Desert squirrels bury large solar project (San Francisco)
Government concerns over the habitat of an endangered Mojave Desert squirrel threaten to scrap plans for Berkeley-based Solar Millennium’s biggest utility scale project in the California desert.
In a report released March 26, advisers to the California Energy Commission recommended an alternative “superior to the proposed project,” which would put a solar thermal plant of 250 megawatts on a California Desert Conservation Area.
That “superior” alternative? Not building the project at all.
The solar project as planned would bisect two major populations of the endangered ground squirrel, commission staff said.
“It would preclude the transference of genes, or the connectivity, and the ability of the species to move through that area and pass genes either to the North or to the South,” said Terry O’Brien, deputy director for the energy commission in charge of environmental protection.
Read the full story in the San Francisco Business Times.
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