There were costly duplicative efforts that could have been avoided in our opinion, but appreciate that the process for permitting these types of facilities was evolving in parallel to our development efforts.”
Peter Weiner, chair of the environmental and energy regulatory practice at Paul Hastings has handled a number of the recent utility-scale solar energy permitting, with over 6 GW in projects.

“Large scale solar and wind are so much better for the planet when it comes to greenhouse gases,” Weiner tells CSP Today. “On the other hand they have very large land footprints and a lot of the siting of these larger facilities have been in areas which have not had a lot of development, such as the desert. As a result the wildlife agencies - which are not very much involved in fossil fuel production - became very involved.”

Tunnel vision

Anywhere in the US, he says, CSP tower technology faces issues from federal agencies like the US Fish and Wildlife Service under the Endangered Species Act, the Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

“They see that their mandate is to protect endangered species, not to protect the planet,” says Weiner. “There are people within those agencies who do not see the larger picture but see what they are instructed to see, which is their statutory mandate.”

The recent policy-driven push for clean energy is exacerbated by the bureaucratic bottleneck. Starting in 2009, there was a one-time ramp-up of renewables stemming from Recovery Act incentives when Democrats briefly held a seldom-seen filibuster-proof majority and US policy approached that of Europe.
As a result, PV developers and CSP developers like BrightSource, Abengoa, and SolarReserve suddenly overwhelmed the agencies tasked with processing an abundance of projects to supply California’s very high Renewable Portfolio Standard in a short time frame.

“We were all focused on deadlines for the DOE loan guarantee and Treasury Grant programs and this created a rush to get permits and approvals,” says Georgis. “The sheer number of large solar projects stressed the resources of the relevant agencies.”

“This was new to them and at the beginning they weren’t sure how to handle this type of activity at this scale,” says Weiner. “When they started looking at it and they saw the impact on water systems in the desert, and with wet cooled CSP, and even PV, they saw issues of scarcity. With all solar they saw disturbance to endangered species, such as desert tortoises and kit foxes.”

Low bar for gas plants

The jurisdiction of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) includes desert solar and transmission permitting, but it doesn’t handle permits for thermal plants. CSP projects need environmental permits from the California Energy Commission (CEC), but the energy procured from a CSP plant by a regulated utility still needs CPUC approval.

“With storage, CSP is a highly valuable resource, and we have to figure out how to properly value that, and how to properly put a price on the externalities of gas emissions,” Attorney Larry Chaset of Sustainable Energy Futures, and a former CPUC staffer tells CSP Today.

“It’s only been in the past four or five years that public agencies have been serious about climate. The CPUC is now looking at construction impact in terms of all the projects it has jurisdiction over,” he explains.

“Yet CSP construction impacts are negligible. Frankly, there’s a much more important question,” Chaset says.

“If you’ve got a 500 MW gas plant that’s going to run, conservatively, at least 2,000 hours a year, with 800 pounds of greenhouse gases per megawatt hour for a 40 year life span... that’s... 30 billion tons of CO2 over its lifetime,” he calculates.

“And yet we’re worrying about a threshold on the order of 10,000 tons to build a CSP project?”

The Question of Coal

Weiner cites a colleague who does day to day siting cases for gas as well as solar before the CEC, who affirms that the CEC does require a complete GHG analysis for gas as well as solar.

But as long as gas plants emit less than 1,100 lbw of greenhouse gases per mWh, they are waved on through, as "cleaner than" a somewhat theoretical alternative of a coal plant. But California has barely generated any coal power for decades, making for a very low bar.

California puts a focus on greenhouse gas impacts from building new energy infrastructure, and compares gas plants favourably to coal ones, yet does not similarly compare the greenhouse gas benefits of renewables to gas plants.

And because gas plants tend to be built closer to the load, where they are not disturbing distant desert land, no wildlife is displaced; the various federal agencies responsible for protecting wildlife don’t get involved.

A brighter future?

Chaset says that recently there has been a “noble effort” to coordinate between state and federal agencies to streamline the process of siting transmission lines. “It can take 5 years to site a CSP project but it can take 8 to 10 years to site a transmission line! And CSP projects are going to depend on the transmission line.”

“The CPUC has publicly stated it’s very interested in CSP in California because of its storage capacity,” Weiner confirms.

One recent example of Fish and Wildlife concern was with solar flux in the now withdrawn BrightSource Rio Mesa project. But this was just a comment on a permit, and not an official denial, according to Weiner.

“Fish and Wildlife has commented adversely on other permits where we’ve gone through and gotten the permit,” he points out. “It’s not a death knell to a project.”

In the BrightSource case, the idea brought up by the Fish and Wildlife Service had been that birds might be affected by flying through the mirrored reflection of sunlight, the solar flux. The idea was dismissed by the CEC, but effects on desert tortoises have notably impacted solar permitting in California.

But couldn’t coexistence between desert wildlife and solar be possible? Why aren’t desert tortoises able to wander within the forest of poles holding up mirrors, troughs or solar arrays?

“The agencies are now contemplating allowing that,” Weiner replies. “That solar arrays and mirrors might not be incompatible with species habitat.”

The original argument had been that there would be a lot of traffic on site, but now as the industry matures, developers are finding less need for trucks on site, and it is becoming apparent that that there are ways around it. “The biologists are very conservative but they do look at the facts once they are on the table, and they may be willing to try some new paradigms on an experimental basis,” he points out.

“In our opinion, they are all moving in the right direction in terms of streamlining the process while preserving the key mandates of environmental protection,” agrees Georgis.

To comment on this article write to Susan Kraemer,
Or contact the editor, Jennifer Muirhead