Go ahead with it. We have no fight in us. The western lands should be turned over to the states. Too late.
Millions of acres to be stripped bare and shaded with solar panels imported from China, no problem.
It will be an amazing act of government that not a single endangered toad or bush will be found on any of these sites.
Someday people will wonder what made us stupid enough to throw away a perfectly good and reliable energy system.
Mass insanity.
The environuts are going to have a cow over this.
There’s going to be a big backlash.
They only want unicorn fart energy sources.
Actually they don’t want any cheap and plentiful energy regardless of how innocuous because that would make humanity thrive, and the thing they hate most is humans.
I’m trying to figure out “snatched”. If the land is already owned by the US government, then how is allocating its use for solar energy “snatching” it. Usually I would use that for privately owned land taken by the government.
Where are all the “conservationists” screaming about this?
150 million acres is almost 1,600 SQUARE MILES. That’s a square 40 MILES on a side.
Then you need all the power lines to connect and concentrate the power and move it to transmission lines. Plus thousands of miles of dirt access roads for maintenance.
Of course, you need backup batteries (which don’t exist at this scale) and backup natural gas fired turbines for night and cloudy days.
You get 0.35 or less MW/acre. Ground cover ratios are 40% to 50%. You get 400-500 MW-hours per year per acre.
Those numbers are terrible and it only works with massive subsidies.
It’s a good thing that the Environmental Impact Assessment will take 7 years to complete before they can apply for the permit to start construction of the Solar farm!...../S/
I expect these solar farms will be equipped with Chinese made solar panels.
BLM (Bureau of Land Management)
there. fixed it.
They have already despoiled hundreds of thousands of acres of rural areas and coastlines with their repulsive, bird-killing wind farms.
Nothing screams environmentalism more than thousands and thousands of acres of man made objects that will be trash in a couple decades...
solar is pointless for a main power source
geothermal is the answer. it’s everywhere. absolutely clean. and the ‘fuel’ is just water being boiled at the bottom of a 6+ mile shaft... the resultant steam comes up other shafts which turns a steam turbine which can produce 1+ gigawatts of power.
extra bonus... we wouldn’t be beholden to china for any of it.
Build nuclear plants! Solar and wind won’t cut it.
Enrich Chinaman and Emperor FJB, screw the public, kill the birds! Yeah!
Oh yeah. They are a mess on many levels
100 million acres of solar panels? Will that be visible from space?
I was enthusiastic about a huge solar energy installation done in Spain some years ago. It required huge government funding and subsidies, but the pro arguments assured the world that the subsidies would soon be ended as the plant paid for itself. You probably saw pictures of it in some movies
However, the rosy future didn’t pan out. The investment in a large plat backfired. Subsidies would have continued into the indefinite future. So Spain pulled the plug on what was the first huge solar energy installation.
Public lands for solar farms is no different conceptually than public lands for grazing. So, leasing public lands is not actually snatching them. The reason they are public is because no one actually has a use for them
If you believe in solar then Nevada or Arizona public lands is the place to be