Inside Climate News reports:

Local conservationist Patrick Donnelly drove east along the Loneliest Road in America, a ribbon of pavement in north central Nevada that deserves its name. Before him, sprawling in every direction, was a green-gray sagebrush basin so large you could probably plop Las Vegas in it and still have room to spare. Save for a stiff wind and the occasional cow bleat, a heavy silence sat on the valley. Not much moved aside from skittish grouse and a few scattered cars. This is a place, a big open hunk of public land, where humans haven’t made an intensive mark.

At least not yet. In corporate conference rooms and government offices from Vegas to Washington, D.C., policymakers, executives and lobbyists are planning a very different future for valleys like this one. If their plans become reality, vast swaths of undeveloped land across Nevada could soon be crossed by towering transmission lines and studded with solar farms in the name of fighting climate change.

The Biden administration has made an aggressive drive to permit 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on America’s federal lands by 2025, which the U.S. Department of the Interior says is enough to power 12 million homes. It surpassed that goal in April. In August this year, it also proposed a solar plan that would make more than 31 million acres of federal land across the American West available for potential solar development.

Even before Donald Trump’s victory in the November election, the Biden administration has been rushing to push through as many renewable energy projects as it can. Trump has promised to place more emphasis on oil and gas development, and at an October 2024 roundtable with Latino voters he criticized the impact that solar development has on the desert, saying “it’s all steel and glass and wires. It looks like hell. … And what it does to your desert areas or the areas that you are putting it, it’s just crazy.” Yet during Trump’s first term, his administration did approve a number of major solar projects on federal land, including the controversial Yellow Pine project near Pahrump, Nevada. And some experts doubt that he will completely roll back the ongoing renewable energy boom in the American West.

“I don’t think there is much of a difference between Trump and Biden on solar, renewables and public lands,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a professor and sustainable energy expert at San José State University. “The clean energy industry plays both sides in the election. Public lands for renewable energy has been pretty bipartisan.”

Nevada, where the federal government manages more than 80 percent of the land, is a key theater for such development—nearly 12 million acres are eligible for it under the Biden administration’s solar plan, approximately 17 percent of the state. More than one-third of the solar and wind proposals pending before the federal Bureau of Land Management nationwide, meanwhile, are located in Nevada. [Continue reading…]