Taxpayer dollars continue to go to an unreliable source of energy that often has negative environmental effects.
Taxpayer dollars continue to go to an unreliable source of energy that often has negative environmental effects.
Y our tax dollars will subsidize a solar company cutting down thousands of protected and rare Joshua trees and destroying habitat for the endangered desert tortoise to make way for a massive energy project in California.
The 2,300-acre Aratina Solar Project west of Barstow is intended to generate 530 megawatts of electricity. But it has infuriated residents with construction dust and a likely threat to centuries-old trees and endangered desert tortoises that are the official state reptile of California and Nevada, the usual environmental safeguards so prevalent in California notwithstanding.
Avantus, the company behind the project, operates its own political-action committee, which naturally donates almost exclusively to Democrats. Avantus changed its name from 8minute Solar Energy after the University of California sued it for misappropriating funds. As 8minute Solar, the company heavily lobbied for key federal solar subsidies.
“Let’s destroy the environment to save the environment. That seems to be the mentality,” local teacher Deric English told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s hard to comprehend.”
The company told the Times that the massive solar electricity-generating and battery-storage project’s environmental benefits will outweigh the destruction of the Joshua trees and habitat of protected wildlife. Local politicians voted unanimously to approve the project despite objections from many locals.
“While individual trees will be impacted during project construction, clean energy projects like Aratina directly address the existential threat of climate change caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions that threaten vastly more trees,” the company wrote online. The environmental-impact statement notes that roughly 4,700 Joshua trees grow on the site.
According to the National Park Service, Joshua trees are a key part of the desert ecosystem, “providing habitat for numerous birds, mammals, insects, and lizards,” and are on average 150 years old, although many are much older than that.
Until 2018, the net impact of all solar panels actually temporarily increased the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions they were intended to prevent because of the amount of energy that is used in their construction. Many older solar panels take up to a decade to accomplish a net reduction in emissions, while even more modern ones placed in the — increasingly limited — climatically ideal environments for solar power typically take many years. So any net benefit from this project will take, at best, years to manifest.
After 50 years and hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, loads of regulatory advantages, and political support, solar power generated under 4 percent of America’s electricity in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The majority of America’s recent CO2 emissions reductions come from the “decreased use of coal and the increased use of natural gas for electricity generation,” not the growth of solar power, according to the EIA.
Solar power also creates about 300 times more toxic waste per unit of electricity generated than nuclear-power plants do, because solar panels use extremely hazardous materials like sulfuric acid and toxic phosphine gas in their manufacturing, according to a report by Environmental Progress.
The hazards of waste from conventional nuclear, coal, or natural-gas plants are well known and can be planned for, but very little has been done to mitigate solar-waste issues, as the by-products of manufacturing and the panels themselves are enormously difficult to dispose of or recycle because of hazardous chemicals. Even the radiation hazards of nuclear waste decay relatively rapidly, losing their radiation threat in mere years or decades, and the spent fuel can be reused as reconstituted fuel for nuclear reactors or in medicine. Solar-panel waste such as lead and cadmium can remain in the environment forever because, unlike radioactive waste, they do not naturally decay into a less harmful state.
Even some environmental groups are starting to notice the negative impacts of solar power. The Center for Biological Diversity sued to block the creation of the massive $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar farm in San Bernardino California out of fear for the endangered desert tortoises and because sunlight-concentrating panels act like superheated death rays for birds, killing tens of thousands of them annually in California alone. The group’s efforts failed. At the Ivanpah Solar Plant, reportedly “so many birds have burned up in the beams that plant workers call them ‘streamers’ — as they leave a trail of wispy smoke as they catch fire.”
“The primary environmental impact of the Ivanpah project is the loss of about 3,500 acres of native desert scrubland under the footprint of the project,” Center for Biological Diversity wrote regarding legal action against the solar-power facility. “While the project site is traversed by power lines, and is near an interstate highway, a golf course and the casinos of Primm, Nev., the land itself was relatively intact, with a resident population of desert tortoise (which has been protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1990) and various rare native plants. However, the project site is not located within the tortoise’s 6.4 million acres of designated critical habitat.”
Many environmental objections to solar power boil down to the fact that solar farms require huge amounts of space to generate electricity efficiently, as solar panels have a relatively low energy density compared with other forms of energy generation such as conventional coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Replacing huge swaths of the natural environment such as desert scrubland with sprawling, ugly solar farms is hard to square with the traditional environmentalist aim of habitat conservation.
The Palo Verde Generating Station in Arizona is the largest nuclear-power plant in the United States, providing 4,010 megawatts of electricity on 4,000 acres of land, almost all of which is simply a safety buffer left in a natural desert state. The Edwards & Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage Project, America’s largest combined solar and energy-storage facility in California’s Mojave Desert, has a generating capacity of 864 megawatts of electricity on 4,600 acres.
And solar power is even less efficient when built up in less ideal environments, as most future solar farms necessarily will be, as the low-hanging fruit of perfect solar sites gets used up, leaving only less than ideal sites. Most of the United States is far less naturally suited to solar-energy production than the Mojave Desert. Comparing an almost four-decades-old nuclear-power plant with a brand-new energy-storage facility skews this land-use calculation in favor of solar. A fairer comparison by an environmental group found that nuclear power is about 50 times more energy-dense than solar and 500 times more energy-dense than wind. Small-footprint and high-density energy sources such as nuclear mean more space for nature and humans to thrive.
Shining some sunlight on the truth about the negative environmental impacts of solar plants, from habitat destruction to bird immolation, would go a long way toward helping the public weigh the trade-offs of solar power compared with other energy sources.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated since its original publication.