You’ll recall the recent hubbub over the Bureau of Land Management’s decision, now reversed, to stop accepting applications for new solar energy projects on public lands until an environmental impact study can be completed. 

As part of that environmental impact study, the BLM and the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy will accept public comments until July 15, 2008. If you’d like to contribute to this process, you can submit your thoughts on the Web, or by mail to:

Solar Energy PEIS Scoping

Argonne National Laboratory

9700 S. Cass Ave. – EVS/900

Argonne, IL 60439

For those of us who haven’t done this sort of thing before, here are some tips from the agencies on how to comment effectively.

In a story posted yesterday, Forbes.com makes use of 3TIER’s wind and solar maps to help illustrate the slide show “In Pictures: America’s Best Places For Alternative Energy.” Also see the accompanying article. 

This just in:

“In response to public interest in solar energy development, the Bureau of Land Management is announcing that it plans to continue accepting applications for future potential solar development on the public lands. The BLM will process these applications, while continuing to identify issues during public scoping currently underway for the programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS).”

Here’s the pdf of the press release from the Solar Energy Development Programmatic EIS site.

Today, Reuters reports on the solar industry’s reaction to the Bureau of Land Management’s announcement that solar development on BLM lands will be halted until a region-wide environmental impact study can be completed.

Last Friday, Earth2Tech reported some less-taken-aback reactions from companies Nanosolar and BrightSource.

Yesterday, Red Green and Blue opined that the BLM is responsibly considering solar development on public lands in light of the National Environmental Policy Act. (I don’t think any rational solar enthusiast is against environmental impact studies, but rather against the seemingly sudden 22-month halt on new development.)

For information straight from the source, check the Solar Energy Development Programmatic EIS site, which includes dates for public meetings, a FAQ, comment form, and a sign-up page for email updates. (Hat tip to Clean Edge for pointing out this resource.)

Even as observers celebrate signs of the solar industry’s maturation (acquisitions by major players, rapid increases in investment in and production of photovoltaics), today the New York Times and the Economist report that, late in May, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management halted the development of new solar on public lands in six southwestern states until environmental impact studies are completed. The BLM will conduct a “region-wide” assessment estimated to take about two years (with the hope of accelerating consideration of future applications), while at the same time requiring individual impact studies for applications (nearly 130) received prior to the May 29 moratorium. 

While this didn’t hit most people’s radar — including Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s – until this week, the Las Vegas Sun had an early line on the story, although their May 30 news item doesn’t specificially mention a halt on new developments. The Sun’s June 18 story is more strongly worded, and captures some industry reaction. Early this week, even before we bloggers began blogging about it, the Sun seemed to hint that the BLM’s moratorium isn’t written in stone:

As for the decision itself, <the BLM’s Linda> Resseguie said “it was a BLM decision, but the Department (of the Interior) was consulted.”

“As far as discussing or debating the merits of a freeze with the congressional delegation before we took that administrative action, I am fairly certain that did not occur,” Resseguie said.

She said it is possible the BLM would reconsider the freeze.

“Policies can always be influenced,” she said.

Senator Reid’s statement is here. He seems to be the only Senator from one of the affected states (California, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado) to have made a statement so far.

In a little-used 3TIER conference room — the one where old desk chairs go to live out their twilight years — sit two stacks of cardboard boxes containing more boxes: slick, nearly featureless black boxes. One pile stores new CPUs awaiting introduction to the computing cluster.

The other pile stores hard drives shipped to us from the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although 3TIER is located in the most wired building in the Pacific Northwest, we calculated that it’s more bandwidth-savvy to ship empty hard drives to Madison and receive full hard drives back. The data acquisition team unpacks them one by one and joins their contents to a massive collection: 12 terabytes of satellite pictures of the planet. These images are the beginnings of the REmapping the World global solar map.

(more…)

Now that you’ve got the 411 on our assessments, you’re probably wondering how that’s different from forecasting, the other thing on which we spend a lot of time and computing power.

In short, an assessment analyzes lots of past data to tell you what the weather was like, whereas a forecast tells you what the weather will be like. “Assessment is ‘hindcasting,’” Scott Eichelberger says. Which means forecasting is … well, you know what it is. Scott didn’t give me a pithy one-liner for forecasting.

Who uses our assessments? Developers who are prospecting for sites for new installations, financiers wanting to know the power-producing potential of a site, and builders who want weather data to help guide which equipment and technology they use. FirstLook assessments are available for wind and solar, whereas the more detailed FullView assessments cover wind.

Who wants forecasts? Usually, energy site and utilities operators who need to plan which sources of power they will call upon in order to ensure a steady supply to the grid. We currently forecast for wind and hydro. I’ll cover forecasting in much more detail in upcoming posts.

Canada’s Energy-TV recently aired a feature on our REmapping the World initiative, starring Ken Westrick and some truly beautiful footage, especially of offshore wind turbines. (I really do think they’re lovely, in a Bauhaus sort of way.) You can learn more about REmapping the World here.

The inventors of the silicon solar cell were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio late last week, along with 13 others, whose creations range from Styrofoam to Bose noise-reducing headphones (which I credit for preventing me from committing capital crimes while doing time in a cubicle as a writer for SuperMegaCorp).

First unveiled in 1954 and boasting 6 percent efficiency, the first modern solar cell was patented in 1957 by AT&T’s Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson. Patent number US2780765 describes their “Solar Energy Converting Apparatus.” In addition to converting solar energy to electricity, the technology developed by Chapin, Fuller, and Pearson is credited for making possible space exploration, fiber optics, and many science fair projects.

The three gentlemen were inducted in the Hall of Fame posthumously.