Following weeks of controversy, the Bureau of Land Management lifted a moratorium they put on solar projects on public lands. The BLM discovered that it could study environmental protection without halting thousands of projects. Bureau Director James Caswell told The New York Times that “By continuing to accept and process new applications for solar energy projects, we will aggressively help meet growing interest in renewable energy sources, while ensuring environmental protections."

Congress, the solar industry and citizens nationwide objected to the plan. The BLM will now conform with the usual National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) procedure by studying the environmental impacts of the plants on an individual basis.

This is an interesting development because it speaks to the public concern over energy policy; there was enough traction to turn this decision around in mere weeks. When was the last time you saw a federal beaucracy make a national policy decision that quickly?

Public lands are going to be an important key in solar production due to the efficiencies afforded by putting up large-scale solar arrays where the sunlight is the most concentrated. Urban solar is also important, but limited by preexisting infrastructure conditions -- they weight roofs can tolerate, the climate of the city, the angle of the architecture, the zoning restrictions. It is going to be much more cost effective to build a solar farm and then transmit the energy created there.

Regarding transmission, a colleague brought a great point to my attention regarding my last article on the moratorium -- that transmission issues will have national impacts that deserve scrutiny. That’s certainly true; I am not saying that solar projects should escape environmental review. I am saying that projects will get individual review, which is more effective data than a sweeping national assessment of the whole industry. Transmission, though we might think of a national power grid, is actually controlled on a regional level by “independent system operators” (ISOs) or “regional transmission operators” (RTOs). Either way, the more local the environmental study, the more useful the data will be.