The LA Times reports that the US government is trying to fast track large scale solar power development in the Mojave desert - Obama administration announces desert 'solar energy zones'.

The Obama administration on Thursday unveiled its road map for solar energy development, directing large-scale industrial projects to 285,000 acres of desert land in the western U.S. while opening 20 million acres of the Mojave for new development.

The Bureau of Land Management's long-awaited "solar energy zones" are intended to make some of the desert's most sensitive landscapes less desirable for solar prospecting by identifying "sweet spots" that have already passed environmental requirements and therefore promise expedited permitting, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said. "These 445 square miles of zones are … where development will be driven," Salazar said on a conference call with reporters.

The 17 solar energy zones in six western states — including two extensive areas in California — were identified by their absence of major environmental or cultural conflicts. But nothing prevents a developer from requesting permission to build on federal land outside the preferred areas.

The policy, which is expected to be finalized sometime next year, would not apply to the 13 solar projects already under construction across the West, nor the 79 pending applications that would occupy 685,000 acres of public land. There are 20 utility-scale solar applications awaiting approval in California.

Todd Woody has an interview at Yale Environment 360 with the CEO of solar thermal power company Brightsource - In California’s Mojave Desert, Solar-Thermal Projects Take Off.

This week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and other dignitaries gathered in the Mojave Desert to officially break ground on BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, the first large-scale solar thermal power plant to be built in the United States in nearly two decades.

BrightSource is one of a half-dozen big solar farms, with a combined electricity-generating capacity of 2,829 megawatts, licensed by the California Energy Commission over the past two months. By year’s end, California and federal regulators expect to approve additional projects that will produce a total of 4,143 megawatts. At peak output, that’s the equivalent of several nuclear power plants and more than seven times the solar capacity installed in the United States last year.

The approval of the projects comes after years of environmental review and controversies over the installations’ impact on water, wildlife, and fragile desert landscapes. The power plants licensed so far will cover some 39 square miles of desert land with a variety of new and old solar thermal technologies. Unlike rooftop photovoltaic panels that directly convert sunlight into electricity, solar thermal uses the sun to heat liquids to create steam that drives electricity-generating industrial turbines.

BrightSource’s 370-megawatt Ivanpah project, located just over the California border, 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas, is the world’s largest solar-thermal power plant project currently under construction. The company, led by CEO John Woolard, received a $1.37 billion loan guarantee from the United States Department of Energy to build the project, which will deploy 347,000 large mirrors that will surround three towers on 3,500 acres of federal land. The mirrors will focus the sun on a water-filled boiler that sits atop the tower to create high-temperature, high-pressure steam.

Woolard, 45, came to BrightSource as chief executive in 2004 after co-founding Silicon Energy, an energy efficiency software company, and stints at California utility PG&E, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and VantagePoint Venture Partners, a leading Silicon Valley green tech venture capital firm. ...

e360: BrightSource’s Ivanpah project is not only the first large-scale solar thermal project to break ground, it is the first to deploy a new power tower technology. Why is that significant?

Woolard: Our team was part of building older trough plants and you learn a lot. If you take a power tower, you get higher temperatures and pressures. That gives you higher thermo-to-electrical conversion efficiency. Think of that as more efficiency, less waste, lower cost. Because of that, you need fewer mirrors, less solar field, and you have a more efficient design.

The other gets down to how you actually build on the land. If you take the older trough designs or anything with a lot of mirrors, [it] would degrade the land. It’s more damaging from a soil and runoff perspective.

The big [problem] is water. What is the world going to look like over the next 20, 30, 40 years? Water in the desert is going to become a much more challenging proposition. So we’ve gotten water usage down to a minimum — the lowest of anybody in the world, basically. ...

e360: While regulators have tried to put big solar projects on the fast track, power line projects to connect solar power plants to the grid remain in the slow lane. How big an obstacle will transmission constraints be for the projects already approved, as well as those in the pipeline?

Woolard: For our projects, we have what’s called LGIA — large generator interconnection agreements — that give us transmission to deliver the power into the California grid. For future projects, you get your LGIAs “x” months in advance of your financial close, so we’re working now on what the transmission is for which sites.

It’s about how you move around and adjust, given everything from appropriate environmental concerns to transmission. We can move within the existing [transmission] system, but the existing system is broken and dysfunctional. In the last decade we’ve done 12,000 miles of interstate natural gas pipelines and 668 miles of interstate [electricity] transmission.

A national renewable energy standard [requiring a percentage of electricity to come from green sources] is hollow without the transmission. It’s like engaging in interstate commerce without the highways and rails. To me transmission is the enabler of a free market. It should be the most bipartisan, universally accepted effort we make as a country because it enables people to compete, it enables prices to go down.

Dave Roberts has a post at Grist outlining his take on the debate about building large power plants on sensitive land — specifically a solar thermal power plant in the Mojave desert - Taking distributed energy seriously.

Many folks are conflicted over the seeming clash between conserving America’s remaining wild landscapes and expanding clean energy supplies. What to do?

To begin with, it seems prudent to postpone the conflict as long as possible, by making every effort to satisfy new energy demand with low-carbon resources on land that’s already developed. Senator Feinstein has gestured in that direction, but neither California or any other state has ever offered serious, sustained support to what’s loosely called distributed energy — energy generated, stored and managed at the local level.

The U.S. power industry has always had a fondness for gigantism: huge plants, remotely located, generating electricity that’s sold cheaply and used profligately. Wind farms on the Plains and solar plants in the Southwest desert, connected to cities by expensive new transmission lines, fit the familiar model. Regulations provide incentives for this development, which utilities know how to manage, and which politicians understand.

Yet the land and water problems facing solar plants should be a reminder that all large new industrial projects impose social costs. Perhaps it’s time to take distributed energy seriously.

What would a new model look like? Solar panels over every parking lot, brownfield, warehouse, and residential roof. Small-scale wind turbines on every bridge, microhydro in every stream and river, advanced geothermal in every back yard, waste heat capture on every industrial plant. Batteries that store power to be used or sold when it’s worth most. An IT-infused grid that can manage complexity; devices that display real-time use and price information; variable power pricing. Every building sealed and weatherized, every appliance and electric car net-connected.

In such a system, it’s not just energy that’s distributed, it’s social and economic power. The result is more democratic and resilient (though such benefits rarely find their way into conventional price comparisons). If “consumers” become producers, managers, and innovators, perhaps the desert tortoise and the world can be saved.

I suspect a mix is going to be the only way forward - both localised, distributed renewables and large scale wind and solar thermal - pure distributed microgeneration (for all its valuable attributes) will probably prove too expensive and intermittent to meet all our energy needs. Dave thinks the societal implications of going the pure distributed model are worthy of plenty of thought.

The last paragraph is something that’s been an interest of mine for a long while: how will distributing the ability to generate, manage, and store power affect social dynamics? What will it look like when communities are more self-sufficient? What kind of innovations will spring up when everyone has access to the levers of energy, the way the internet gave everyone access to information infrastructure? What kind of lives will people live when their energy and gas bills are radically reduced or even eliminated? This is heady futurist sort of stuff, too much to get into in this post, but I suspect the changes will be far more sweeping than anyone can anticipate.

Which leads to a final point: cost comparisons between central-plant power and distributed power are woefully inadequate, typically focusing in on price-per-kWh. Of course rooftop solar fails by that comparison. But what happens when you factor in the saved cost of transmission lines that don’t have to be built? What happens when you factor in the efficiency gains made possible by smart appliances, smart vehicles, and smart grids? What happens when you factor in the fact that money spent on these systems will circulate almost entirely within a community rather than leaving it? What happens when you factor in energy independence, resilience, innovation, jobs?

There are “system of systems” benefits around distributed energy that we can’t yet predict, much yet place a dollar value on. As in so many areas, the question should not be how to save pennies, but how to construct the kind of lives, the kind of society, that reflects our highest aspirations.

Fortune has an article on the great land rush underway in the Mojave desert in search of prime solar thermal power generation real estate - The Southwest desert's real estate boom.

Buchanan, 53, is scouting sites for a solar power company called BrightSource Energy, an Oakland-based startup backed by Google and Morgan Stanley. The blunt, fifth-generation Californian, who used to survey the same area for natural-gas power sites, knows that the presence of an endangered species such as the tortoise could derail BrightSource's plans to build a multibillion-dollar solar energy plant on the mesa.

BrightSource badly wants these 20 square miles of federal land on what is called Mormon Mesa. The company was in such a hurry to stake its claim with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that it applied for a lease sight unseen. That's an expensive gamble for a startup, given that application fees alone run in the six figures. "I usually like to go out and kick the tires before filing a claim," Buchanan says, "but there's a lot of competitive pressure these days to move fast."

That's putting it mildly. A solar land rush is rolling across the desert Southwest. Goldman Sachs, utilities PG&E and FPL, Silicon Valley startups, Israeli and German solar firms, Chevron, speculators - all are scrambling to lock up hundreds of thousands of acres of long-worthless land now coveted as sites for solar power plants.

The race has barely begun - finished plants are years away - but it's blazing fastest in the Mojave, where the federal government controls immense stretches of some of the world's best solar real estate right next to the nation's biggest electricity markets. Just 20 months ago only five applications for solar sites had been filed with the BLM in the California Mojave. Today 104 claims have been received for nearly a million acres of land, representing a theoretical 60 gigawatts of electricity. (The entire state of California currently consumes 33 gigawatts annually.)