We had heard about this phrase in a vague way years ago, but recently we experienced it firsthand in the town where we live, in our own “backyard” public lands. This gave us an inkling of what Indigenous people, People of Color, and rural communities have been dealing with for many years. It remains a problem for the environmental community, despite some efforts to address it.

Parachute environmentalism is a term describing exploitative practices by often urban, distant environmentalists traveling to local communities to extract information, knowledge, pledges of support for a cause, or even simply photo ops, and then leaving without involving locals or giving credit for information or ideas collected.

Much has been written of parachute science, where researchers from wealthy Northern Hemisphere countries travel to developing host nations in the Global South which are then treated as mere locations for fieldwork and sampling, while the local experts living there are used as guides, or are ignored, and are left out of published results. There is an extractive dynamic and the practice has been labeled as colonial and parasitic.

Similarly, non-local NGOs have sometimes been accused of parachuting into regions, often benefitting from local community knowledge yet not including local voices as intellectual partners or collaborators. Information leaves with the NGOs, and the resulting environmental campaigns may not necessarily reflect or benefit the local community or direct stakeholders in their own backyard.

This is the situation we found ourselves in, and unfortunately it is not a new feeling.

As volunteers, Basin & Range Watch has always sought to share information that we find, collect, and organize, and we give it away freely and abundantly. We try to give any credit where credit is due. But very often we are the source of information, whether though our own extensive field visits to sites, long hours of research, Freedom of Information Act requests, discussions with federal and state employees about public land matters, or by attending hundreds of public meetings and reading environmental review documents. We believe that organizing such information and sharing it widely benefits us all and strengthens grassroots networks of people who are local to environmental issues, or who care deeply about public lands and want to participate. Everyone should feel empowered with tools for the use of information.

This is not a universal philosophy.

And so it was as a multinational gold mining company began to coalesce its plans for opening large pits and extracting groundwater in the headwaters of a special desert river, that we saw the NGOs parachute in from the distance.

We have lived on the headwaters of this river for 24 years, hiking the scenic public lands, birdwatching daily, learning the special flora and vegetation types of the area as naturalists, restoring habitat on our small private parcel. We came from a National Park Service and biology background, having worked careers as federal and state employees, and we chose this special area because of the wildness, the history, the dark night skies, the ability to walk out the door and observe desert bighorn sheep, endemic fish, see migrating warblers out the kitchen window, and even watch an occasional tortoise dining on wildflowers.

The Non-local NGOs brought an army of botanists to look for rare plants in order to comment on the Environmental Impact Statement for the gold mine—some of whom we had taken to show the locations of these rare plants in past years. Collaborations could have happened: we found some populations in years past, either on our own or hearing about populations from agency personnel; we told the botanists and they came out to take samples and then deciphered the genetics back in the lab. But we were not invited to help collaborate on any comment letters after all of this. (We wrote our own to agencies.) This despite the fact that we had worked with public land managers to enact on-the-ground protections of some populations of the rare plants. It was as if we lived in two parallel universes, the out-of-state botany crew from academia, and our local efforts. The collaboration suddenly ended after we guided the nonlocal experts to the plant populations.

The NGOs then parachuted into the local public meeting hosted by the Bureau of Land Management and the mining company at the town community center to answer questions in front of posters and groundwater cone-of-depression maps. Several of the springs and wetlands in the area have the potential to lower or even dry up as the gold mine open pits are dug and must then be pumped and dewatered so the gold below the water table may be accessed. There is a water conservation alternative where only one of three open pits is dug into the aquifer on the headwaters of the river.

The meeting was crowded with locals, some in support of the mine, some concerned about groundwater pumping and water pollution. Tribal members were also present.

The NGOs brought a reporter from a distant city news media outlet. He walked right past us without making eye contact, even though we had taken him into the field in prior years on other stories. He also walked past the local tribal members, who had oral stories of the springs and groundwater that are not part of any AI data center information bank. In fact, the reporter chose not to interview a single local person for his story, which quickly appeared the night after the meeting. Only the parachuting NGOs and visiting out-of-state botanists were interviewed. A tight little club. The story was paywalled but a photo gallery showed smiling faces of nonlocal environmentalists touring all of our favorite spots in the valley and surrounding mountains. The private tour had taken place earlier that week.

The information mining and photo ops complete, the NGOs left back to the city or their home state.

The local all-volunteer NGO, the Tribal members, the well owners, the residents, were left with the consequences of living with future open pit cyanide leaching gold mining in the watershed, their stories untold. The slick media story that appeared slanted towards picturing a small depressed rural town at a crossroads, with the mine potentially being the one thing that could save the local economy. No mention was made of long-time residents who have been working to build an eco-toursim economy here for decades, at the gateway of a famous national park. Not a sentence about that experience from people who live here. No one was asked about their own town.

Don’t get us wrong, if the parachuting NGOs can help preserve precious groundwater, springs, and rare plants in the headwaters we are all for it.

But we still had to laugh at this whiplash tour of fellow environmentalists, scientists, and reporters in our backyard. Not even an email to grab a cup of coffee on the way out?

This colonial style of thinking—that local information, and even ideas can be treated like a resource to be extracted at will, and taken out of the locality without credit given back—is very familiar to Indigenous people. We got a taste of it.

It reflects the larger divide in the US at present, the lack of communication, lack of listening, regardless of one’s politics. This small town has traditionally been about half Democrat and half Republican so the problem is not about politics. The problem we see is that so much is missed by parachute environmentalism, so much local information and experience is ignored. Nature loses.

Speaking of the need to decolonize conservation, de Vos and Schwartz (2022) say:

“International collaborative conservation efforts need to put away the parachutes and strategically plan for building equitable scientific collaborations in support of locally driven, solutions-focused, sustainable conservation action. Conservation is a truly global problem requiring a truly global effort. Historical power imbalances perpetuated by differential access to training, funding and information hinder the progress toward the equitability required to find salient, credible, and legitimate solutions to our pressing conservation challenges. These barriers challenge us, as scientists and practitioners, to both speak up about our interests and needs but also to listen and work to build programs that are mutually equitable and beneficial to all partners as well as the biodiversity we work to protect.”

Reference:

de Vos, A., & Schwartz, M. W. 2022. Confronting parachute science in conservation. Conservation Science and Practice, 4(5), e12681. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.12681

May 15, 2026 - Reno, NV - The old saying goes: “All roads lead to Rome.” In the modern state of affairs in Nevada, it seems that all roads lead to data centers. Greenlink West Transmission Project, currently approved and under construction, is mostly connecting up to new data centers and other industrial facilities at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center east of Reno in northern Nevada. More data centers are planned near Silver Springs, NV. Data centers here will require enormous amounts of energy, planned to come from natural gas power plants at Apex, north of Las Vegas, massive planned solar projects in Nevada’s western deserts along the route, as well as existing natural gas power east of Sparks. The huge substations being built now in Amargosa Valley and Big Smoky Valley in Esmeralda County for Greenlink give an indication of the megawatts of solar projects that can be fed into the line.

Yet NV Energy, the Investor-Owned Utility building Greenlink, has simultaneosuly announced that it will be cutting off power to the community of Lake Tahoe because of the need to direct more power to data centers in northern Nevada, concentrated around the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. 5,900 megawatts may be needed by 2033 for data centers. Lake Tahoe in adjacent California has 49,000 residents which receive power from Liberty Utilities, which sources 75% of electricity from NV Energy. The local utility has until May 2027 until NV Energy ends its power supply agreement with Lake Tahoe.

Lake Tahoe depends entirely on NV Energy transmission infrastructure, and is not within the California Independent System Operator area. Building it’s own transmission line west across the high Sierra would costs “hundreds of millions” of dollars according to an interview with Liberty in Fortune.

There may not be enough land to build solar projects to replace this energy. Liberty might be looking to buy energy from out of state and continue to use NV Energy transmission lines.

Data centers already use 22% of Nevada’s electricity in 2024, and that number is rising.

Meanwhile we watch Greenlink West Transmission Project relentlessly move forward in construction, bulldozing new roads into desert ecosystems, carving tower pads into mountain sides, filling water trucks with locally-pumped groundwater, and opening up large swaths of the western Nevada wild outback to solar energy development.

For massive data centers.

Things are changing fast. Even faster with the U.S. plunged into war with Iran, which may upend a lot of predictions in the coming weeks.

The current administration wasted no time in swinging wildly off the climate change track, and the U.S. government went from full-speed heavily subsidizing renewable energy under the Biden administration to chasing AI and building data centers under Trump. Data centers require enormous amounts of energy to run intensive software and cooling machinery, as we have discussed previously. (Don’t get us started about how much CO2 emissions war puts out).

Both Biden and Trump used public lands for their goals, and the Mojave Desert was and is in the bullseye. Solar project development hit a frenzied pace under Biden as applications poured in on sensitive Mojave Desert tortoise habitat. The pretense has always been that tortoises can be translocated to other areas thus mitigating the negative impacts of degrading tortoise populations, but this often results in mortality and tortoise numbers have continued to decline. Federal solar tax credits, easy loans, and cheap lease fees made solar development on public lands lucrative. Streamlined environmental reviews made solar developers flock to the deserts.

A pause has occurred under Trump 2.0, just as in his first term. We are beginning to see the bottleneck bust open now, as a pile of renewable energy applications sitting on Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s desk awaiting review has been moved off his desk. A selection of public lands utility-scale solar projects is now confirmed to be moving forward again. We’ll detail these in a future post.

Incentives for renewable energy are much less under Trump, and the solar tax credit situation is drying up fast. But Burgum is pushing an “American Energy Dominance” rhetoric so any and all energy projects are allowed. Developers are having to be more creative in financing large-scale solar projects—some applications are as large as 15,000 acres.

Private equity will undoubtedly play a much more important roll in funding solar energy development. For instance Michael Brune, past Sierra Club director, announced he was forming a private climate investment fund.

And the goals for solar energy projects have now begun to change. Originally touted as lowering climate-harming carbon emissions and helping to save the earth, now more openly solar developers are admitting to us that solar projects will feed electricity into massive data centers. The high-voltage 525 kiloVolt Greenlink Transmission Project in Nevada, under construction, starts at natural gas power plants at Apex, and two of the three end-point 365-kV feeder lines fork to the enormous Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center which houses data centers and industrial parks. Large substations are being built along the line in Nevada’s remote wildlands in order to feed in solar project generation. We call this greenwashing.

Here is a quick rundown of some of the related news items and social media posts we have read in the last month:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs are becoming much more complex with software such as “agents” which can perform functions such as being personal assistants, processing vast amounts of data, analyzing data, and even making decisions independently (although not always correctly!). This program advancement has sped up in the last year.

• The military noticed. As seen from recent arguments on x, the power of AI to scan and integrate enormous amounts of data very quickly to find patterns is useful. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, known for its advanced AI model Claude, sparred with the Pentagon on allowing its classified AI models to be used for mass domestic surveillance and even for fully autonomous weapons (where humans are taken out of the loop for selecting and engaging targets). See Anthropic’s Statement of ethics. They wouldn’t budge on this. Trump then settled the debate by ordering the Department of War to remove Claude from all of its systems, and the Pentagon declared Anthropic a company that was a “supply chain risk.” This is an unprecedented move.

• The void was filled within hours by another company, OpenAI, whose CEO Sam Altman agreed to the Pentagon’s demands for use of its model. Altman later admitted that he could not control the Pentagon’s use of AI.

• The Department of War is using Anthropic’s classified AI model in the war on Iran as we write this (it will take 6 months to extricate the model from their computer systems).

• Needless to say this all takes gargantuan amounts of energy. The rise of data centers for this level of information processing threatens to eat up whole cities’ worth of electrical generation. There is not enough energy to fill the demand.

• Microsoft is seeking to restart Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, renaming it the “Crane Clean Energy Center.” They want it running to feed their massive AI data centers by 2027 or 2028.

• Huge new natural gas generating facilities are being built to power data centers, mostly Back East where large rivers provide plentiful water for cooling towers. Coal power is not always being taken off line because of data center needs.

• Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) are used in Generative AI to construct images and videos. These require huge amounts of energy ramped up very quickly. Intermittent solar power plus battery storage is not able to supply this power alone, but is being paired with baseload (natural gas power plants, nuclear in the future) to feed hungry data centers and make them into “green data centers.”

• In an unexpected development, advanced modular reciprocating engines are making a big splash to power GPU-intensive data center needs. These powerful engines reached a historic peak in World War II used in P-51 Mustang propeller-driven warplanes developed by Rolls-Royce for the American military.

• Today companies like Rolls-Royce and Caterpillar cannot build these modern reciprocating engines fast enough, as they are in demand to power data centers. They can ramp up within minutes when GPUs need them. They can be installed within months of an order, not years as with nuclear power plants or large-scale solar projects on public lands. A data center company can purchase 90 reciprocating engines at 10 megawatts each and place them on site of the data center. They run on a variety of fuels, such as natural gas, diesel, or biofuels. (We do not seem to be moving away from fossil fuels.)

• We have early information that one utility-scale solar project planned in the Boulder City Green Zone in southern Nevada will switch to being a data center now. On tortoise habitat.

• We attended a Nye County Commission meeting where developers are seeking to build a data center with associated solar panels on a private land parcel in Sarcobatus Flat in the northern Mojave Desert of Nevada. Digital information processed would be beamed to satellite links.

Both Republicans and Democrats are supporting this unsustainable data center push, and it may change the face of the Mojave Desert again.

Old tank tracks from General Patton’s training maneuvers can still be seen on parts of the southern California deserts. Today we observe Air Force F-16 fighter jets and other military aircraft regularly over the Mojave as they fly between such places as the Nevada Test and Training Range and Edwards Air Force Base in the West Mojave of California. Soon we may be seeing vast tentacles of grids, power plants of various kinds, and data processing facilities in the desert ecosystems that are unfortunately not always going to be for purposes of saving the earth.

January 21, 2026 - Pahrump, NV - We attended the Nye County Commission public meeting today in Pahrump, Nevada, and learned more details about a new proposed solar project at Scotty’s Junction in Sarcobatus Flat on the east side of Death Valley National Park. The solar project is proposed on private land on the east side of US 95, and we usually do not get involved in private land projects. But the nature of this one raised eyebrows: data mining for Bitcoin. What if this starts happening on public lands?

The developers, Tesla Solar LLC (no involvement with Elon Musk), were present and we were able to talk with them. The Sarcobatus Solar Project would have data servers housed in air-conditioned buildings tied to a set of solar arrays across 800 acres. All the power would be used internally, so the data center is “distributed” and not grid-tied. We specifically asked if the project would tie in to Greenlink West Transmission Project, which is to be built nearby in Sarcobatus Flat—the answer was No.

But unlike the usual massive data centers that we discussed in past a Substack, such as at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, this project would have small servers in small buildings with high compute power but low acreage connected with blocks of photovoltaic solar panels and batteries that would help make the energy less intermittent through the night. We are not sure we buy the non-intermittent part, as Lithium-ion batteries are not yet known to release stored power all night long—4 to 6 hours seems typical at other solar projects.

But the main use of these mini-data centers would be to mine data, specifically Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency.

But what exactly is bitcoin mining? It is the use of powerful computers to guess random numbers at high speed that solve difficult mathematical equations in order to verify transactions that unlock virtual bitcoins into your virtual wallet. And one bitcoin is worth a lot.

It is an expensive process. And in the U.S. it is perfectly legal. In the last several years when cryptocurrency mining took off, traditional large data-mining centers were built next to coal power plants, and the miners would buy the power plant, and the entire energy generation of the power plant was fed into massive server arrays to run the computers 24/7/365 racing to compete with other miners to unlock bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. The sole purpose of which is to get rich.

So this new distributed small-scale data mining trend is concerning. It still uses a lot of power and the over-worked server networks need to be cooled, but computer chips have become tinier, more powerful, and can now theoretically run on blocks of solar panels tied directly to the server units. In this new kind of distributed data center, 10x10-foot air-conditioned sheds house data processors with each solar field, for crypto mining. Each set of solar arrays powers data mining, and possibly would be used for other data processing such as with credit card transactions, according to the developers of the Sarcobatus Flat project.

What if these distributed data-mining centers start to appear as solar-powered project applications on public lands and on thriving desert ecosystems?

No fiber-optic lines would be needed to connect data to the miner operations—the data would be relayed to Starlink satellites. Thus these kinds of projects can be built anywhere.

At first the developer wanted 38-foot-tall tracking photovoltaic solar arrays to power the servers. The County code instructs that such facilities cannot exceed 25 feet, so the developer wanted to apply for a variance. The Code says no variance is allowed in this case. The developer could request a code waiver. During public comments some Nye County residents objected to all the variances and waivers being discussed by solar developers. The developer then agreed to have a lower non-tracker fixed solar array below 25 feet tall. The panels would be fixed on ballast boxes on the ground. They would obtain water for dust control during construction from local water suppliers via truck, and no wells would be needed on site.

The Nye County board made a motion to approve the preliminary development plan. The motion passed. Commissioner Bruce Jabbour recused himself from the vote because he said he has a business relationship with the developer, Tesla Solar LLC.

Times are changing rapidly: no longer are climate change goals in front of some solar developers, but now the shift is towards AI and cryptocurrency, both of which have massive energy consumptions and huge Carbon footprints. We will be following this trend.

Overlooking the Truckee River along USA Parkway in Storey County, Nevada, across from a pair of concrete signs proclaiming “Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center” and “Worlds Largest,” an ominous metal sentinel looms over the traffic exiting Interstate 80, bound for any of about two dozen warehouses and construction sites. A plaque bolted down at the foot of a roughly human-sized archway in the sculpture’s base reads:

Below the text, a QR code is etched into the stainless steel. When scanned with a smart phone, the code navigates to an error page.

Beyond this relatively small arch, in a high desert valley rapidly filling with massive data centers, lies the northern terminus of the Greenlink West transmission line at Comstock Meadows Substation.

When the Berkshire Hathaway Energy subsidiary NV Energy officially announced the 525 kiloVolt transmission line project known as Greenlink West, the electric utility corporation explicitly described the project as vital and necessary to fulfill the State of Nevada’s mandate to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels. In its July 2021 Plan of Development document, NV Energy stated:

“Development of the Greenlink West Transmission Project facilitates access to renewable energy zones and is necessary to accommodate decommissioning of conventional fossil fuel generation resources.”

In 2021, NV Energy estimated the combined cost for construction of the Greenlink North and Greenlink West transmission projects to be $2.5 billion. By the time the project was granted federal approval in September 2024, that number had ballooned to $4.2 billion, and the company was already appealing to the state’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to approve increases in the base rate for electricity. In other words, NV Energy sought to pass a portion of the cost of construction on to their “customers,” who did not ask for the transmission line to be built, had extremely limited opportunity for public comment on the proposal, and do not have any options for electricity service other than Nevada’s monopoly utility company.

In September 2025, the PUC approved a rate hike of $4 per month in Southern Nevada specifically to recoup Greenlink West construction costs, in addition to a state-wide peak usage rate that will increase electricity bills by over $25 for most customers. This rate hike fits into a broader trend of increasing economic stress on a growing proportion of Americans, with difficulty affording electric bills reported as particularly acute. An analysis from ICF suggests that electricity rates could increase as much as 100% by 2050.

Since the Greenlink project was announced, Basin and Range Watch has fought to stop it, primarily on the grounds that, in addition to damage to Nevada wild lands from construction of the transmission line itself, this infrastructure will accelerate rapid development of poorly sited industrial solar installations on public lands adjacent to the line. Greenlink West is a hairline fracture through some of the last remaining unbroken wild land in the lower 48 states, opening Nevada’s outback to a new, green extraction that proposes to turn this landscape into a sacrifice zone in the name of decarbonization.

But where and to whom will this brave new voltage actually flow?

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in September 2025 that NV Energy acknowledged a suite of tech companies will be allowed to access electricity transmitted via Greenlink lines. The combined Greenlink North and West will be able to transmit up to 5,000 megawatts (MW). NV Energy has promised Switch, Novva, and others up to 4,000 MW for a complex of massive AI data centers in the greater Reno area.

This recent wave of high-tech development in northern Nevada is concentrated at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, along the Truckee River between Sparks and Reno, where Switch opened a 130 MW data center next door to the Tesla Gigafactory in 2017. Since then, Google, Tract, EdgeCore, Novva, Vantage, PowerHouse, Apple, Blockchains, and Microsoft also acquired land in the area and began building data centers. Tucked in behind Google’s data center complex at the south end of Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center is NV Energy’s Comstock Meadows Substation, currently undergoing an expansion to become the northernmost node of Greenlink.

In order to keep up with the spike in electricity demand caused by these new data centers, Mark IV Capital has announced plans to construct a 1,800 MW natural gas generating station in nearby Fernley, with intent to transfer the plant to NV Energy. This, too, fits a broader trend of big tech rushing to build fossil fuel-powered generating stations to power data centers. Incidentally, the southern terminus of the Greenlink West transmission line is at the Apex Generating Station northeast of Las Vegas, which will enable NV Energy to bring power produced there from natural gas all the way to northern Nevada.

Reporting and speculation on the impact of the current boom in artificial intelligence has become abundant, verging on overwhelming, at the close of 2025. In the short term, anxiety is mounting over the fact that investment in AI data centers is solely responsible for the U.S. having net positive GDP growth in the past year. We would be in a recession without growth in this one industry. By now, all of the biggest news outlets have run a story on this issue. So, let’s add to the noise. Here are some of the problems with AI that we know about so far:

● AI processes and data centers consume tremendous amounts of electricity.

● AI data centers consume a lot of water for cooling. One study estimated that data centers in the U.S. used 17.5 billion gallons in 2023.

● “AI companion” chatbots have introduced the human race to a new mental illness: AI Psychosis, where people develop relationships with AI personalities that have led to suicide, divorce, and social isolation.

● AI’s practical business applications as a corporate efficiency tool are not panning out to be as revolutionary as boosters claim, in spite of trillions of dollars in investment.

● This massive investment into building AI data centers is unlikely to return, which has prompted many economists to warn that the AI industry has caused an unsustainable bubble.

This last point, while depressing and scary, can be understood as a point of leverage for anyone looking for a way to oppose a data center in their area. These companies are stretched so thin, running on faith and fumes, that vocal opposition can make more of a difference. For inspiration, look to Tucson, whose city council unanimously rejected a proposed Amazon Web Services data center in August 2025. Credit is entirely due to a community mobilization to put pressure on the city council and Amazon, stating loud and clear "No Desert Data Center."

If the environmental damage and outright grift of the AI project at large aren’t enough to turn you against your nearest data center and the Greenlink transmission line, let the final straw be your rising electricity bill. Nevadans have now joined the ranks of ordinary working people subsidizing the destruction wreaked by Big Tech through their local electric utility. Will Greenlink ever fulfill its promise to bring clean energy to Nevada homes and businesses? Is the state any closer to its decarbonization goals?

We are not entirely at the mercy of these corporations, in spite of their immense wealth and influence. If you hear about a data center proposed near you, submit comments, attend local government meetings, and connect with other citizens who share your outrage. These actions are effective. And support Basin and Range Watch, whose fight against Greenlink West continues with a lawsuit alongside Friends of Nevada Wilderness.

When the utility-scale Oberon Solar Project was approved on public lands in 2022 in Riverside County, CA south of Joshua Tree National Park, many old growth desert ironwood trees were removed. Some were over 1,000 years old. The Bureau of Land Management issued this statement:

Interesting now that the builders, Intersect Power, have been bought by a company that will now build resource-wasting data centers. Saving the planet appears to be less profitable these days.

Forgotten trees

Characteristic of the area are great wide sand washes filling the valley bottoms, grown with diverse thickets of low desert woodland. Here we looked for the Burro deer among the shady Ironwood trees (Olneya tesota), Palo verdes (Cercidium floridum), Honey mesquites (Prosopis glandulosa var. torreyana), Desert willows (Chilopsis linearis), Smoke trees (Psorothamnus spinosus) and Graythorn (Zizyphus obtusifolia var. canescens). Many were in flower in May: bright yellows of the palo verdes and mesquites, pinks of the Desert willows, and pale purples of the Ironwoods.

Desert Ironwoods can grow to 35 feet tall and after warm-season rains are covered with purple pea-flowers, revealing its family relationship. So-named because the wood of this tree is extremely dense and hard - it reportedly sinks in water. Native people made arrowheads from the rock-like wood.

Situated east of Palm Springs, CA, the 2,700-acre Oberon Solar Project has been constucted and is now in operation on public lands that were once wild desert ecosystems. The project is rated at up to 500 megawatts (MW), with 200 MW of Lithium-ion battery storage.

This was one of the first new utility-scale solar projects approved under the 2016 Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP) that was not grandfathered in from older applications, and thus is significant in setting a precedent for how future solar projects are negotiated and approved under the DRECP. In spite of BLM’s new mitigation measures negotiated between the contentious environmental assessment and final decision under the DRECP, this project was still allowed to kill a significant amount of desert ironwood tree wash habitat--an imperiled vegetation community in California.

In 2021 we visited the site of the the-proposed Oberon Renewable Energy Project, a photovoltaic solar project proposed on one of the worst sites in Chuckwalla Valley--full of microphyll woodland, sandy washes, a crucial connectivity corridor for wildlife, archaeological sites, Federally Threatened Mojave desert tortoise Critical Habitat, and a healthy population of Mojave fringe-toed lizards (Uma scoparia). This Colorado Desert landscape should have been protected in full as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern, and not included as part of a large Development Focus Area for energy under the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP).

Surprisingly, 600 acres of designated Critical Habitat for the desert tortoise was approved by the Bureau of Land Management for development for the Oberon Solar Project. The habitat is located in desert dry wash woodlands where tortoise dine on the fallen seed pods of the ironwood trees.

We commented heavily during the environmental review of the project, but unlike so many current opinions on how permitting slows these projects, we witnessed the review streamlined and quick to be approved. Local communities and Tribes were ignored.

We even tried to sue BLM to stop the project because it would use up nearly all mitigation allowances given out in the DRECP for the entire plan area for its 30-year duration--for just this one solar project! But no attorney would touch a “green energy” project. The project was built. Now the energy will go to data centers, not try to lessen CO2 emissions as originally claimed.

San Bernardino County, California - We have been opposing and following this utility-scale solar power project for years, and as often happens with these poorly-sited projects on public lands, we think we have stopped them—and then they later suddenly bounce back. We call these Zombie Projects.

And for the umpteenth time, we are not against solar energy—it just needs to go on rooftops, over parking lots, and fill in already-disturbed lands. This is not disturbed land, but a thriving Mojave Desert ecosystem full of wildflowers, lizards, desert tortoises, kit foxes, burrowing owls, and more. See our March 2014 wildflower field report at https://www.basinandrangewatch.org/Soda-Mt-Spring.html. Why destroy this?

The power plant project site lies right on the boundary of the Mojave National Preserve next to a scientific research station at the desert outpost of Zzyzx, California.

(Pronounced “ZYE-ZIX,” we desert rats like to think some joker wanted to make sure they were the absolute last entry in the old phone book.)

Zzyzx was originally called Soda Springs because of the rare desert springs there, which attract desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni) to drink. The property is now part of the Mojave National Preserve, and California State University operates a Desert Studies Center there.

The imperiled Mohave tui chub (Siphateles bicolor mohavensis), a desert fish that once inhabited the nearby Mojave River, was placed in a spring-fed refugium lake at the Zzyzx research center in order to conserve it from potential extinction.

This is all to emphasize the importance of water in the area: groundwater, spring water, the Mojave River, and associated biodiversity. Photovoltaic solar power plants often pump and extract a lot of groundwater with new wells, water trucks to try to control dust during construction, and often alter surface hydrology with thousands of acres of new industrial development.

The new 2,700-acre Soda Mountain Solar Project (300 megawatts) would be built on Bureau of Land Management land adjacent to the Mojave National Preserve. The State of California has released a 1,300 page Environmental Impact Report (EIR). The project will hurt local bighorn sheep populations. The project was rejected by San Bernardino County in 2016, but the California governor was not happy and turned jurisdiction over to the California Energy Commission—an elaborate rubber stamp agency.

Here is what the agencies say about bighorn sheep in the EIR:

“The proposed project would result in significant and unavoidable impacts to desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni) individuals and their movement within and surrounding the project area. This species is designated as Fully Protected by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), pursuant to California Fish and Game Code Section 4700. Additionally, significant and unavoidable impacts would occur as a result of inconsistencies with applicable California Fish and Game Code sections that prohibit take of fully-protected species. Desert bighorn sheep in the Soda and Cady Mountains form a critical part of the Mojave Desert metapopulation and rely on intermountain movement corridors for gene flow, recolonization, and access to seasonal resources. While desert bighorn sheep are known to move within and around the project area, staff is concerned that these areas would be avoided during construction and operation due to increased human presence and limited site availability through the solar arrays. Additionally, the proposed project could compromise the use of the planned wildlife crossing being installed as part of the Brightline West High-Speed Rail Project, which is located within 1.25 miles of the project area and is designed to restore connectivity between desert bighorn sheep populations fragmented by I-15. Impacts that displace sheep, remove important foraging habitat, or result in mortality or decreased fitness would be considered significant and unavoidable.”

So an expensive wildlife crossing overpass structure is to be built over highway 15 near Zzyzx as part of mitigation for a high-speed rail project, but this giant solar project would compromise the wildlife crossing? We say No!

The Soda Mountain docket page on the California Energy Commission website is here: https://efiling.energy.ca.gov/Lists/DocketLog.aspx?docketnumber=24-OPT-03&fbclid=IwY2xjawPBdwdleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE3dXRaUVJRMjNvT0ZLbURmc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHit021y70tnNF2WU250LRCysaU9MHl6jPMH1uKRdKECHyjhYzNdGgQtQiwK2_aem_qm-feUz-lVw0BzwWOdLEjQ

You have until 2/27/26 to submit comments.

We will provide our comments and talking points before the deadline. Stay tuned! (Make sure to download and keep any documents from this state website, as they tend to disappear after a few years.)

Wildlife connectivity would be harmed by this zombie project that new companies try to revive, as we reported in 2015 at https://www.basinandrangewatch.org/SodaMountain.html:

Bighorn Sheep Experts Say Project Would Harm Connectivity

January 13, 2015 - Two noted wildlife biologists have written a column describing how important the Soda Mountain valley is for bighorn sheep connectivity. John Wehausen, Ph.D., an applied population ecologist who has studied bighorn sheep populations in California since 1974, and Clinton Epps, Ph.D., an associate professor at Oregon State University who specializes in mammal conservation.

They write, “The proposed Soda Mountain Solar Project would straddle Interstate 15 and cover areas between the north and south Soda Mountains on the northwestern edge of the Mojave National Preserve, pinching off the best location to re-establish important bighorn sheep movements that have been severed by I-15. The proposed development, which would include solar arrays, infrastructure and roads, would likely prevent bighorn from moving through the project area.”

The broad connection between bighorn populations in Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley National Park could be impacted by cutting off the already tenuous movement corridors between these areas, say the biologists:

“Our research finds that the Soda Mountains connection is a particularly important restorable corridor in the southeastern desert region of California, where a wildlife overpass would re-establish migration affecting numerous bighorn sheep populations on either side of I-15.”

They emphasize, “While we recognize the importance of investing in a renewable energy future that buffers us from the worst impacts of climate change and enhances our nation’s energy independence, we strongly believe that this can be done in a manner that does not jeopardize the ecological integrity of our national parks, wilderness areas and wildlife.”

See more at The Daily Bulletin.

RENO, Nev. — Conservationists won their protest against the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) faulty final Environmental Impact Statement for the Greenlink North Transmission Project, halting the project’s progress and protecting open space and wildlife habitat. The proposed 525 kiloVolt (kV) transmission line would have spanned from Ely to near Yerington, NV, and included the construction of two new large substations to open the remote region to energy development.

This is the third phase of an energy transmission triangle that the Investor-Owned Unity NV Energy, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, has been planning and building for years. The first part of the project was completed in 2015, spanning from Las Vegas to Ely. The second phase, Greenlink West Transmission Project, was approved in 2024 and is now under construction with 180-foot-tall rust-colored steel towers going up using enormous cranes, despite destructive impacts to Joshua trees, Mojave desert tortoise habitat, and Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument. The third leg of this statewide transmission project is Greenlink North, proposed to connect the transmission network across central
Nevada.

Much of this new development and future power plant growth would be to feed energy-intensive data centers. A data center boom has occurred in the Reno-Tahoe area of northern Nevada, and NV Energy has promised Google, Switch, Novva, and other companies up to 4,000 megawatts (MW) for a complex of AI and cloud data centers larger than the city of Detroit.

“The cost of this green energy and big data is thousands upon thousands of acres of bulldozed tortoise habitat and sagebrush landscapes being lost forever, and Nevada’s wild, open spaces criss-crossed by transmission lines,” said Paul Ruprecht, Nevada Director of Western Watersheds Project.

Currently there are over 100,000 acres of solar and wind energy applications along the Greenlink North project route as companies wait for the line to potentially be built. But fossil fuels are not being taken offline, and more natural gas generating facilities are being built to feed the hungry data center growth. Greenlink West starts at the Apex Industrial Park north of Las Vegas, which has four natural gas-burning power plants, and NV Energy is proposing to add more there.

Three parties, including ours, Lander County, and another environmental group coalition lead by Center for Biological Diversity, filed official protests with the BLM showing that Greenlink North violates sage-grouse plans. Our protest points include how Greenlink North would violate management standards for transmission lines over 100 kiloVolts in the 2015 Greater Sage-Grouse Approved Resource Management Plan Amendment (ARMPA). Greenlink North is proposed at 525 kiloVolts. Greenlink North is proposed to slash through 162 miles of Priority Habitat Management Areas (PHMA) for greater sage-grouse, as well as General Habitat Management Areas (GHMA) and other areas key to the survival of sage-grouse. The ARMPA clearly states that if adaptive management responses have been triggered, GHMAs and PHMAs become exclusion areas for high-voltage transmission lines that are outside of designated utility corridors.

Because soft and hard triggers for sage-grouse management have been tripped here many times over multiple years, BLM has admitted that such a giant transmission project would not be allowed.

“Instead of conforming to the existing resource management plans across central Nevada, BLM is pushing to amend plans and ram this huge transmission project through important sage-grouse areas,” said Laura Cunningham, Co-Founder of Basin and Range Watch and California Director of Western Watersheds Project. “Sage-grouse populations continue to drastically decline, just like with the desert tortoise, and mitigation measures have not been working to slow these declines.”

Additionally, Basin and Range Watch and Western Watersheds Project formally protested the decision because BLM approved the project although they had never evaluated the impacts to visual resources on 21,000 acres in central Nevada.

“The Greenlink North project would be built in one of the most unspoiled and stunning regions of the Great Basin and Western USA,” said Kevin Emmerich, co-founder of Basin and Range Watch. “BLM failed to fully evaluate the impacts the transmission line would have on visual resources.”

The National BLM Director remanded the decision back to the Nevada State Director “for consideration, clarification, further planning, or other appropriate action to resolve this protest issue.” There may be a supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the project in 2026.

“We’ll continue to follow the review process for the Greenlink North Transmission Project to make sure the agencies adhere to the regulations that protect imperiled species and viewsheds,” said Cunningham.

This is remarkable.

This might just help conserve some of our beloved California deserts in the future. We have been critiquing the Duck Curve for years and years, seemingly to deaf ears. We have been putting alternatives in environmental review comments for years on how market mechanisms need to be used to save energy and balance the grid, instead of curtailing solar and wind projects built on public lands and then building more projects endlessly.

Here it is! Governor Newsom signed legislation to try to relieve the Duck Curve and halt wasteful curtailment by creating a “day-ahead energy trading market” (instead of a “spot market” of minutes) to give more time for grid balancing authorities like the huge California Independent System Operator (CAISO) to sell excess solar power across state lines instead of switching desert solar projects off. (And buying baseload/on-demand natural gas generation and hydro power.)

The Duck Curve is a label for how large-scale solar energy projects generate too much electricity onto the grid during mid-day when the sun is high in the sky, and the finely-tuned grid starts to unbalance with the surge. Many solar projects that have destroyed desert ecosystems are actually turned off during these peak solar insolation daylight hours in order to not disrupt the grid. Turned off! This has been incredibly wasteful for many years.

Don’t believe us, check the CAISO website and its daily variable energy resource (VER=solar and wind) curtailment chart:

This is all wasted renewable energy power that is shut off to balance the grid. A lot of public lands ecosystems were sacrificed for this.

Amazing quote from the SF Gate December 1, 2025 article, California has a huge solar power problem. A fix is coming:

With more efficient power usage, California wouldn’t need quite as many new solar, wind and battery projects to reach its 2045 goal of sourcing 100% of its energy from renewables. Building fewer projects means fewer costs for ratepayers.

(See https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/california-solving-solar-power-problems-21207873.php?sid=682d624c4f2690bb1c07fbe2&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=briefing&utm_campaign=sfgt%20%7C%20the%20daily&stn=nf)

Yes, why keep building more and more large-scale solar power projects on undisturbed public lands when they are not even being used most of the time!

The photo below sums up much of what we have been fighting for since 2009. This is what we are talking about when we want to save beautiful desert ecosystems full of life and history, cultural landscapes, public lands, and local communities where people live.

Interesting side notes from the SF Gate article:

• Lithium battery storage is not enough to take excess solar generation and store it.

• Natural gas generation and Pacific Northwest hydro are still required in this scheme to balance the grid and flatten the Duck Curve.

• The utility-scale solar project build-out and associated transmission infrastructure to get those remote solar projects to load centers might be in part responsible for high California electricity bills shouldered by ratepayers. Newsom signed this bill to try to lower ratepayer electricity costs. This finally hints at the highly profitable ratebasing utilities have been getting away with for decades, where infrastructure project construction costs such as transmission lines are passed on to rate-payers.

• This day-ahead market is still theoretical, other states have to agree and sign up with CAISO. Bonneville Power has already apparently rejected it, not wanting to give California more dominance.

Unstated:

• Rooftop solar solutions and energy efficiency could have avoided desert solar project curtailment and these grid imbalances altogether, especially if Investor-Owned Utilities didn’t gut the Distributed Energy Resources sector with heavy political lobbying. (See more at our Solar Done Right project https://www.basinandrangewatch2.org/solar-done-right)

Newsom’s bill is not perfect, but perhaps this will bring back better planning and stop some of the destructive future solar and wind projects on desert ecosystems as a result of unplanned energy sprawl. We have been calling for better national planning for years, and this might be a small step towards that in a regional fashion.

Over 70,000 acres of federally threatened Mojave Desert tortoise habitat has been bulldozed for solar projects. Enough.

Although we have seen a few new utility-scale solar applications stake out territory with new applications on public land, for the most part the solar land rush has hit a pause button.

Although Trump seems to have a particular hatred for wind projects, he has not pointedly called out solar energy as much, and has largely allowed solar projects to continue in the pipeline at the whim of the market.

But his market policies seem designed to punish renewable energy, while pushing fossil fuels and nuclear power in order to compete with China in the race for Artificial Intelligence. We will have a lot more to say about AI in future posts.

Dozens of utility-scale solar projects on public lands in the California and Nevada deserts have been constructed equaling thousands of megawatts, and more project applications were moving forward under President Biden, projects such as Rough Hat Clark Solar Project, Bonanza Solar Project, Libra Solar Project, and Soda Mountain Solar Project. What is the overall status of the solar build-out now?

The new administration has been busy modifying energy policies that impact renewable energy on both public and private lands. President Trump signed legislation and several executive orders pertaining to solar power that we briefly summarize below.

The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) was signed into law on July 4, 2025, by Trump, restricting many subsidies that supported renewable energy in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

The bill halted the 30% Residential Clean Energy Tax Credit for rooftop solar generators at the end of 2025.

Then on July 7, 2025, Trump signed an executive order called “Ending Market Distorting Subsidies for Unreliable, Foreign Controlled Energy Sources,” which directed the Treasury Department to strictly enforce the step-down and termination of green energy federal tax credits. This includes:

• “Within 45 days following enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Secretary of the Treasury shall take all action as the Secretary of the Treasury deems necessary and appropriate to strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits under sections 45Y and 48E of the Internal Revenue Code for wind and solar facilities. This includes issuing new and revised guidance as the Secretary of the Treasury deems appropriate and consistent with applicable law to ensure that policies concerning the ‘beginning of construction’ are not circumvented, including by preventing the artificial acceleration or manipulation of eligibility and by restricting the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.” Sec. 3(a).

The Clean Energy Investment (48E) and Production (45Y) Tax Credit have been widely used by solar developers for utility-scale solar projects in the desert under Biden. The tax credits are not immediately eliminated but under Trump’s new order to obtain the tax credits projects must commence physical construction on or before July 4, 2026, or begin operation on or before December 31, 2027. Traditionally a solar project could qualify for a tax credit by ensuring that 5% of the project’s total costs were incurred—Trump’s executive order eliminated this safe harbor provision for large-scale projects. Construction must also be “continuous” with some exemptions.

• Treasury is also directed to implement the Foreign Entity of Concern restrictions in the OBBB.

This refers to certain countries and businesses deemed to be a threat to the US, such as China and Russia. Projects obtaining solar panels and components from China are therefore barred from receiving tax credits, and this could have large impacts to desert projects. The Yellow Pine Solar Project in Pahrump Valley, NV, now under construction on public lands, was noted to have pallets of Chinese solar panels on site.

• Trump is also pushing domestic manufacturing of solar cells instead of imports. To access the 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Tax Credit must have the final product containing at least 65% (by cost) domestically manufactured content. This could put a delay on desert solar projects as they figure out how to wean off imported Chinese solar panel materials.

• Another order directs the Interior Secretary (responsible for millions of acres of public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management) to “conduct a review of regulations, guidance, policies, and practices under the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction to determine whether any provide preferential treatment to wind and solar facilities in comparison to dispatchable energy sources. The Secretary of the Interior shall then revise any identified regulations, guidance, policies, and practices as appropriate and consistent with applicable law to eliminate any such preferences for wind and solar facilities.” Sec. 4(a).

Trade tariffs: Trump has imposed tariffs on China which are still under negotiation, and this is likely to increase costs of materials for solar projects. Most solar cells are still manufactured in China, or shipped to countries like Malaysia for further export.

How these measures are likely to play out in the desert remains to be seen. Many environmental reviews of utility-scale solar project seem to be holding on pause, but with no clear indications of the future from federal agencies tasked with permitting renewable energy projects.

This also means that land protection campaigns have also ground to a halt. Unfortunately we do not see that there will be any new national monuments or Areas of Critical Environmental Concern designated during this time of political infighting, although bipartisan support for public lands remains high.

June 17, 2025 - We've been watching social media blow up as people from all sides of the political aisle decry the language in the Senate reconciliation bill that would authorize the sell-off of millions of acres of beloved public lands. Memes are being made by both liberals and conservatives--a rare time of voiced unity about a subject, that of the wild and beautiful American landscapes, that language in the Big Beautiful Bill seems to offer up as mostly elidgible for a process of disposal to private bidders up to about 3 million acres.

Tens of millions of acres outside of national parks, monuments, and other special designations, could be chosen in this sell-off process of lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service in the Western states and Alaska--suspposedly for "affordable housing."

The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources wrote up an amendment to the budget reconciliation bill that would sell off between 2.2 and 3.3 million acres of from these eligible public lands to private commercial interests.

Tell your Senators NO! Our public lands are one of the best ideas of this country, loved by millions of Americans for recreation, solitude, camping, exploration, hunting and fishing, and enjoyment.

The map below shows eligible public lands that may be included in the sell-off amendment to the Big Beautiful Bill.

Detail from a map from The Wilderness Society showing all eligible public lands--in this case managed by Bureau of Land Management--that could be sold off. This seems to include most of Pahrump Valley, NV, including tortoise translocation sites and nominated Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC). The mapped lands ignores recreational routes, Tribal trust lands, the Old Spanish Trail, and even the existing designated Ivanpah ACEC. From https://www.wilderness.org/articles/media-resources/120-million-acres-public-lands-eligible-sale-senr-budget-reconciliation-package

Seen on X.

The three map details above show areas that are absolutely not ever going to be affordable housing: left, the Toiyabe, Toquima and Monitor Range in remote central Nevada; center, the extremely steep and rugged Inyo Mountains and southern White Mountains in eastern California near Bishop, CA; and right, high-value US Forest Service Lands mapped around the edges of Yosemite National Park—which would be resort and luxury home territory if sold off. (Green = US Forest Service, and yellow = lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management).

Meme captured from social media.

Grazing allotments and Wilderness Study Areas are mapped as eligible. This is almost laughable as "affordable housing" - the very steep and rugged Inyo Mountains and southern White Mountains near Bishop, CA. Is this for mining companies to bid on?

Call your Senators and tell them NO! Do not agree to this amendment to the reconciliation bill. Keep our public lands for the people! You can call the U. S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to connect with your Senators in Washington DC.

Find your Senators here: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm?lang=en

Sarcobatus Flat, Nevada, Joshua Tree, and limestone ridge in the Mojave Desert of Southern Nevada — all public lands.

We have seldom seen such bipartisan push-back on social media towards such language in a Congressional bill, which is too broad and sweeping.

After widespread losses in the congressional and presidential campaigns, the Democrats have been doing a lot of soul-searching. We just listened to a new podcast by California Governor Newsom interviewing Ezra Klein, New York Times journalist and co-author of the recent book Abundance with Derek Thompson. We read reviews of this book, marketed by Simon and Schuster as a “paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.” The podcast clarified that the title referred to an abundance of technology. That is the goal.

Klein argued that we need to build an ungodly amount of new renewable energy projects. Seemingly just for the sake of building things.

We at Basin and Range Watch are a mix of Democrat and Republican voters, and we try not to get too political. We want to represent everyone who loves the Mojave and Great Basin deserts, and we critique all administrations regardless of party. We couldn’t help notice, however, a shift in liberal talking points to the right recently, and towards the all-out development mentality of some conservatives. Governor Newsom’s podcast was surprising in its reach towards Trumpian values. We could hear a little envy in their voices.

Klein and Newsom covered a lot of topics, from failed high-speed train plans, the race for Artificial Intelligence, and controversial low-income housing needs, to the desire to cut through red tape and build, build, build more. We have noticed that many Democrats have embraced development policies and plans, and moved away from traditional conservation and environmental values of protecting natural areas and rare species, and even saving public lands. But we were surprised to hear Governor Newsom discuss with Klein about the need to streamline environmental reviews and reduce the time it takes to build major projects through wildlands and people’s backyards. Bedrock laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, and California Environmental Quality Act were described as obstacles for developers, rather than as public safeguards for the excesses of corporate greed and government overreach.

Having spent the last 15 or so years commenting on environmental reviews in California, we can attest that the streamlining has already happened, the developers almost always get what they want, and the people of this country have the deck stacked against them if they don’t want a giant high-voltage line being built at record pace over their land, or a utility-scale solar project built next to their house. If you don’t agree, tough. Eminent domain is alive and well. Public lands are a resource to be used for extraction.

Newsom bragged how he pushed through a 300-megawatt solar project in the California desert (probably the Oberon Solar Project, which was built partly overlapping hundreds of acres of Critical Habitat for the federally threatened Mojave desert tortoise, and which took the threat of a lawsuit by the local community to get the developer to move the solar project away from homes at Desert Center).

Klein and Newsom complained about “localization,” a new word for “NIMBY”—an acronym for “not in my backyard,” which has been turned into a bad word by developers.

These damn people who want views of nature and beautiful landscapes, Newsom said in so many words, they are a hindrance to the future of build-out for technology.

That future in this new liberal world is one of data centers, factories, renewable energy projects, urban housing sprawl, and new transportation corridors. Newsom even hinted that California should become more like China, a nation where people’s rights are practically nil, where entire towns are forced to be removed for vast construction projects like dams, and nature is routinely polluted and bulldozed.

Values of wild nature, biodiversity, ecological health, open space, and quality of life for local communities are values that we believe many people in both political parties still hold dear.

But many “Development Dems” as we call them, are seeking to wholly urbanize and domesticate their party, and imitate Elon Musk in pursuing high tech solutions to all perceived problems.

We are a bunch of ‘desert rats.’

We perceive that sometimes the best solutions are to leave wild nature alone, let it be, allow the natural world to thrive.

Whatever your political views we thank you for continuing to support the wild desert, and working with us to try to minimize the damage and destruction from the construction projects that each year eat away at our public lands and natural areas. The Mojave Desert and Great Basin habitats are among the most intact ecosystems on Earth, and regardless of political direction we will continue to fight to defend these beautiful landscapes, working with both parties and all administrations.

There is still a place for having an abundance of desert tortoises and pronghorn antelope, plentiful Joshua tree woodlands full of lizards and birds, superblooms free of bulldozers.

Amargosa Valley, NV - I’m normally a very positive person, but lately I’ve wanted to jump through a time portal and choose a past era to escape back to, like in the old Star Trek episode. Back to a time before bulldozers and politicians.

This afternoon we checked out the Greenlink West Transmission Project construction in Amargosa Valley, Nevada, near Big Dune. The 100-acre substation was now fenced off, heavy machinery in place, water trucks in a row, and acres of new roads driven upon and desert shrubs grubbed out. This was depressing because just a few weeks ago this was a highly intact, unfragmented Mojave Desert landscape—flat yes—but full of biodiversity. Desert tortoises, kit foxes, and burrowing owls live here, as well as endemic scorpions and the unique Atomic tarantula.

The delicate desert pebble surface was broken in large areas, revealing the poof-dust underneath to blow in the winds. You could see the trails of numerous kangaroo rats hopping about on the new machinery marks as the hopping rodents collected the seeds from past wildflower blooms.

We came here to witness the destruction of this quiet desert valley just east of Death Valley National Park and south of Beatty. We spent years opposing the high-voltage line that will stretch from Las Vegas natural gas power plants to Reno data centers and Tesla giga-factories. We commented to the Bureau of Land Management, attended public meetings, got the news out.

But most environmentalists looked away.

(Many actually supported it.)

Maybe it was the brilliant messaging by the proponent NV Energy, an investor-owned utility and natural gas company, placing the word “green” into the name of this electrical monster that will stretch hundreds of miles across the remote Nevada Outback. The utility has been pushing to build this for years. It was formerly called DesertLink. They will make a gigantic profit by recouping construction costs from ratepayers. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett and his company Berkshire Hathaway bought NV Energy in 2013. They saw the potential for energy expansion and return on investment.

Far from the urban centers where such money deals are made, the wild desert is thriving out here. Young bursage bushes could be seen growing in groups around older plants. Harvester ants collected fallen seeds to take underground.

These are public lands, popular with recreationists. The sprawling substation is careful to avoid the few roads here. Locals also tried to fight the giant transmission line, but many residents and town councils looked away.

“It’s a done deal,” we heard a lot. I thought, well, if you look away it definitely becomes a done deal…

We tried to interest our senator and Congressional representatives in the plight of this land, but they looked away.

We also talked to environmental attorneys, but they too looked away.

Defending the desert is a tough job. But we refuse to look away, and will document the construction of this transmission project so that more people understand what is lost when society chooses energy-hungry artificial intelligence over natural wonders. We were careful to stay on public lands and not walk on the recently-approved Right-of-Way.

I’m a naturalist and biologist by training. I’d rather be out identifying plants, birding with binocs, using field guides to decipher animal tracks, photographing lizards. But I have come to learn more than I care to know about heavy machinery, construction methods, and the impacts of building things out on top of ecosystems. Documenting the before and after of such development is important.

I have trained myself to not look away.

Pahrump, Nevada - The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued a Record of Decision today approving the Rough Hat Clark County Solar Project on public lands located just south of Pahrump, Nevada, in spite of the grave impacts the project will inflict on federally protected Mojave desert tortoises.

The project site is located on diverse high elevation habitat for several other important Mojave Desert species as well. These include Joshua trees, Mojave yuccas, kit foxes, American badgers, rare cacti, kangaroo rats, roadrunners, and LeConte’s thrashers.

The Rough Hat Clark County Solar Project is a proposed 400-megawatt solar photovoltaic facility on 2,400 acres of public land that would replace nearly 4 square miles of Mojave Desert habitat with solar panels, battery storage banks, substations, and new transmission lines. The project is one of 5 new large-scale solar projects and new transmission lines proposed for Mojave Desert habitat on public lands south of Pahrump, Nevada.

The biological analysis for the Rough Hat Clark County Solar Project estimates that there are 114 adult desert tortoises on the site, and a density of 13 per square kilometer. Usually the number of juvenile tortoises is more than the number of adults on any given habitat site. The US Fish and Wildlife Service only requires that adult tortoises be moved and not juveniles due to the difficulty of finding quarter-sized juvenile tortoises, but this means that hundreds of desert tortoise juveniles and hatchlings could be crushed by large earth-moving equipment. It should also be noted that nearly 3 times more tortoises were found on the adjacent 3,000-acre Yellow Pine Solar Project site than predicted by project biologists. They were relocated on a record-breaking drought year and 33 were killed by badgers in their new location.

“In the spring of this year, biologists will excavate every burrow and hole in the ground on the project site to find and move as many desert tortoises as possible,” said Kevin Emmerich, Co-Founder of Basin and Range Watch. “We continue to be amazed that the BLM pushed so hard for this project at the expense of the declining desert tortoise. Solar energy does not need to be built on the most sensitive habitats. Alternatives on rooftops, degraded lands and even Solar Energy Zones on public lands could be used to avoid these impacts. Enough important habitat has been compromised for energy, and we have the technology and ability to avoid these habitats”.

The desert tortoise was listed as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 and has seen sharp declines in several of its Recovery Units due to multiple causes in the last two decades. Starting in 2009, large-scale solar energy applications have been accepted on thousands of acres of tortoise habitat throughout the range of the species and over 80,000 acres of this habitat has been developed so far for solar energy.

In March of 2024, a coalition of organizations and several individuals requested that the Interior Department and Bureau of Land Management cancel the environmental review for the Rough Hat Clark County Solar Project over significant impacts to the Mojave Desert tortoise. It appears that BLM values the wishes of the large-scale solar industry over protection of endangered species.

Final decision on from the BLM: https://eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/project/2019992/510

Organizations request to cancel the Rough Hat Clark County Solar Project: https://www.basinandrangewatch2.org/solar-projects/rough-hat-clark-solar

Basin and Range Watch is a nonprofit working to conserve the deserts of Nevada and California and to educate the public about the diversity of life, culture, and history of the ecosystems and wild lands of the desert.

This is a quick post as we emerge from end-of-the-year deadlines for combating threats to our public lands and deserts. Every administration has done this: pile up environmental review comment and protest deadlines over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. We are used to it. Yet this administration really stepped on the accelerator, announcing several big deadlines starting with the protest periods for the Western Solar Plan and Rough Hat Clark Solar Project, then comments on environmental reviews for Greenlink North Transmission Project, Copper Rays Solar Project, and Bonanza Solar Project. Then the Rock Valley Solar Project application is moving forward, so we investigated that one too. All of these projects would have dire impacts to thriving Mojave Desert and Great Basin ecosystems.

We at Basin & Range Watch are pretty much workaholics, so we put aside vacation for now and dug in to the comments and protests. We are driven to defend the desert, especially as few other groups take the time to write long, detailed comments on these kinds of projects, based on fieldwork.

We try to be apolitical on these subjects. We expect the next administration to perhaps slow down on the renewable energy build-out, but not completely stop.

But politics drives the public lands managing agencies to streamline reviews and bend the law. We push back.

Fifteen years ago we knew a lot less about the laws that govern federal agencies—we dove in and learned as we went. Along the way we worked with various environmental attorneys and that helped bolster our knowledge. I look back at our comments from 2010 and laugh, but at least we tried. Gaining experience by “doing” is a good method—trial and error.

Over the years we even began to make jokes to lighten the tedium of writing these kinds of comments on NEPA (pronounced “nee-pa”), the National Environmental Policy Act, which is actually a very weak law when it comes to public lands preservation. Protection is not a focus of this law, but rather mitigation. And the more we pushed on the huge impacts to threatened and endangered species, local communities, Tribal homelands, air quality, groundwater resources, etc., the more the agencies thought up new “mitigation measures” to push back at us. The mitigation looked better on paper, but over the years we have seen how these measures seldom work on the ground.

We began to speak more legalese: FONSI (“fonz-ee”), FLPMA (“flip-ma”), ROD (“rod”), DRECP (we called this one “D-Crap”).1

Along the way we noticed that science was left behind. Over and over. Politics dominated the decision-making process. Most federal environmental reviews seem pre-determined under both Democrats and Republicans.

This is where the public comes in, and we highly value our grassroots friends and allies. Together we can keep pushing back on the agencies, use the best science, and defend our desert.

That is why these posts will never be paywalled. We give our information away for free, always, because this grows our strength from the bottom up. Education and cooperation are keys. One of my pet peeves is a term I hear in some environmental coalition calls: “grass-tops.” In other words, a few self-described elites using fake grassroots organizing where a top-down approach is still pushed.

But that is material for another post.

Happy New Year! And get out and enjoy the desert.

November 5, 2024 - Beatty, NV - We used to see desert bighorn sheep all the time in the Bare Mountains just southeast of Beatty, Nevada, in the upper Amargosa River watershed. Almost every visit to this half-volcanic-half-limestone mountain range would guarantee a sighting of these horned ungulates. Groups of rams with massive curls could be seen walking through the blackbrush heading on old trails to Specie Spring, an oddly-named waterhole important for wildlife, and surrounded by shady willow thickets. Herds of ewes with young could be spotted standing on rock outcrops along the 4x4 road to the spring. This seemed to be a paradise for bighorn twenty years ago.

That all changed when gold exploration arrived in force several years ago. The mountains began to swarm with pick-up trucks with various mining-support company logos, drill rigs, water trucks, and excavators. The sheep seemed to retreat into less accessible areas and we hardly saw them.

Then the spring dried up, the first time this occurred in local recollection, and apparently outside of a drought period. Rumors circulated that the nearby Sterling gold mine blasting activity could have been related, but we are not sure. Lately we occasionally see some water or mud in the spring, but never like we sued to. We stopped seeing bighorn.

More threats have been piling up. Greenlink West Transmission Project was recently approved to be built on public lands from natural gas generating stations at Apex, Nevada, to Reno-Sparks data centers and industrial factories. The impacts to desert tortoise, sage grouse, Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, rare plant populations, and wild areas in remote Nevada will be huge. The giant 525-kiloVolt transmission line will be constructed across the eastern side of the Bare Mountains, around a large gold exploration field, further stressing the bighorn sheep herds here.

Even after commenting extensively on the Environmental Impact Statement, we underestimated the gigantic impacts to one small town and the public lands around it as the NV Energy-owned project begins the early construction phase.

Representatives from the construction contractor came to Beatty, in Nye County, Nevada last night to a town board meeting, to demand resources from this small, rural town which is already supporting extensive gold exploration. Lithium exploration, and tourism. The new large socioeconomic impacts were not analyzed in the environmental review, and we just learned about them at this 11th-hour meeting.

Beatty is in a pinch point. The red line on the map above is the final approved route through the Beatty area in the headwaters of the Amargosa River, between Death Valley National Park and the Nevada Test and Training Range (Department of Defense). Map from the Greenlink West Final Environmental Impact Statement, page 2-29.

Andrea Green, the Fleet Administrator for the Greenlink West construction contractor EC Source Services, came to the small town to try to build relations but ended up sounding rather demanding of resources. 

We attended the public town meeting and took notes. Basin and Range Watch includes volunteers who are well-informed about transmission projects--some of us have worked as biological contractors on construction projects in the desert, and even taken safety and monitoring training on utility-scale transmission construction projects as past contractors.

Green told the Beatty townspeople attending the meeting that many construction workers would begin to come into town and the area, needing to construct new roads and widen existing roads into the desert hills and valleys, build new pads for transmission towers, then crews and vehicles for the steel tower erection would move in, which can involve helicopters to deliver tall sections of towers that may be 180 feet tall. Then the wire-pull crews come to literally pull the transmission line wires through each tower. This could involved 100-500 workers which would all be stationed in Beatty (!).

Green said that the contractor chose Beatty as a central hub for construction because the first section of Greenlink would start from Kyle Canyon (at Las Vegas) through Beatty to Goldfield. Construction workers would not want to commute all the way to and from Las Vegas during this phase, so Beatty was chosen as a main construction central area for worker housing, lay down areas, and services for this phase of construction.

The transmission contractor said construction workers would be out building the new high-voltage transmission line on 10-14 hour shifts. She then stated that they were now looking for housing, stores, and restaurants. They were looking for laundry services, oil change shops, medical services, and food catering--maybe food trucks to deliver food to the transmission workers. Muffled laughter in the audience could be detected. But then Green said that the town should not try to price-gouge us. She said that they were looking for housing, but not at $2,000 per month, and more like $400 per month.

Beatty has no food stores except what can be scrounged at the Dollar store. Beatty does not have auto mechanics. There is a Denny's, a BBQ, and a Mexican cafe, and 4-5 bars. There are two gas stations, one of which includes a candy store. Housing is already at a premium for the service staff of these businesses. The small rural medical clinic has trouble keeping a doctor able to visit even once a week.

We asked Green if she understould that the gold mine exploration in Beatty has already filled up housing here, that there are not many stores, and that services are few. There would be cumulative impacts to the socioeconomics of this small town by adding hundreds of new workers on top of the hundreds of gold and Lithium mine exploration worker force already present. Not to mention the regular flow of tourists, which the town has tried to plan for.

What was Greenlink prepared to give back to the town for all these demands of services? We heard nothing. Even the gold miner company has given funds to help improve the medical clinic building, and other grants to local schools.

In an email exchange, Green clarified that not all 500 workers would be in Beatty at one time, but more like 100 at a time perhaps, as workers traveled to the line along the construction segment through Amargosa Valley to Goldfield. Yet 100 workers added to a cumulative worker housing strain in a town that had about 1,000 permanent residents before the gold exploration boom and transmission approval is still quite a lot.

We asked her why they chose the small town of Beatty to shoulder this new influx of construction workers on top of the already large gold exploration work force? Green stated that they wanted to "promote this great area."

There were no offers of local jobs. All workers apparently need to travel in from distant areas for specialized high-voltage electrical work, and use the few services and resources of this small rural town, and not offer anything back except "promotion." The town has done a fine job of promoting itself.

The town board asked about whether the contractor had read their letters about the recreational routes in the area, and their concerns about the popular off-highway vehicle roads being impacted? Green stated that she did not have access to any letters. 

Green said that this first leg of Greenlink West Transmission Project construction of 373 miles going through Beatty would need perhaps over 300 trucks and construction vehicles and equipment. They would come back to do restoration and replant any vegetation removed in order to constuct the high-voltage transmission line. 

A large lay-down yard was chosen next Beatty to be located south of town on a private parcel. Another lay-down yard for equipment and material would be located off of Kyle Canyon Road in Clark County, Nevada, beginning in mid-December. Beatty construction would likely begin by January to March, and last 1.5 to 2 years.

The contractor came in to this small rural Nevada town with an entitled attitude that everone is poor, ignorant, and desperate for money. This small rural town is one of the popular Gateway communities to Death Valley National Park, hosts tourists, birdwatchers, campers, history buffs, 4x4 tours on a well-mapped recreational route system on public lands, and has an extensive and professionally-made mountain bike trail system. Retired PhDs have moved here, biologists live here. Writers, artists, and research scientists often visit. A nature preserve system along the upper Amargosa River protects valuable water in the desert. Do not judge a town by its size and location, many local people say.

The cumulative impacts of construction to a certain small town were not analyzed in the Greenlink West Transmission Project Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). 

Cleverly, the Final EIS on page 2-11 states that the construction activities were described in a Preliminary Plan of Development (POD), which was not analyzed in the EIS as a finalized POD, and that the construction activities would be refined in a deferred Construction, Operations, and Maintenenace Plan, which was also not analyzed in the EIS. Thus we were not given an opportunity to comment on this new cumulative impact of using Beatty as a construction hub for Greenlink West:

FEIS 2.1.4 GLWP Construction 

The construction activities are described in the GLWP Preliminary POD (NV Energy 2023) and would be refined and finalized in the Proponent’s subsequent Construction, Operations, and Maintenance (COM) Plan (pending, NV Energy n.d.). The COM Plan provides direction to the Proponent’s construction personnel, construction contractors and crews, compliance inspection contractor, environmental monitors, and agency personnel regarding specifications for construction and O&M activities. The federal ROW agencies would monitor the construction and would likely use a compliance inspection contractor to ensure that the measures required by the ROD are implemented and to achieve the desired resource protection. (Greenlink West Transmission Project Final EIS page 2-11)

Other impacts include the temporary blocking of access to public lands and roads during construction: during wire-pulling activities, temporary guard structures would be erected during construction at road, railroad, and electric line crossings to protect these features and the public in the event that the wire falls (Final Environmental Impact Statement page 20). Accidents involving the un-electrified wire falling on contractor trucks during wire pulls is known in the past during construction on past projects.

Interestingly, during the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine environmental review in northern Nevada, a separate environmental review under the National Enevironmental Policy Act (NEPA) was undertaken by the Bureau of Land Management because the influx of workers needing housing on public lands and man camps would cause a potentially significant impact on public lands. Yet the Beatty influx of workers needing housing for Greenlink West is happening largely on private lands, so the significant impacts are slipping through the cracks of the law. Yet the cumulative impacts have not been analyzed adequately.

Many people we know moved to Beatty to enjoy the beautiful natural landscape, the wide open desert, the wildlife, and the local history. They do not want industrialization and man camps. The entitled attitude of NV Energy's contractor was surprising, expecting us all to serve them as they open up the land to solar energy development, new roads, and an almost 200-foot tall new high-voltage transmission line that was opposed. This neocolonial attitude is common--come into a small community, Take, Take, Take, give nothing back.

We wonder what has happened to the local bighorn sheep herds.

The Department of the Interior must have been running out of ink trying to sign approvals, move projects forward in environmental reviews, and cut ceremonial ribbons for shovel-ready projects on public lands, especially in Nevada. This was actually a depressing few weeks. We knew these projects were coming down the pipeline, and we have been actively commenting on them and trying to raise awareness. But to see them all move forward—all of them—without truly addressing our conservation concerns and bypassing our recommended less-impactful alternatives was, well, disheartening. But we will keep moving forward in order to protect desert tortoises, sage grouse, Joshua trees, wildlands, and towns, cultural landscapes important to Tribes, and communities impacted by this energy push.

You can tell the Department of Interior did this by design—to overwhelm conservation groups with a multiple rollout of project approvals and new Environmental Impact Statement advancing milestones. This renewable energy land rush is also undoubtedly driven by the short time left for the current administration, in the face of an unpredictable presidential election.

But still, the whole thing reeks of streamlining and bias towards the industry.

What happened to the new Public Lands Rule that was supposed to balance development and extraction with conservation? Words only? We will have more to say about this.

Here is a quick rundown of what we are dealing with, and it is not exhaustive:

• The $4.2-billion Greenlink West Transmission Project was approved on September 6, 2024, to be constructed across more than 400 miles of wildlands, including public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from Las Vegas to Reno-Sparks, Nevada, opening up tens of thousands of acres of habitat for Mojave desert tortoise, sage grouse, pygmy rabbit, pronghorn antelope, and rare plants to remote solar development. The new 525-kilovolt electric line would have power poles 200 feet tall crossing Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument managed by the National Park Service. The Record of Decision was signed by the Acting Deputy Secretary of Interior on September 9, 2024, with no appeals allowed. This represents the final agency action and approval, and the utility NV Energy plans to begin construction in phases, starting in December 2024 in the Amargosa Valley segment. NV Energy ratepayers will pay for this approved transmission project on their monthly bills for years.

• The Greenlink North Transmission Project proposed from Ely to Yerington, Nevada, moved forward on September 10, 2024, when BLM announced the release of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for public comment. This next stage of the large Greenlink Transmission Project would open up remote sage grouse habitat along “The Loneliest Road”—US 50-- in central Nevada. The public comment period is 90 days.

• A slew of large-scale solar applications has been sent to BLM in anticipation of opening up these remote deserts and sagebrush habitats. Older solar applications are also moving forward. BLM announced the 5,133-acre Bonanza Solar Project Draft Environmental Impact Statement release on September 6, with a public comment deadline on December 5, 2024. The solar project north of Indian Springs, Nevada, is anticipating an upgrade of the GridLiance transmission line in order to connect from this remote location to load centers in California. This photovoltaic project with Lithium-iron-phosphate battery storage is proposed on the most crucial Mojave desert tortoise connectivity corridor in Nevada. As a conservation alternative, Basin and Range Watch and Western Watersheds Project proposed a Cactus Springs Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) to better protect this habitat. BLM is reviewing our ACEC nomination but arguing against the science. More on the flood of other solar applications in future posts.

• The Western Solar Plan update final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement and proposed action with multiple Resource Management Plan amendments was pushed ahead despite outcry on August 29, 2024, allowing solar development on millions of acres of BLM-managed lands across the 11 western U.S. We are protesting this.

Where do you even start?

This reminds us of the time when the transcontinental railroad was rushing to be built across the United States in the 1800s to open up the western frontier to development: in 1862 the golden spike was hammered in the last segment of the railway in Promontory, Utah. Many groups and people may look at the Greenlink West Transmission Project as representing “progress.” To us it represents the opening up of remote biodiverse wild areas and culturally significant landscapes to industrial commercial development, in this case so-called renewable energy projects. With no equitable discussion including all parties being impacted, this is not progress. Greenlink West Transmission Project is that key initial opener of the natural resource (the Great Basin landscape) for the start of vast solar energy exploitation.

“Greenlink” West has always been about bringing existing natural gas megawatt generation from Apex, Nevada, to data centers and Lithium battery factories in the Reno-Sparks area. We want to start calling it “Datalink West Transmission Project.” To meet climate goals we really need to push harder for Distributed Energy Resources in the built environment, such as the massive amount of unused rooftop solar systems and parking lot solar canopies that are potentially available if better policies are allowed, and even more importantly energy efficiency and energy conservation. But our current unsustainable society is most likely too energy-hungry to fulfill any of its needs with renewable energy, frankly.

Lately more and more giant data centers for AI are demanded by our digital society. We have seen these gargantuan data center warehouses with rows of industrial air conditioners for cooling, and large water use. But which will it be? Energy-hungry data centers or addressing climate change goals? The two seem mutually exclusive now, and Nevada’s wildlands are in the bullseye. Whether this is even the right direction for fulfilling the data center need for 24-7 massive baseload energy requirements is not being examined unfortunately. See the Los Angeles Times article at https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-08-12/california-data-centers-could-derail-clean-energy-goals

These fast-tracked energy projects on public lands remind of us the post-WWII military-industrial complex. Now we are witnessing the utility-scale solar energy-industrial complex where the federal government is helping energy developers gain profits and out-of-control energy consumption at all costs in new areas of the desert. Nature be damned.

We are happy to see that there is some recent concern out there about how the new Western Solar Plan will impact Amargosa Valley, Nevada. The plan is a long term blueprint for public lands solar development in the west. But solar will move forward in this region with or without the Western Solar Plan. There are 3 projects that the BLM fully intends to move forward in this region sprawling over 19,000 acres. In summer of 2023, BLM auctioned off the leases for these three solar projects totalling 23,675 acres to 3 developers for a record breaking 105 million dollars. These will all be grandfathered into the new Western Solar Plan.

Building 19,000 acres of solar energy will require the use of about 4,000 to 6,000 acre feet of water mostly for dust supression. While it is a mostly a one time construction use, most projects are under 10 mies from Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and the basin is overdrafted by over 17,000 acre feet. The projects will create fugitive dust nightmares and one will be built next to the community of Amargosa Valley. They will destroy habitat for kit fox, burrowing owl, desert tortoise and bighorn sheep. Endemic tarantulas, scorpions as well as insects will lose bulk amounts of habitat.

In 2010, Basin and Range Watch helped the community of Amargosa Valley push away the Amargosa Farm Road Project. Unlike these, it would have been a 4,600 acre concentrated thermal solar project. It would have needed 3,000 to 4,000 acre feet of water a year. We pushed it into using a dry cooling technology but that ended up bankrupting the project. It was referred to as a "Model Solar Project" by a national environmental organization. Ironically, many groups are very concerned about Ash Meadows now. Times have really changed.

The projects are:
Amargosa Solar Zone - NV Energy - 6,000 acres

Silver Star Solar - Leeward Energy - over 3,000 acres

Rock Valley Solar - Nextera Energy - 10,000 acres.

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