Last October BrightSource Energy began construction on the first large-scale solar thermal power plant to be built in the U.S. in two decades. After an arduous three-year environmental review, a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee and more than a half-billion dollars in investment from the likes of
But as the dignitaries speechified, biologists were discovering the creosote-bush-studded landscape was crawling with some uninvited guests: desert tortoises. Years of surveys had estimated that, at most, 32 of the iconic, imperiled animals called the 5.6-square-mile site home. But as giant road graders moved in, biologists had already found nearly that many tortoises just in the project's first, 914-acre phase.
"The big mystery question is, why are there more animals than expected?," said Mercy Vaughn, a respected desert tortoise biologist who's leading the company's roundup and relocation of the long-lived reptiles, as she stood outside a tortoise holding pen in October.
Today those pens have expanded to hold even more tortoises. Federal officials in April ordered construction temporarily halted on part of the project until a new environmental review could be conducted. The reason: Government biologists now predict that between 86 and 162 adult tortoises and 608 juveniles roam the site, some 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas. Biologists with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which leases the land to BrightSource, concluded that the project would "harass" 2,325 mostly juvenile tortoises living within a 2-kilometer radius outside the site in the Ivanpah Valley, where another company,
Wildlife has emerged as the wild card in plans to build more than a dozen multibillion-dollar solar projects in the desert Southwest. Earlier this year German developer Solar Millennium's U.S. venture abandoned a 250-megawatt solar project after 16 months of environmental review because of concerns over its impact on the Mohave ground squirrel. The renewed scrutiny of other big solar projects raises the stakes for the Obama Administration, which has offered more than $8 billion in loan guarantees for solar construction, and for developers and investors making bets on Big Solar.
BrightSource has signed contracts to deliver 2,600 megawatts of electricity to California utilities, which are facing a state mandate to obtain a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. In April BrightSource, an Oakland startup, filed for a $250 million initial public offering. The company's success, it warned in the filing, turns on building Ivanpah on time and on budget. (President Obama has nominated BrightSource's chairman, John Bryson, as the next U.S. Commerce Secretary.)
"Climate change is the biggest driver of species extinction there is," says John Woolard, BrightSource Energy's chief executive. "If Ivanpah doesn't move forward or can't be done, then we should write off all renewable energy in the country."
The 500-square-mile Ivanpah Valley straddles the border between California and Nevada, bisected by an interstate highway that links Los Angeles and Las Vegas. On the Nevada side three hulking casinos, an outlet mall, a monorail and a roller coaster rise from the empty desert like apparitions from a Mad Max movie. A natural-gas-fired power plant shimmers in the heat between two dry lake beds.
The California side remains relatively undeveloped but for the incongruous oasis of an 18-hole golf course. Solar developers covet the open land, intense sunshine and the transmission lines that march across the valley floor.
BrightSource helped kick off the great desert solar land rush in late 2006, when it staked a claim on a swath of the valley adjacent to the golf course. Over the next two years dozens of companies, from
Biologists saw something different: a high-quality habitat for a genetically distinct population of desert tortoises. "Ivanpah Valley was at one point recommended for critical habitat designation and was considered significant to save for the desert tortoise," says Kristin Berry, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in California who is a leading authority on the tortoise. "That is now, of course, being cleared for solar development."
On a recent spring day a large machine stood ready to plunk poles into the ground in a series of precise circles that radiate from the foundation for one of BrightSource's three 459-foot towers. Some 170,000 mirrors called heliostats will be attached to those poles and focus the sun's rays on water-filled boilers atop the towers. The heat will create steam to drive electricity-generating turbines.
BrightSource executives take pains to point out efforts to minimize the project's environmental impact: Desert vegetation has been trimmed rather than plowed under; a dry-cooling system will slash water consumption; and a veritable army of biologists has been deployed to protect and relocate desert tortoises. In late May 91 biologists in green hard hats were roaming the desert, even walking the roads from the interstate exit to the construction site, on the lookout for tortoises as 18-wheelers rumbled back and forth.
BrightSource CEO Woolard, an urbane, affable 46-year-old, hardly fits the stereotype of a rapacious Big Energy boss. He holds a master's degree in environmental planning and can geek out about animal migration corridors and species dispersal patterns as well as turbine efficiencies and heliostat-positioning algorithms.
Still, there's no getting around the numbers. BrightSource initially conducted surveys in 2007, a drought year, when tortoises tend to stay deep in their burrows. By the time construction began last October the rains had returned, and the soccer-ball-size critters emerged to feast on fields of wildflowers. A change in the way government biologists estimate the number of juvenile tortoises, which can be as small as a silver dollar, also boosted the population projections.
"What's amazing about this is not only that there are so many of them, but they're also finding so many juvenile desert tortoises," says Kevin Emmerich, cofounder of Basin & Range Watch, a Nevada website that tracks and opposes large-scale solar development in the desert. "That indicates that this is a functioning, breeding population that has got a future."
Emmerich, a retired park ranger and amateur tortoise biologist, is down on his knees peering into a burrow, its occupant's footprints visible on the site of First Solar's planned 400-megawatt Silver State project, across the highway from Ivanpah. A government assessment estimates the land contains as many as 123 tortoises. Judging by the dozen burrows he's stumbled across in a small swatch of the site, Emmerich thinks there are far more tortoises here.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service will have the final say on Ivanpah--and declined to comment while its review is under way--but given the political and economic capital on the line, few observers expect the jump in tortoise numbers within the construction site to derail the project, though expensive delays or changes are possible. "Even at the absolutely maximum number of tortoises we'd expect to find, there is room to relocate tortoises elsewhere at a density that is not outrageous," says Amy Fesnock, a chief wildlife biologist for the Bureau of Land Management in California.
BrightSource had also deftly neutralized opposition to the Ivanpah project from big environmental groups, which have so far been measured in their response to the higher tortoise estimates. Despite reservations, the Sierra Club decided not to challenge the licensing of Ivanpah. And the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson, Ariz. group known for its aggressive litigation on behalf of wildlife, dropped its opposition last year after BrightSource agreed to preserve desert tortoise habitats elsewhere. "I don't know where we're going to end up," Bill Corcoran, a Sierra Club official in Los Angeles, said of his organization's position on Ivanpah. "Now that they've found desert tortoise numbers of an order of magnitude larger than expected, there's the opportunity to thoroughly consider impact of the project."
According to the Western Watersheds Project, an Idaho environmental group, the new tortoise numbers will bolster a lawsuit it filed against the Interior Department earlier this year, arguing it failed to adequately consider Ivanpah's impact on wildlife. "The findings basically vindicate our earlier claims," says Michael Connor, the group's California director. "We provided extensive data showing that the area historically was shown to have high desert-tortoise numbers."
The twist in the tortoise estimates will most likely hit hardest with First Solar and other developers that have tussled with regulators and environmentalists over the impact of projects yet to break ground. First Solar's 2,153-acre, 300-megawatt Stateline photovoltaic farm is to be built adjacent to Ivanpah, while the company's Silver State project would install solar panels like those found on residential rooftops on nearly 3,000 acres just across the border in Nevada. Fesnock, the BLM biologist, says surveys are turning up fairly high densities of tortoises on the Stateline site, raising concerns the project could block their movement across the valley.
First Solar's vice president of government affairs, Jim Woodruff, says he expects the two projects will be subject to stricter scrutiny in the wake of the Ivanpah tortoise numbers. "We take a very conservative approach toward siting and to surveying for desert tortoise," he says, noting the projects have been redesigned to avoid tortoise-rich areas.
Simply counting tortoises more accurately may not be enough, as regulators say they're moving toward considering the regional impact of big solar projects. Translocation will become less of a viable solution and more of a flash point, as greater numbers of animals are moved.
The track record for translocation is limited and not encouraging, according to Berry, the government biologist who has studied a massive resettlement of tortoises from the nearby Fort Irwin army base in 2008. Half of the group of 158 tortoises she has been studying died after being relocated.
Environmentalists are already citing the higher tortoise numbers to press for reconsideration of projects far from Ivanpah, such as the 663.5-megawatt Calico project near Barstow. Says Corcoran, "What has happened at Ivanpah really shows the need to do the analysis to avoid the sort of collision that we have going on now."
