Green lights for big solar projects on fed lands

[cal04]

One will install 28,360 dishes in Southern California desert
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39521200/ns/us_news-environment/

After five years of negotiations and battles, some of them environmental, two large solar power projects on Tuesday got the first-ever green lights to set up shop on federal lands.

"These projects are milestones in our focused effort to rapidly and responsibly capture renewable energy resources on public lands," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement announcing the approvals for projects in desert areas of Southern California.

One includes a square mile of solar panels near Victorville in inland Southern California, and the other covers about 10 square miles in the remote Imperial Valley, east of San Diego.

The announcement comes about five years after solar developers began asking the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for rights to develop hundreds of solar plants on federally owned desert land across the Southwest.



These "SunCatcher" systems are the backbone of one of two projects approved Tuesday. The solar dishes were developed by Sandia National Laboratories and Stirling Energy Systems for Tessera Solar.

[rurallib]

1. This seems to signal a real change in direction - finally.