Say What?

The New York Times reported June 27 that the Bureau of Land Management has placed a moratorium for up to two years on all new solar power projects on U.S. public lands in the sun-drenched states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah.

The moratorium is meant to buy time for the department to study the environmental impacts of proposals, which would involve running power lines, roads, and increasing water use in parched regions.

“The problem is that this is a very young industry, and the majority of us that are involved are young, struggling, hungry companies,” the Times quoted Lee Wallach of Solel, a solar power company based in California that has filed numerous applications to build on public land and was considering filing more in the next two years. “This is a setback.”

It appears the review is grounded in good intentions, but one wonders why the federal government can’t invest greater resources to speed up the process in a time when the country is in a growing energy crisis.