" I heard it through the AgLine"

January 14, 2011

 

 

·        Farmers can’t agree on where to cut spending

·        Floods take massive toll on Australian farms

·        Fruits, veggies star in school nutrition plan  

·        World moving closer to food sticker shock

·        Solar industry dealing with green backlash

 

 

Farmers can’t agree on where to cut spending

 

(AP via Yahoo! News) ATLANTA – The nation's biggest farm lobbying group supports a balanced budget. It's against tax increases and says the federal government needs to tighten its belt.

 

Just don't ask its members where the government should trim billions of dollars in agriculture spending — they can't agree.

 

Despite warnings about belt-tightening and record federal deficits, delegates to the American Farm Bureau Federation left their annual convention this week without making major suggestions on where Congress should trim spending in the next Farm Bill, which sets federal funding for agriculture.

 

Senior Farm Bureau leaders, a ranking senator and even U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack signaled this week that cutbacks are likely as the aftermath of the Great Recession pushes U.S. government deficits to levels last seen during World War II.

 

"We have a responsibility, even an obligation, as an organization with great political and policy influence, to weigh in and help find solutions to these problems facing our nation," Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman told the convention in his opening address. He urged his fellow farmers to "make choices and establish priorities."

 

It didn't happen.

 

"Our delegates did not give us clear direction as how and when and where that should occur," Stallman conceded two days later, after the farmers punted those decisions back to the Farm Bureau's board of directors.

 

It remains unclear exactly when cuts could be coming. Lawmakers could trim spending approved in the 2008 Farm Bill this year to align existing spending with the federal government's diminished income. But the austerity debate also could be delayed until Congress starts major work on the next five-year Farm Bill.

 

"This is going to be the most difficult Farm Bill that we've ever had to write," Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the Senate agriculture committee, told the convention.

 

Some farmers signaled a willingness to compromise to save the U.S. money. They suggested individual farmers should pick which safety net program they want from the federal government but not take assistance from multiple programs.

 

Money saved under that plan could be used to expand agriculture insurance and price protection for all farmers, said Craig Lang, who leads the Iowa Farm Bureau and helped draft the proposal. Farmers with better insurance would be protected from problems that hit their wallets but are beyond their control, such as disease outbreaks and drought.

 

"It protects the assets so you can come back the next year and keep producing either that meat, milk, eggs or crop, or whatever it is," Lang said.

 

But the proposal was ripped apart by other delegates, especially Southern farmers. They prefer direct payments from the federal government — one part of the existing safety net — and have complained that insurance premiums are too high for the benefits they receive.

 

With that opposition, support for the compromise quickly evaporated, and delegates decided to lobby for direct payments, crop insurance and two other programs designed to protect farmers' bottom line.

 

Wisconsin Farm Bureau President William Bruins, a dairy farmer, worried the lobbying group was asking for too much.

 

"Let's make sure that each and every program that we support in the Farm Bill is important enough that we want to save some dollars for it," he said. "So let's not simply load the Christmas tree up with ornaments and see how many of those programs we can keep alive."

 

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Floods take massive toll on Australian farms

 

(AP via Yahoo! News) TENT HILL, Australia – Australia began to tally the multibillion dollar toll of massive flooding that left fertile farmland in the northeast a boggy mess of rotting vegetation and swamped the third-largest city of Brisbane, where residents waded through stinking mud Friday in search of salvageable possessions.

 

Mining companies have announced that they won't be able to meet contracts for coal, Australia's biggest export, due to the flooding in Queensland state while farmers there are counting crop losses that could push up world food prices.

 

The floodwaters that swamped entire neighborhoods in Brisbane, the state capital, receded Friday, leaving behind a thick layer of putrid sludge that covered streets and thousands of houses. More than 30,000 homes and businesses were flooded with muddy water and officials warned some residents their homes were so badly damaged, they'd need to be destroyed.

 

The flooding is a particularly cruel blow to farmers, many of whom had hoped for bumper crops after much of Australia emerged from its worst drought in more than a century. The effects are being felt as far away as China, where prices for the coal used in steelmaking are on the rise and hampering government efforts to control rising inflation.

 

John Bishop, a tall and burley 66-year-old farmer, pointed to where a crop of lettuce remains hidden under a foot (30 centimeters) of water in the Lockyer Valley, which is west of Brisbane and provides much of Queensland's fresh produce. Elsewhere in the valley, water melons are rotting in the ground and soaked lucerne — a high quality feed for livestock — will have to be trashed.

 

Bishop says some farmers anxious to begin working their sodden land have been told by police to hold off until a search for the bodies of missing local residents is completed.

 

Weeks of relentless rains and flooding across Australia's northeast have left 26 people dead. Another 53 people are still missing. Most of the people unaccounted for are from the Lockyer Valley and the nearby city of Toowoomba, where a sudden downpour on Monday caused a flash flood likened to an inland tsunami.

 

Bishop's farm on Tent Hill is on the valley's higher ground and escaped inundation. But farmers like him with salvageable crops will struggle to truck them to market with local roads washed out and bridges damaged.

 

He said any more heavy rain on the sodden soil would be catastrophic for the valley where his family has farmed since 1939. "We're hardy stock in this valley," he said. "It'll take time, but we'll recover."

 

Even more frightening for farmers is the Bureau of Meteorology's prediction that rain could continue until the end of March due to the cool conditions in the central equatorial Pacific Ocean associated with the current La Nina — a weather system known for producing heavy rains.

 

Flooding rains on Friday spread farther south along the Australian east coast, forcing thousands of people to be evacuated from their homes in Victoria state and the island state of Tasmania.

 

Some towns were all but abandoned as major flood alerts were issued for five rivers in Victoria and residents were evacuated from three towns in northwest Tasmania where an entire summer's average rain fall was recorded in a single day, authorities said.

 

The overall cost to Australia's 1.3 trillion Australian dollar ($1.29 trillion) economy from the Queensland floods could amount to as much as $13 billion, or 1 percent of gross domestic product, if infrastructure damage is severe, JP Morgan economist Stephen Walters wrote in a research report.

 

Some economists are already trimming the forecasts for economic growth this year. Bank of America Merrill Lynch has cut its forecast to 3 percent from 3.3 percent. JP Morgan Securities cut its prediction to 3.3 percent from 3.7 percent.

 

The deluge has hit mines that provide much of the global supply of coal, forcing giants like Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Anglo American to rely on a legal clause that allows them out of contracted sales in the case of natural disasters or other unforeseen catastrophes.

 

Contract prices for steelmaking coal have been set at $225 a ton (0.9 metric tons) in the first quarter of 2010 but are forecast by analysts to rise to around $300 a ton later this year because of the flooding.

 

Analysts at research and stock brokerage firm CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets predicted that floods would remove 11 million tons (10 million metric tons) of Australian steelmaking coal from the world's supply in the first three months of the year.

 

Liu Feng, a strategist with Central China Securities in Shanghai, said China's own coal producers will be able to fill the gap that results from suspended Australian exports. "But the coal price in China will be pushed up in a short term," Feng said.

 

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Science, the federal government's main forecaster on the farming and mining industries, said the flood would put upward pressure on international food and energy costs although it is too early to calculate Australia's export losses.

 

ABARES chief commodity analyst Jammie Penm said his bureau had predicted last month that, with the drought retreating, Australia's agricultural produce — 60 percent of which is exported — would increase from AU$41 billion in the last fiscal year to AU$45.6 billion in the current fiscal year ending June 30, 2011.

 

That figure will now have to be revised down when ABARE releases its next forecast on March 1.

 

Coal exports earned Australia AU$34.5 billion last fiscal year and ABARES predicted last month that higher prices due to soaring world energy demand would lift earnings to AU$50.6 billion in the current year.

 

Jim Devine, spokesman for the state mining association Queensland Resources Council, said communication difficulties due to flooding meant a clear picture of when mine exports might normalize would not emerge until next week.

 

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Fruits, veggies star in school nutrition plan

 

(United Fresh Produce Association) WASHINGTON, D.C. – The United Fresh Produce Association is cheering a new proposed rule from the Department of Agriculture that would significantly increase the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables served to the 32 million students served by the National School Lunch Program.

 

The proposed rule, announced this week, seeks to align the National School Breakfast and Lunch Programs with the 2005 Dietary Guidelines and Institute of Medicine’s recommendations, both of which call for increased consumption of fruits and vegetables.

 

“Fruits and vegetables really are the stars of this proposed rule,” said Dr. Lorelei DiSogra, United’s vice president of nutrition and health. “We are pleased that the proposed rule will double the amount of fruit served at breakfast, double the amount of fruits and vegetables served at lunch and increase variety. Children like fresh fruits and vegetables and will eat more when they are available in school meals. Increasing children’s consumption of fruits and vegetables will improve their health and reduce their risk of childhood obesity.”

 

All schools would be expected to implement the proposed rule beginning in school year 2012-2013. 

 

“The new proposed meal requirements will raise standards for the first time in fifteen years and will help improve the health and nutrition of nearly 32 million kids that participate in school meal programs every school day,” added DiSogra. “Together with the recently passed Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, this rule will dramatically increase the amount of fruits and vegetables available to school children.”  

 

While the initial analysis of the proposed rule is very positive for fruits and vegetables, there are still many details to examine that will impact the produce industry. United Fresh will form a working group to review the rule and provide comprehensive comments back to USDA within the 90-day comment period.

 

Ed. Note: A transcript of the proposed rule is available by contacting United Fresh Communications Manager Patrick Delaney at pdelaney@unitedfresh.org or 202-303-3400, ext. 417.

 

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World moves closer to food sticker shock

 

(FT via CNN.com) – The world has moved a step closer to a food price shock after the US government surprised traders by cutting stock forecasts for key crops, sending corn and soyabean prices to their highest level in 30 months.

 

The price jump comes after the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation warned last week that the world could see repetition of the 2008 food crisis if prices rose further. The trend is becoming a major concern in developing countries.

 

While officials are drawing comfort from stable rice prices, key for feeding Asia, they warn that a sustained period of high prices, especially in grains such as wheat, would hit poorer countries. Food price hikes have already led to riots in Algeria and Mozambique.

 

"Stocks of corn and soyabean are at incredibly tight levels ... and the markets are surging to incredibly strong prices," Chad Hart, agricultural economist at Iowa State University, said.

 

Dan Basse, president of AgResource, a Chicago-based forecaster, added: "There's just no room for error any more. With any kind of weather problem in the upcoming growing season we will make new all-time highs in corn and soy, and to a lesser degree wheat futures."

 

Agricultural traders and analysts warn that the latest revision to US and global stocks means there is no further room for weather problems. The crops in Argentina and Brazil, to be harvested soon, look fragile due to dryness.

 

Traders are particularly concerned about the cost of vegetable oil, key for developing countries such as China where an emerging middle class is buying more frying oil. The US Department of Agriculture said the ratio of global stocks-to-demand would fall later this year to "levels unseen since the mid-1970s, reflecting an accelerated pace of vegetable oil" consumption for food and fuel.

 

In Chicago, the price of soyabeans rose as much as 5.2 per cent to $14.20½ a bushel, the highest since late 2008. The USDA said that domestic stocks-to-demand would drop to the lowest point in nearly half a century.

 

Corn prices jumped 5 per cent to $6.37 a bushel, the highest level since July 2008.

 

The USDA said that by August the ratio of US corn stocks-to-demand would fall to a surprisingly thin 5.5 per cent, the smallest cushion in 15 years.

 

The US is the world's largest corn supplier, meeting more than half of global import needs. Corn is an important ingredient in animal feed, and the tightening market partly reflects stronger appetites for meat in emerging markets. Record ethanol production in the US will also swallow up nearly 40 per cent of the US crop.

 

The boom in agricultural prices has lifted the outlook of the agribusiness sector in the US. Cargill, the world's largest trader of food commodities, said its profits had tripled year-on-year during the second quarter of its fiscal year.

 

The shares of Deere & Co, the world's largest manufacturer of tractors and combines, surged 2.3 per cent, approaching an all-time high. But food companies such as Nestlé fell as analysts said they would struggle to pass rising wholesale costs to consumers.

 

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Solar industry dealing with green backlash

 

(MSNBC.com) PAICINES, Calif. — When Mike Peterson jumped into a colleague's single turboprop Pilatus and flew over the remote central California valley that he now hopes to turn into a solar plant, he saw sunshine, flat land that would require little grading and two big transmission lines to tap into. "Wow," he remembers thinking at the time. "God made this to be a solar farm."

 

But when Kim Williams looks out at that same land from her low-slung ranch house, she sees an area rich with wildlife that is helping support her grass-fed chicken farm, her neighbor's cattle operations and her peaceful way of life. She supports solar energy on a small scale -- the electric fence around her chicken coop is powered by solar -- but says when she learned about the solar plant she felt shock and disbelief. Now, she's suing to block it.

 

The push to create an alternative to carbon-based fuel has hit an unlikely snag: environmentalists.

 

The split between Peterson and Williams illustrates this awkward state of affairs. To a growing number of environmental advocates, the dozens of large solar plants that are springing up in vast areas of the western wilderness are more scourge than savior.

 

The upshot is that those who on paper seem to be perfect allies for solar are turning into its biggest enemies.

 

That includes the Sierra Club, which last week filed what senior attorney Gloria Smith says is its first suit against a solar plant, a giant 664-megawatt project called Calico that is slated to go up in the desert near Barstow, California. It would lie smack in the middle of habitat for rare plants and animals, in an area Smith calls "a very unfortunate site."

 

The legal brawl comes as the U.S. is racing to adopt renewables. In the United States, renewable energy, including solar, makes up just 8 percent or so of electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That figure was expected to jump to 13 percent by 2035 -- but that was before the Green vs. Green feud.

 

Even though Williams and her cohorts support the broad goal of reducing dependence on fossil fuels, they say it comes at too high a cost if it means building on undeveloped land. Helping their case: the proposed plants are often slated for areas with threatened or endangered animals, including kit foxes, kangaroo rats, rare lizards and others.

 

Now, the groups have gone from complaining to litigating. That means solar companies must take funds and management time that would have been spent on developing their plants and spend them instead on fighting lawsuits. For some companies, the likely result is that plants won't be built.

 

For the solar industry overall, the situation marks a fundamental shift in attitude. Where previously almost any bare patch of desert seemed like a prospective solar plant, now the reality is that much of the nation's most fertile ground for alternative power and energy independence may well remain undeveloped.

 

And the backlash is likely to slow down the number of big plants developers will try to get through. Some 142 U.S. solar plants are under development, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association, up from just 28 two years ago. Many of these are well over 500 megawatts; a handful are over 1,000 megawatts, meaning they would cover hundreds of acres of land and power at least 300,000 homes each.

 

The big plants give the U.S. a chance to gain ground in the solar power industry, where it lags countries like Spain, which has around 30 large-scale solar plants in the construction phase. China, which dominates the solar panel business, is also racing ahead, with an aggressive renewable-energy policy and big loans to companies.

 

Solar energy is among the strategic industries in which China is considering investing up to $1.5 trillion over five years to cement its position as a provider of high-value technologies.

 

In one major project, China's Shandong Penglai Electric Power Equipment Manufacturing Co. is working with Burbank, Calif.-based eSolar to build a series of plants totaling 2,000 megawatts of electricity in the deserts of Northern China. Some 60 miles away, Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar is working on the first stage of its own China plan, a 2,000-megawatt project.

 

Analysts say the prevailing view in China is that the good done by solar plants outweighs any damage they may do to the environment, and concerns about plants and animals are minimal. Not so in the United States.

 

California - state of solar

California lies at the center of the U.S. solar industry, thanks to a confluence of sunlit land and a legal requirement for 33 percent of its electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020. More than 40 solar utility plants are in development, according to the state's public utilities commission. Almost all of them have or will run into problems with environmentalists or people who simply don't want the plants in their backyard -- plants like Peterson's Solargen.

 

The company was born in 2006, as the government was bolstering its support for the solar sector through tax credits and loan-guarantee programs. Peterson, the company's chief executive, was among those who bought in. Previously, he had advised high-net worth individuals at Goldman Sachs, and later founded and managed an alternative-energy investment firm.

 

But the Solargen executives weren't the only ones who had spied opportunity. The Solargen team figured it could never compete with the hordes of developers focusing on the deserts, where too many projects were chasing too few power lines to carry all the electricity they would generate. Fewer companies were looking in central California.

 

When Peterson first saw Panoche in 2008, he said he felt he had hit the jackpot: a 20,000-acre valley with few inhabitants that seemingly no other developers had their eye on. While most other utility-scale plants are planned for government-owned property, this land was privately owned -- which Peterson assumed would make the permitting process easier.

 

He quickly moved in, figuring out who owned the land he would need -- both for the plant and a preserve to mitigate loss of habitat for animals and plants on the site -- and enlisting local movers-and-shakers to help him get it. He recalls negotiating with one rancher who kept a shotgun at his side for the entire meeting; another unsuccessfully kept trying to ply Peterson, a Mormon who doesn't drink, with spirits.

 

Meanwhile, he was trying to nail down funds. That's been tough for almost all solar energy companies, particularly startups, in a climate where investor cash has slowed to a trickle. The more innovative the technology, the harder it has been to line up financing. Many companies are trying to tap into loan guarantees on offer from the U.S. Department of Energy, but the application process is lengthy and rigorous. Peterson says his application was turned down.

 

Trips to Silicon Valley's fabled Sand Hill Road got him nowhere. Venture capital investment has declined overall, but clean technology has been particularly hard hit. Just $625 million was invested in the sector in the third quarter of 2010, the National Venture Capital Association says, compared with $1 billion two years ago.

 

Peterson's then-limited experience in solar energy didn't help. And the founder of Solargen, Eric McAfee, had landed in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which found he had caused drilling company Verdisys to make misleading disclosures about its expenses and revenues. In 2006, McAfee agreed to pay a $25,000 civil penalty without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations. Peterson calls McAfee, chairman and CEO of ethanol company AE Biofuels, "a leading thinker in renewable energy" who regularly addresses forums such as Milken Institute conferences, and adds that the SEC never filed any restrictions against McAfee.

 

Desperate for financing, Peterson finally dusted off the Mandarin he had learned as a Mormon missionary to Taiwan in the early 1980s, and went back for several visits. He can still rattle off the greeting with which he began each meeting -- describing how much he enjoyed his time in Taiwan, how glad he was this project has brought him back, and how sorry he was about his rusty language skills.

 

One company he hit up was UMC, which had founded NexPower Technology Corp., a thin-film solar manufacturer. To seal the deal with its investment arm, Peterson agreed to buy some panels from NexPower for the plant as long as he can find a lender willing to finance a project using those panels.

 

The gambit worked. He won investments from UMC Capital, his largest backer, and Chinatrust Venture Capital, amounting to $6.5 million. Altogether, Solargen has raised close to $12 million, Peterson says. Building the plant will cost a total of $1.3 billion, he estimates.

 

While Peterson was lining up financing, however, some Panoche Valley residents were lining up against the plant, which they learned about in the summer of 2009 after a Pacific Gas & Electric representative mentioned it to Ron Garthwaite, a local dairy farmer.

 

"It was kind of hard to get our minds around," says Williams, who moved to the Valley from San Francisco a few years ago after reading sustainable-agriculture bestseller "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and deciding she too could raise chickens.

 

Solargen's plans to put the plant on just a small portion of the valley, allow sheep to graze beneath the panels and buy property and easements to set aside 20,000 acres of land in and near the valley as nature reserves did nothing to alleviate her concerns.

 

She, Garthwaite and others like the Santa Clara chapter of the Audubon Society started organizing to fight it.

 

But where Williams was seeing red, the county was seeing green. Solargen has offered to pay a $1 million a year fee to the county for the life of its plant -- a nice addition to a county where the annual operating budget runs around $40 million. And Solargen meant jobs -- up to 200 during peak construction. The county approved the project.

 

"The majority of the population of my district supported it," says Reb Monaco, the outgoing member of the board of supervisors who represents the rural southern part of the county, including the Panoche Valley.

 

In the heat of battle

Those who didn't quickly dusted off a well-worn playbook: using environmental laws to fight a development project.

 

Lawyers say the moment state or local government approves an environmental plan offers the best opportunity to sue to block a plant, using the federal law known as the National Environmental Policy Act or state law such as the California Environmental Quality Act as grounds. Having threatened or endangered species of plants or animals on a site gives the suits far more heft, they say.

 

 

 Save Panoche Valley, the organization Williams helped create, and its allies filed a lawsuit in November alleging that the county approved subpar environmental and water assessment reports and improperly canceled conservation agreements to keep the land in agricultural use. Threatened or endangered animals such as the San Joaquin kit fox, the giant kangaroo rat and the blunt-nosed leopard lizard receive special mention throughout the lawsuit. The county doesn't comment on allegations in pending lawsuits, said assistant county counsel Barbara Thompson.

 

Getting the permits rescinded is the ultimate goal, the groups say. But almost as good is simply delaying the process. "A long drawn-out one would be a victory too," says Garthwaite, who believes Solargen would simply run out of money and time to keep fighting.

 

If worst came to worst, Solargen could simply sell the project without developing it, says Christine Hersey, a solar analyst at Wedbush Securities who has been following environmental concerns closely. Because Solargen already has its land and most of its permits, the business has value, but would have more value if the company also had an agreement with a power company to purchase its electricity, something Peterson says he's working on.

 

Right now, the battle is in the hands of the county, which is preparing a response to the lawsuit ahead of a hearing scheduled for March. Peterson says he's worried the overhang will make it harder for him to raise his next round of funding -- in particular, $7.5 million he needs to come up with by February as a deposit for a powerline-interconnection study required by the utilities that own the lines he hopes to connect to.

 

What's next

Peterson's fears are well placed, says Hersey, the solar analyst at Wedbush. "Investors who were performing their due diligence would want those (lawsuits) resolved before they committed any capital," she says, speaking generally about the solar industry. And as more solar projects from a variety of companies wind their way through the approval process, litigation "will become a bigger issue," she says.

 

Among the plants she considers at high risk is First Solar's 300-megawatt Stateline project, which has high numbers of threatened desert tortoises.

 

Several other projects are already mired in legislation or under threat of it.

 

The Quechan Tribe, a Native American group centered around the border between Arizona and California, has sued the Bureau of Land Management over a 709-megawatt plant planned for its ancestral land in the Imperial Valley, citing animals such as the flat-tailed horned lizard. The tribe charges the BLM approval of the project didn't follow appropriate procedures. Last month, it secured an injunction blocking the plant, under development by NTR plc's Tessera Solar.

 

Just last week, La Cuna de Aztlan, a Native American advocacy group, and its co-plaintiffs filed a lawsuit over federal approval of six solar plants, citing the cultural environment, among other issues.

 

Among the six is the 370-megawatt Ivanpah plant in the Mojave Desert, for which BrightSource Energy broke ground in October. BrightSource already made some concessions after the Center for Biological Diversity, known for litigation on development it believes threatens the environment, raised concerns. The Tucson-based group is keeping a close eye on other proposed solar projects, according to biologist Ileene Anderson.

 

In its suit filed last week in the Supreme Court of California, the Sierra Club sued the California Energy Commission over its approval of the Calico Solar Project. Among the Sierra Club's worries: The plant is going in an area rich with desert tortoises, which are threatened under federal law and endangered under California law, and other species. CEC officials "look forward to defending our position in court," said spokeswoman Sandy Louey. The developer, Tessera Solar, sold the project to New York-based K Road Power late last month.

 

Groups ranging from the Audubon Society to the Defenders of Wildlife to the Natural Resources Defense Council are also lobbing out objections against other projects.

 

About half of all plants in development now are having issues concerning plant and animal habitat, culture sites, or water demand, Hersey estimates. Many of those could end up in court. And just the threat of litigation seems likely to affect the scale of solar, analysts say. Developers could cut back the size of future proposed plants, and think more carefully about where they should go -- and that's the point, environmentalists counter.

 

Serious solar

California has a handful of solar plants that date from the late 1980s, but the solar industry has only recently taken off in a big way. Fears over dependence on overseas fuel sources, a growing distaste for coal-powered electricity and generous government subsidies have all helped boost the industry.

 

Currently, the largest solar plant in the U.S. is just 160 megawatts -- enough to power up to 50,000 homes. But BrightSource's Ivanpah at 370 megawatts just upped the ante. A stream of proposed plants is following in its footsteps, including a pair of 550-megawatt plants slated to break ground next year in San Luis Obispo County and Riverside County, and a 1,000-megawatt plant under development in Riverside County.

 

Of course, savvy operators can try to stave off legal action. Until last week's lawsuit by the Cuna de Aztlan, BrightSource had successfully taken this approach with Ivanpah.

 

One tactic is to go all out to protect plants and animals at risk. Solar companies can go above and beyond the requirements of the law, with extra-detailed studies of the species in question, extra-large purchases of land for use as preserves to offset ill effects at the site, and so on.

 

Solar Millennium is getting a lesson in going to great lengths with its proposed 250-megawatt Ridgecrest plant, mostly on private land in California's Kern County. Officials are worried about the effect on the Mohave ground squirrel, so Solar Millennium is considering whether to fund a two-year study to evaluate the squirrel population in the area. Phil Leitner, the independent biologist leading the study, says if the study goes ahead, he plans to trap squirrels, put radio collars on them, and take tissue samples from their ears to determine their genetic makeup.

 

Back in the Panoche Valley, the environmental reports and the permitting process have eaten up almost two-thirds of the money Solargen has raised. Among the bills: paying for scat-sniffing dogs to run up and down the hills, looking for traces of the endangered San Joaquin kit fox.

 

But not all the valley's residents are against the plant. "It's good for making work," says Mario Bencomo, 53, a ranch hand who says several unemployed friends are eager for jobs.

 

And naturally, many landowners want to see the plant go up, including San Benito County residents who live outside the Valley but own land there. Some have sold options on their property for the project -- for prices of up to $2,600 an acre, according to a person familiar with the situation. Among them are Reprise Software vice president of operations Sallie Calhoun and her husband, Reprise chief executive Matt Christiano.

 

In addition to her Panoche Valley property, Calhoun also owns a ranch a few minutes' drive from the valley in the hamlet of Paicines. She uses sustainable grazing techniques there, chairs the board of a group that works to restore grasslands, and generally considers herself a steward of the environment.

 

She sees no conflict between her position on the environment and her support of the solar project. "I am passionate about preserving open space," she says, adding she believe the solar plant achieves that goal. "The idea that we're going to protect every lizard, every drainage, seems counterproductive."

 

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