In April, federal officials, for instance, ordered BrightSource Energy to halt work on part of its 370-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System after biologists found more desert tortoises at the project than the 32 predicted. Revised projections had estimated there could be as many as 162 adult tortoises and 608 juvenile tortoises on the 5.6-square-mile construction site in the Mojave Desert about 40 miles south of Las Vegas.
I wrote that it was unlikely the expected population explosion would derail Ivanpah, given all the political and economic capital on the line, including a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee and a half billion dollars from Google, Morgan Stanley and other investors. And sure enough, late Friday the United States Fish and Wildlife Service allowed construction to proceed, finding in a revised biological opinion that Ivanpah would not jeopardize the continued existence of the tortoise, which is listed as a threatened species under the U.S. and California endangered species acts.
But a close read of the 108-page document shows that BrightSource, an Oakland, Calif.-based startup, is going to be in the desert tortoise business for at least the next decade. And it provides plenty of fodder for environmentalists concerned about the consequences of other huge solar power plants planned for the Ivanpah Valley and elsewhere.
For instance, the Fish and Wildlife Service discussed risks that the BrightSource project and a 400-megawatt First Solar photovoltaic farm to be built nearby could impede migration of desert tortoises and create a genetic bottleneck. But the agency did not consider the impact on the desert tortoise of the planned 300-megawatt Stateline photovoltaic power plant that First Solar plans to build on 2,53 acres of government land adjacent to the BrightSource project.
“In drafting a biological opinion, the Fish and Wildlife Service only considers projects in which biological opinions have already been issued or projects that have already been constructed,” Lois Grunwald, a spokeswoman for the Fish and Wildlife Service in California, said in an email. "First Solar is only
in its preliminary stages - neither the footprint or exact acreage is known. We don't have reliable data to analyze because there is, in effect, no First Solar project yet."
First Solar has filed a proposed development plan with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which controls the Stateline site. And Amy Fesnock, a lead biologist with the BLM in California, told me that the project has been redesigned more than once because of its impact on the desert tortoise and concerns that it could block migration of the animals.
BrightSource, meanwhile, has already deployed as many as 100 biologists at a time to find, protect and relocate desert tortoises found on its construction site.
(The company has also started a “head start” program for baby tortoises. Female tortoises found on the site will be X-rayed to see if they’re carrying eggs, which will be placed in nurseries to hatch. The young tortoises will be kept protected in pens to increase their survival rate, which is a dismal 10 percent in the wild.)
The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that BrightSource will translocate between 103 and 246 desert tortoises to new habitat over the next five years, according the report. (Underscoring just how difficult it is to come up with accurate desert tortoise numbers, the agency discounted some of the BLM’s own estimates.)
The relocated tortoises will be radio-tagged as will some of those already living in the translocation areas. The agency is requiring BrightSource to monitor and conduct periodic health assessments of those tortoises for five years. But the company could be monitoring some tortoises for the next decade or more, the report said.
Environmentalists, regulators and other solar developers will be watching the BrightSource translocation closely. Some biologists consider translocation a risky strategy to compensate for the impact of big solar projects given the spotty record of success relocations so far.
“Many of the potential areas to put tortoises have populations in decline or populations that are not thriving,” says Kristin Berry, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in California and a leading authority on the desert tortoise. “If you add new tortoises to that when we don’t understand why the numbers are going down, it is not necessarily a wise move.”
Berry served on a California state committee charged with developing a strategy for permitting solar development in the desert while protecting endangered wildlife. Its conclusion in a report released last year: “Translocations “have been used as ‘feel good’ actions that are generally not effective at sustaining populations. Moreover, the practice has the potential to do more harm than good to populations of rare species.”
Given the money and the quality of the desert tortoise biologists BrightSource has hired – even BrightSource opponents concede their top-notch qualifications – the Ivanpah project is likely to be the most intensely studied desert tortoise translocation to date. If nothing else, it should yield a wealth of data on the desert tortoise.
