Rocky Mountain juniper groves, known locally as “swamp cedars,” at Bahsahwahbee in Nevada’s Great Basin. (Courtesy of Monte Sanford)
Long before the days of freeways and highways, interstate travelers relied on rugged dirt trails.
The Old Spanish Trail was one such path.
Spanning approximately 2,700 miles between present day Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Los Angeles, California, and running through a portion of Southern Nevada, the trail was used by traders, explorers and settlers during the early 19th century. California-bred horses and mules were swapped for goods made in New Mexico, and contraband and slaves were also transported along the route.
Portions of the trail are overgrown or have been paved over by cities. But other sections have been preserved, and in 2001, more than 150 years after the trail fell out of use, the portion of the trail running through Nevada was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The following year, Congress commemorated the path by designating the Old Spanish National Historic Trail.
But roughly two decades later, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the National Park Service, the federal agencies jointly tasked with managing the trail, haven’t drafted a management plan for it, leaving parts of the trail open to development. And in Nevada, that means not just residential and commercial development, but also solar development.
The BLM recently released its Western Solar Plan, a guiding document for solar development across 11 Western states, including Nevada. While the plan protects roughly 130 million acres across the West from solar development, it also identifies 31 million acres nationwide that could be used for solar development — including almost 12 million in Nevada.
While it’s highly unlikely that anywhere close to that amount will be developed, the plan fails to provide a solid framework of where solar development should occur on those millions of acres. Should solar arrays be built across one large swath of land, or in small clumps that pocket the desert? Although the plan protects critical habitat, recreation areas and wildlife migration corridors, what does it mean for areas that are locally significant or for the state’s rural way of life?
As one conservationist told me, “It is not very helpful in figuring out where and how much solar needs to go in Nevada.”
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, along with groups including Basin and Range Watch and the Amargosa Conservancy, have filed a protest with the federal government over the plan, alleging it will be yet another scar on the Old Spanish National Historic Trail.
During the past decade, federal agencies have approved roughly four dozen projects affecting the trail, including the Gemini Solar Project, the largest utility-scale solar project in Nevada. That project built utility-scale solar fields over a 3-mile stretch of the trail.
Across Southern Nevada, there are five additional proposed solar projects adjacent to the trail and one, in Pahrump Valley, that would sit on top of the trail. If built, the projects would cover thousands of acres with row upon row of solar arrays.
But it’s not just an obscure trail in Southern Nevada that could be affected by the Western Solar Plan.
Friends of Nevada Wilderness has mapped out areas that, under the plan, could be developed. Its mapping shows a section of the proposed Bahsahwahbee National Monument in Eastern Nevada is ripe for solar development, as are portions of the Black Rock, Smoke Creek and San Emidio Desert playas in Northern Nevada.
The playas are particularly confusing to conservationists, who point out the ease with which they flood under nominal amounts of precipitation and the intense, abrasive alkaline dust storms that plague them (picture dusty vans driving around after Burning Man).
High solar potential? Yes. Ideal areas for solar development? Probably not.
In a separate protest, the Center for Biological Diversity points out that lands will be open to development “based on poorly defined exclusion criteria, inconsistent application of those criteria, and inadequate consideration of public lands resource values.”
Not everyone feels the plan is too permissive, though. In a letter earlier this year to the Department of Interior, Dwayne McClinton, director of Nevada’s Office of Energy, took the opposite stance, calling the plan “unnecessarily rigid” and having “limiting exclusions and design features.”
The plan “will severely limit solar energy development in Nevada and will drive up energy costs for Nevada ratepayers by driving up development costs for the few projects [that] might still be developable,” he wrote.
Nevada lacks a solar development plan of its own, so the Western Solar Plan does provide some level of framework. It's up to federal officials to now ensure the plan strikes a balance between being “unnecessarily rigid” and being “inconsistent” and “inadequate.”
Otherwise, Nevada could end up exchanging its cultural and geographical resources and wildlife habitat for sprawling solar complexes — a remote, desert version of suburban sprawl.