Earth Equity News

BrightSource Scraps Mojave Desert Solar Project. By Louis Sahagun, LATimes, September 18, 2009. "Ending a bitter feud in the rush to develop solar farms, BrightSource Energy Thursday said it had scrapped a controversial plan to build a renewable energy facility in the eastern Mojave Desert wilderness that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wants to transform into a national monument. The proposal pitted companies queuing up to replace imported oil and facilitate a national clean-energy economy against environmentalists strongly opposed to the idea of creating an industrial zone within 600,000 acres of former railroad lands that had been donated to the Department of Interior for conservation. The acrimony even triggered a nasty public squabble between Robert Kennedy Jr., a senior advisor at VantagePoint Venture Partners, which raised $160 million for Oakland-based BrightSource, and David Myers, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy, which raised $40 million to buy the old railroad lands to protect them from development. 'I commend BrightSource Energy for this action,' Feinstein said in a statement. 'It's clear that conservation and renewable energy development are not mutually exclusive goals -- there is room enough in the California desert for both.' Of particular concern was BrightSource's proposal to develop a 5,130-acre solar power plant on a portion of the donated lands known as Broadwell Dry Lake, which lies within Sleeping Beauty Valley."