So, not gonna happen, right. So, the next best thing is find loophole in BLM so can approve renewables on Dept of Interior land. Which they did.

Numbers are not fudged:

1. As I said in the story, ‘Not all the renewable projects themselves are on public land. For the last two new approvals at the end of December; just the transmission and roads associated with them is on public lands. The two bring the total DOI approvals to 27 utility-scale renewable energy projects, an unprecedented jump.

2. As a matter of jurisdiction,energy projects that need transmission across public land must be approved by the BLM:

Till now, both approvals – on BLM land or crossing BLM land were all oil and gas.

Now, we are getting clean energy. Good news.

On the second point, even in Southwest watersheds there will be lots of methane (etc) releases. Most importantly, it is the next two decades during which we are reaching critical tipping points and we absolutely must not put any unnecessary GHGs into the atmosphere whatsoever (especially methane). So the more rapid dissipation of methane compared to CO2 is irrelevant to the current emergency.

You are alone in a room. In front of you is a large box with a hole in the side. You are given two options —

Option 1: You can stick your hand in the box and one of two things will happen. Either 1) your hand will be chopped off, or 2) you will be rewarded with a large bundle of cash.

Option 2: You do not stick your hand in the box. But you are not allowed to leave the room and for all eternity it will be only you and the box.

What do you do?

In parts of the SW it’s “100 miles” from the snow pack to the ocean and the water moves that distance fairly quickly. Without the marshes/wetlands needed to let it soak into the aquifer. I really think that people are going to make the decision to trap as much of that water as possible, even if they lose 10% to evaporation. Best practices be damned will, I suspect, be the rule.

Methane, while a much more powerful greenhouse gas, does not remain in the atmosphere anywhere as long as does CO2. Additionally, remember that if we’re talking reservoirs in the SW we aren’t talking about a lot of plant material that’s going underwater. Nothing like building a dam in the rain forest.

I’m not sure that I buy your evaporation argument. If the runoff is not trapped in reservoirs it’s going to quickly run to the sea. Some will evaporate but more will be saved for use.

The problem of methane release. I wonder how the math works out in terms of plant decay emissions vs. many years of fossil fuel avoidance?

(I’m not advocating for more dams. Just looking at what may happen as snow packs disappear faster and other sources dry up.)

Another key to understanding this announcement is that the administration uses the term ‘utility-scale ‘ to describe the projects fast tracked. This means extremely large projects that are dangerous to wildlife (especially in the case that those projects are solar thermal farms which require huge amounts of water to keep them cool).

So the question to ask, is why are we putting huge industrial scale utility plants on public lands, much of which is probably habitat for endangered species; species for which big wind and solar farms (and the long high voltage power lines necessary to carry their output from public wildlands to urban areas) are particularly harmful?

So the megawatt numbers are fudged and the strategy is environmentally harmful.

Instead, the Obama administration should be providing major incentives for urban centers themselves to be fully developed with community-wide local distributed generation, which consists of millions of installations of smaller scale renewables and efficiency measures and which require no large power lines plowed through natural areas.

Also note that large power lines from remote areas allow for profit corporations which own those lines to continue controlling electricity and holding it hostage from consumers, charging them high monopoly rates.

So the Obama administration’s announcement is largely smoke and mirrors, represents an inherently anti-environmental approach to renewable energy generation and transmission, and also pales in comparison to the subsidies being given by the Obama administration to the destructive fossil fuel, nuclear and big ag industries for -their- energy production.

Advice taken.

It’s looking to me as if battery technology might be maturing rapidly enough to fill the need. Zinc-air and sodium-ion batteries are promising – cheap materials and companies are claiming high cycle numbers.

Water is likely to be a major problem in the SW over the coming years. I can see lots of holding reservoirs being built if the snow pack starts melting too fast or not building up at all. If a bit of forethought is put into the projects then they could also be used for energy storage and production.

Then we’re likely to be dealing with less snow pack and more winter rains. That might lead to additional storage dams being built.

With sooner melting snows we could see more dams in other parts of the SW.

That is probably wise not including hydro, since the way we used to build gigantic dams like Hoover can never be done again (apart from the environmental problems giant dams cause, the Colorado river is drying up in the southwest) so there is no way to compare it.

We should subsidize emerging technologies which promise to improve our lives. It takes time to perfect new technology and there needs to be large enough manufacturing to bring down the price.

Some years back solar panels were more than $50 per watt. Because we subsidized panels over many years the price has now dropped to less than $1 per watt.

With subsidies we took wind from very expensive about 30 years ago to now one of our two cheapest ways of producing electricity. Our cheapest renewable.

That kind of subsidizing is way of investing in a better future.

I would agree that if a technology can’t support itself after an adequate opportunity then we should cut it loose. Time to quit subsidizing coal and nuclear.