Where Should the Wind Turbines Go?

Protecting the American West from development used to be rather black and white: a company would propose drilling for oil and gas in a wild place, and conservation groups would battle against such exploitation to prevent natural treasures or critical habitat -- say, the nesting spot of an endangered species -- from being despoiled. Environmental activists have fought hard to preserve landscapes such as Utah's redrock canyon country from oil drilling and California's Tejon Ranch from power plants. But as large-scale renewable energy projects advance -- finally -- from the drawing board to reality, the choices have become more complicated.

Renewable-energy technologies, such as solar arrays and wind turbines, don't emit carbon dioxide, but they can nevertheless disturb habitats and cause environmental harm. How does society balance the urgent need to develop renewable energy with the protection of wild lands that happen to have significant renewable resources? That's the dilemma confronting Johanna Wald, an NRDC senior attorney on the western lands team, who has spent the past 20 years fighting to protect wild places. "We need renewable energy, and we need it fast. But we also need to develop land areas responsibly," she says.

To assist in this effort, NRDC has teamed up with the Audubon Society to create a powerful new mapping tool. A digital program created for Google Earth plots more than 15,000 locations in 13 western states that are either legally off-limits or are of such high natural value that "conservation groups would fight tooth and nail to protect them," says NRDC senior scientist Matthew McKinzie.

The high-tech clean energy and conservation map is the product of a lot of old-fashioned legwork. McKinzie spent the past year hunting down the coordinates of 20 different types of land, including federal and state parks, wildlife refuges, and roadless and wilderness areas. In all, he collected records encompassing 860 million acres -- about half the land area of the lower 48 states. NRDC also located the habitats of 173 threatened species. All these data were then plotted on an interactive Google Earth map, which was color-coded to represent the different categories of public lands. The map also includes a feature designed by Audubon that focuses on some sage grouse habitat.

"Renewable energy companies were coming to me and saying, 'Show us where we cannot develop,' " says Wald, who served as manager of the mapping project. "Now we have a unique tool to help figure out the best places to site transmission lines and renewable-energy projects."

When deciding what to include on the map, NRDC chose the best-known categories of land across the 13 states, with an emphasis on federal land; if there was a category of land that was specific to one state, it wasn't included. And just because a wild place is not on the map does not mean environmental groups are okay with its development: in the future, NRDC plans to expand the map to include more wildlife data, as well as lands of special importance to local and regional groups.

The map establishes only some of the troubled ecosystem areas that need protection, Wald stresses. But with it, environmental groups, renewable-energy developers, federal agencies, and others can begin to work together to identify those areas where development would cause the least amount of conflict. Fewer disputes increase the speed at which energy projects can be permitted.

Wald uses the example of Anza Borrego Desert State Park in Southern California: she describes it as "a victim of bad siting." A gas and electric utility wanted to run a transmission line through the park. Environmental groups opposed the line, and it took years before an alternative route was approved. The Google Earth map will make such alternative routes easier to find. "We need to get these renewable-energy resources up and running as quickly as possible," Wald says. "But we need to site them in areas that are not environmentally sensitive and will garner support from different stakeholders, so permits can be obtained swiftly."

The clean energy and conservation map could not have come at a better time: in March, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar created a federal task force that will move forward with the development of renewable energy on public lands. "We've all spent years protecting special areas of public land from damaging human activity," explains Wald. "Now, we must look for land areas that we can use to deal with climate change."

Wald's pragmatism is a necessary shift in tactics in a more complicated world that is no longer black and white.