In An Act Of Shear Ignorance The U.S. Freezes Solar Energy Projects

Just as the Solar Industry is really heating up, The United States goes and pulls something like this! The United States federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take two full years! Wow, that is just what we needed with unbelievably high oil and energy prices... now that is thinking. I know that the puppets in our government are being strung along by the oil and coal companies, but this is just ridiculous... Here is part of The New York Times article...

The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

But the decision to freeze new solar proposals temporarily, reached late last month, has caused widespread concern in the alternative-energy industry, as fledgling solar companies must wait to see if they can realize their hopes of harnessing power from swaths of sun-baked public land, just as the demand for viable alternative energy is accelerating.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Holly Gordon, vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs for Ausra, a solar thermal energy company in Palo Alto, Calif. “The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resources in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry.”

Much of the 119 million surface acres of federally administered land in the West is ideal for solar energy, particularly in Arizona, Nevada and Southern California, where sunlight drenches vast, flat desert tracts.

Galvanized by the national demand for clean energy development, solar companies have filed more than 130 proposals with the Bureau of Land Management since 2005. They center on the companies’ desires to lease public land to build solar plants and then sell the energy to utilities.

According to the bureau, the applications, which cover more than one million acres, are for projects that have the potential to power more than 20 million homes.

You can read the entire article here!

What do you think about this latest move by The United States federal government?