Johanna Wald is a senior attorney in NRDC's San Francisco office and an expert on the use of public lands. 

The Obama administration is committed to large-scale renewable energy projects. But this raises a fundamental question: Where will they go?

Like any large energy project, they will have significant impacts. Utility-scale solar projects typically require thousands of acres of land, which is frequently graded and denuded of vegetation. Once these plants are built, electricity generation will be the sole use of the land-and they will be there for a very long time. Wildlife habitat will be gone, and so will the values of open space and wildness. In addition, depending on the technology and the location, solar projects can use a lot of water, a very limited and precious resource in the West. They will also require major new transmission lines that will cross public lands.

There's a lot of debate among environmentalists as to the wisdom of these large-scale projects. Where does NRDC come out on this?

The heart of the debate is over what is the role that utility-scale projects should play in meeting our renewable energy needs. Many environmental activists believe that rather than relying on large-scale projects located in remote areas, the focus should be on smaller scale "distributed generation"-generating power locally on  homes and industrial rooftops-along with a greater emphasis on efficiency and conservation. As the longtime leader on the latter two topics, NRDC of course agrees that they must be the foundation of our new energy economy. We also agree that distributed generation will be make an important contribution to meeting our renewable  energy goals. But at the same time we are convinced that we will also need some level of utility-scale generation in order to get a significant amount of renewable energy on line quickly, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as to promote a more sustainable energy future. But of course all these projects must be sited carefully, and none of them should be located in places with unique or sensitive resources.

What is the current status of development plans on public lands?

The key to getting the renewable power we need on line in a timely fashion is to ensure that development occurs on lands that not only have good solar resources but also low or relatively low environmental values. They should also have the necessary infrastructure already in place. To its credit, the Department of the Interior has taken a promising approach to solar development on public lands. For designation as solar development zones, it is looking for areas with relatively low conflicts that either have or are near to existing transmission lines and roads. Concentrating solar projects in suitable areas will help prevent the proliferation of widely dispersed projects across our public lands, minimize the footprint of solar development, and reduce the need for new infrastructure, including transmission. It will also help developers by speeding up the permitting process for projects in these zones. In the short term, the department is looking to permit a number of renewable projects as a "downpayment" on the Obama administration's vision of the important role the public lands will play in the clean energy economy.

A lot of the concern about the placement of these large projects on public lands has focused on the Mojave Desert. Can you give us an update on what's going on there?

Hundreds of applications for renewable energy projects have been filed on public lands in southern California. Many of these are in highly valued areas, and their potential development is highly controversial. Some are located in the national monument that Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, has proposed, while others are on "critical habitat" for imperiled species. The Interior Department is focusing its efforts on a subset of these projects that have the potential to meet the deadline for funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. NRDC is working with a number of groups to ensure that the projects the department approves are the best of this subset.