Rural America Set to Be Transformed by up to 55 Million-Acre Federal Solar Plan

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โ€˜Our public lands are playing a critical role in the clean energy transition,โ€™ said Laura Daniel-Davis, acting deputy secretary of the Interior Department.

Solar energyโ€™s appetite for vast amounts of land has prompted the Biden administration to propose designating as much as 55 million acres of public lands as potential sites for industrial-scale solar farms.

Thatโ€™s an area larger than 36 states and similar in size to Idaho or Minnesota.

An updated initiative by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), called the Western Solar Plan, proposes six alternatives for solar development.

In the most aggressive of these scenarios, 55 million acres across 11 Western states would be made available for solar energy. The least aggressive alternative would designate 8 million acres for that purpose.

The BLMโ€™s โ€œpreferred alternativeโ€ falls halfway between the two, setting aside 22 million acres for solar development.

In total, the BLM manages 162 million acres of public land designated as โ€œmulti-use.โ€ These multiple uses include farming, ranching, hunting and fishing, hiking and camping, drilling, and miningโ€”and more recently, wind and solar installations and transmission lines to connect them to the grid.

The BLM, a division of the Department of the Interior, states that, in order to carry out the Biden administrationโ€™s goal of generating 25 gigawatts (GW) of electricity from wind and solar on public lands by 2025โ€”and generating 100 percent โ€œrenewableโ€ electricity by 2035โ€”solar panels would need to be sited on 700,000 acres of public land.

More than 3 million solar panels are required to produce 1 GW of electricity, according to the Department of Energy. One GW can power 500,000 to 750,000 homes on average, assuming a constant supply of energy generation and use.

โ€œThe Interior Departmentโ€™s work … is crucial to achieving the Bidenโ€“Harris administrationโ€™s goal of a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035,โ€ Laura Daniel-Davis, acting deputy secretary of the Interior, said in a Jan. 17 statement.

โ€œAnd this updated solar roadmap will help us get there in more states and on more lands across the West,โ€ she said.

โ€œOur public lands are playing a critical role in the clean energy transition.โ€

Byย Kevin Stocklin

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