Nevada is poised to be a leader in the renewable energy revolution, but we don’t have a plan for how to achieve the state’s goals while protecting our irreplaceable biodiversity.
And lithium deposits beneath our dry lake beds and in our volcanic mountain ranges will prove a critical element in the necessary deployment of battery storage systems and electric vehicles.
Most famously at the moment, the rare wildflower Tiehm’s buckwheat grows only in soils rich in lithium and boron at Rhyolite Ridge in Esmeralda County.
The fight to save Tiehm’s buckwheat isn’t over, but this is an important victory that puts a roadblock in the mine’s extinction plan.
The Thacker Pass lithium project, which our organization is not engaged on, poses a dire threat to the greater sage grouse and native aquatic invertebrates.
Rather than coming up with a plan for Nevada’s clean energy transition, they are simply allowing the market to determine where and how renewable energy and critical minerals are produced.
Instead of planning ahead — Where along the Greenlink path might be the best place to site solar? — the PUC, and by extension the Legislature and governor who set policy, are just leaving it up to the market to decide where the least environmental impacts might be.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
This approach, often called “Smart from the Start” planning, is proven and should include representatives of the whole spectrum of affected stakeholders who stand to be impacted by such projects, including Indigenous and rural communities, advocates for wildlife and plant communities and public land users of all stripes.
California undertook an effort like this for renewable energy planning — the Desert Renewable Energy and Conservation Plan, which allocated parts of the California desert for solar energy production and parts for conservation.
Without a plan for siting renewable energy production and critical minerals infrastructure in the most environmentally responsible places, we are unnecessarily sacrificing justice for our planet in a zero-sum game.