How the Renewable Energy Boom Is Remaking the American West

This article was produced in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations, with support from the Puffin Foundation. 

ON HIGHWAY 50, Nev.—Local conservationist Patrick Donnelly drove east along the Loneliest Road in America, a ribbon of pavement in north central Nevada that deserves its name. Before him, sprawling in every direction, was a green-gray sagebrush basin so large you could probably plop Las Vegas in it and still have room to spare. Save for a stiff wind and the occasional cow bleat, a heavy silence sat on the valley. Not much moved aside from skittish grouse and a few scattered cars. This is a place, a big open hunk of public land, where humans haven’t made an intensive mark. 

At least not yet. In corporate conference rooms and government offices from Vegas to Washington, D.C., policymakers, executives and lobbyists are planning a very different future for valleys like this one. If their plans become reality, vast swaths of undeveloped land across Nevada could soon be crossed by towering transmission lines and studded with solar farms in the name of fighting climate change. 

The Biden administration has made an aggressive drive to permit 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on America’s federal lands by 2025, which the U.S. Department of the Interior says is enough to power 12 million homes. It surpassed that goal in April. In August this year, it also proposed a solar plan that would make more than 31 million acres of federal land across the American West available for potential solar development.

Even before Donald Trump’s victory in the November election, the Biden administration has been rushing to push through as many renewable energy projects as it can. Trump has promised to place more emphasis on oil and gas development, and at an October 2024 roundtable with Latino voters he criticized the impact that solar development has on the desert, saying “it’s all steel and glass and wires. It looks like hell. … And what it does to your desert areas or the areas that you are putting it, it’s just crazy.” Yet during Trump’s first term, his administration did approve a number of major solar projects on federal land, including the controversial Yellow Pine project near Pahrump, Nevada. And some experts doubt that he will completely roll back the ongoing renewable energy boom in the American West.

“I don’t think there is much of a difference between Trump and Biden on solar, renewables and public lands,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a professor and sustainable energy expert at San José State University. “The clean energy industry plays both sides in the election. Public lands for renewable energy has been pretty bipartisan.”

Nevada, where the federal government manages more than 80 percent of the land, is a key theater for such development—nearly 12 million acres are eligible for it under the Biden administration’s solar plan, approximately 17 percent of the state. More than one-third of the solar and wind proposals pending before the federal Bureau of Land Management nationwide, meanwhile, are located in Nevada. 

Donnelly, an environmental activist with the Center for Biological Diversity, is deeply troubled by this federally backed plan. He has spent years defending Nevada’s wild places and endangered animals from developers of all kinds—mining groups, oil and gas drillers, real estate firms and agricultural interests. But now he sees a major new threat at the hands of the renewable energy industry, whose growing power and presence was on display during his road trip. All across the state, solar farms, geothermal projects, lithium mines, transmission lines and more are being planned on undeveloped public lands. 

“We are talking about a fundamental transformation of the American West,” said Donnelly.

At the center of this push is NV Energy, which provides around 90 percent of the state with electricity and is a subsidiary of magnate Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy. The company wants to build two enormous transmission lines on federal property in Nevada. If completed in the coming years, these projects, known as Greenlink West and Greenlink North, would span more than 700 miles in the state, most of it federal land. They will help make NV Energy a dominant player in the emerging renewable energy system of the western United States. 

The company has said the lines will create a “renewable energy highway that allows access to Nevada’s resource rich renewable energy zones.” It also says the lines will generate $690 million in economic activity. 

Greenlink West, which received federal approval in September, is slated to be in service by the end of May 2027, NV Energy says. Greenlink North, still undergoing federal review, is targeted for late 2028. 

Many government officials, including top decision-makers at the Interior Department, agree that the Greenlink lines are a critical step toward decarbonizing the national economy. State politicians have said the lines will make Nevada a major player in the renewables arena and enrich the state. Some prominent environmental organizations in the region have also supported the projects, including the climate group Western Resource Advocates, which has called the Greenlink projects “crucial in helping Nevada reach its targets for reducing the harmful carbon pollution that causes climate change.” 

In addition to creating jobs and driving private-sector manufacturing and investments in renewable energy, President Joe Biden’s “clean energy policies are also putting America on a path to cut climate pollution in half by 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2050 as we transition away from fossil fuels,” an Interior Department spokesperson said. 

Yet even among environmental groups and government officials, the Greenlink projects have been divisive. Nevada environmentalists like Donnelly, as well as U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service staff, have expressed concerns that the lines and the development they’ll bring could harm imperiled species, fragment habitat and damage paleontological resources. Consumer advocates, meanwhile, worry the transmission lines will enable the utility to hike rates on the backs of Nevada residents. 

This build-out hinges on the Bureau of Land Management, which administers more than 47 million acres in Nevada. 

The agency’s priority is to make it happen. 

Hundreds of pages of public records, particularly from 2021 and 2022, show that long before the federal government approved the Greenlink West line in September, BLM staff were internally griping about concerns raised by other federal agencies, chatting with NV Energy like close colleagues rather than arms-length regulators, and occasionally monitoring local opposition to both transmission lines.

The Bureau of Land Management works closely with project developers, and it is typical for BLM officials to meet regularly with applicants as projects move through the approval process. But Type Investigations and Inside Climate News reviewed communications that suggest the BLM and NV Energy enjoyed a particularly cozy relationship. Among other things, the BLM has sometimes used NV Energy’s corporate headquarters in Las Vegas to conduct meetings with renewable energy developers and other interested parties.

“I suggest pairing back the number of conservationists in the roundtable by a couple,” BLM director Tracy Stone-Manning wrote in an email to her staff ahead of a closed-door meeting between Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, renewable energy companies and advocates that was held in May 2022 at NV Energy’s headquarters. “Don’t get me wrong, we want renewable energy advocates represented,” she added, “but not outnumbering the solar developers.”

Climate change imperils public lands just as surely as the rest of the world. After decades of oil, gas and coal extraction on federal property that has helped fuel the crisis, a push to hasten the energy transition here is a notable shift. But if it’s not done carefully, it too could threaten the health and ecological integrity of such lands—exactly the situation now unfolding, some experts warn.

In Nevada, there has been no comprehensive planning effort that adequately balances conservation needs with the renewable industry’s desires, Mulvaney said. Such work has been done in other places, particularly in southern California with its Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan. 

Mulvaney is among the experts who see the Nevada situation as a modern-day resource rush, a haphazard boom that is sparking conflicts and harming landscapes.

“So long as the federal government continues a developer-centric approach to solar power and transmission projects on public lands, the energy transition will be more contentious and cause more conservation impacts from energy sprawl than it needs to,” he said. “With the solar development ‘mandate’ on the lands they manage, the Bureau of Land Management is in the familiar position of land disposal, this time through the virtual privatization of public lands for corporate profit.” 

A Full-Court Press for Two Costly Transmission Lines

When NV Energy decided to build the Greenlink lines, the company needed state approval in addition to the BLM’s blessing, but it didn’t initially get all that it wanted. In March 2021, Nevada’s Public Utilities Commission declined to approve construction of a section of the proposed Greenlink West line. NV Energy also had not yet received the commission’s approval to begin construction on Greenlink North. So the company, a major political donor in the state, flexed its muscles in the Nevada legislature. 

In the last weeks of the legislative session that year, the company pushed for a green energy bill that included an effective mandate to build both Greenlink projects in full. It passed overwhelmingly, with backing from an influential electrical workers union and environmental organizations. 

The chief sponsor of the bill, Chris Brooks, a Democrat, would later resign from his seat in the state Senate to take a job in renewable energy with Arevia Power, which is currently proposing multiple renewable projects near the Greenlink routes. One was approved by the BLM in September at the same time as Greenlink West.

In a statement, Arevia Power noted that Brooks, before joining the Nevada legislature, “had a long career in renewable energy development and construction, starting Nevada’s first solar company in 2001. His work in the legislature and his current role at Arevia are entirely separate.”

During a hearing for Brooks’ green energy bill, NV Energy CEO Doug Cannon told state lawmakers that NV Energy would provide the $2.5 billion required to build the Greenlink lines. “Nevadans will not be asked to pay for this investment until at least five to six years down the road,” once the lines are in service, he said. 

“We are talking about the largest mostly undisturbed landscape in the lower 48 becoming an energy production zone.”

— Patrick Donnelly with the Center for Biological Diversity

Despite the assurances, the company went before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) a year later and asked permission to incorporate some construction costs into wholesale customers’ electric bills before the transmission lines are operational. It also asked for permission to recoup costs from consumers should the transmission lines ultimately fail to be fully built due to circumstances outside the company’s control. 

FERC approved the company’s requests last year.

Such actions have riled consumer advocates in Nevada, most notably the state’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “BCP does not believe FERC should be granting incentive rate treatments to two utilities [NV Energy’s subsidiaries Nevada Power and Sierra Pacific] when their customers are experiencing their highest bills ever and have experienced hundreds of millions of dollars in rate increases for purchased fuel and purchased power in the past two years,” the agency wrote in a filing to FERC.

While the rate increases approved by FERC would only apply to large consumers like casinos, that could change. State law requires NV Energy to join a regional electric market by 2030; if that happens, the Bureau of Consumer Protection warned, homeowners, local businesses and other retail customers’ rates would also be impacted by the increases. The Greenlink project, the bureau wrote in its comments to FERC, “is going to create significant upward pressure on the general rates paid by customers of the Nevada electric utilities.” 

NV Energy is also currently seeking permission from the state’s Public Utilities Commission to incorporate some construction costs into retail customers’ electric rates. If the commission grants the request, ordinary Nevadans will help fund the project during its construction.

Meanwhile, the anticipated costs of the two transmission lines have ballooned to $4.2 billion. The majority of the project’s costs likely will be borne by Nevada ratepayers. 

“Due to inflationary pressures being experienced by everyone, the original cost estimates, prepared in 2018, for the Greenlink project have risen,” the company said in a statement. In addition, “certain project changes were necessary to accommodate environmental considerations which also increased the project cost.”

Federal approval of Greenlink West in September means that the last major hurdles it faces are likely court challenges by opponents. Greenlink North, meanwhile, awaits a decision from the BLM. The agency released a draft environmental impact statement for Greenlink North shortly after Labor Day, a key milestone. 

Travel the now-approved Greenlink West route with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Patrick Donnelly, and you’ll hear his many misgivings about the green energy revolution unfolding in his state. 

One September afternoon, Donnelly, with a worn cowboy hat shielding him from the fierce sun, hiked to the top of a rocky butte and looked out on a flat expanse of desert in Esmeralda County, about a three-hour drive northwest of Las Vegas. 

“Chances are good this will be all mirrors in 10 years,” said Donnelly. 

A consortium of companies are proposing a giant solar energy complex here that will generate upwards of 6,000 megawatts of energy. These solar developments, if approved by the BLM, could impact as many as 62,000 acres of desert land, two-thirds the size of Las Vegas. 

Indeed, utility-scale solar, like wind energy, requires a massive amount of land—glinting fields of photovoltaic panels stretching for miles and surrounded by fences. The Esmeralda solar facilities will plug into the Greenlink West line, which will run right through this landscape as it follows Highway 95 from the north edge of Las Vegas to the Reno area. The Esmeralda project has sparked denunciations from some residents of the local county, the most sparsely populated and one of the poorest in the state. 

Donnelly is a strong supporter of transitioning away from fossil fuels. But he feels that the federal government has failed to adequately consider Greenlink West’s impacts on the environment—including the enormous amount of solar development like Esmeralda that will likely rise up along its route. 

The BLM is considering nearly 110 proposals for wind and solar projects in Nevada, according to the agency’s public database. The agency has said it aims to permit some 13 gigawatts of renewable energy projects in Nevada alone, equal to roughly half of the Biden administration’s 2025 goal for federal lands. 

The bulk of the impending development is utility-scale solar, and large projects are proposed along the Greenlink lines. 

What is coming to Nevada, Donnelly said, is “a massive industrialization of a previously undisturbed landscape, and we are not talking about a single valley, we are talking about the largest mostly undisturbed landscape in the lower 48 becoming an energy production zone.” 

In California, also rich in public lands, conservationist concerns about the impacts of large-scale renewable development have been incorporated in a more comprehensive manner. A deal finalized in 2016 for the state’s public desert lands, the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, or DRECP, struck a balance between renewable development and land conservation on public lands in the southern part of the state. The deal was the result of years-long negotiations between conservationists, developers and numerous state and federal agencies, including the BLM. That didn’t happen in Nevada, according to critics of the impending renewable boom. 

“The DRECP was a grand bargain. We gave up about 500,000 acres for solar and got millions of acres [of desert land protected] for conservation. That was a good deal. I will take that deal any day,” said Donnelly. With the Greenlink lines and the Biden administration’s Western Solar Plan, “conservation gets nothing. The desert gets nothing.”

In 2023, Gregory Helseth, BLM Nevada’s renewable energy branch chief, told a reporter that the agency had never considered creating a plan similar to the DRECP for Nevada because of the large volume and diffuse nature of public lands in the state.

A BLM spokesperson said in a statement that the new Western Solar Plan “would guide solar energy projects to areas near transmission lines or to previously disturbed lands, avoiding major conflicts with other resources, including important habitats and sensitive cultural resources.” The BLM is working on updating its land-use plans for Nevada, the agency said, describing the effort as a “comprehensive landscape-scale statewide planning effort.”

Development at Scale—and Growing Opposition 

Many officials and advocates argue that development at this scale is urgently needed. Numerous prominent conservation groups, including The Wilderness Society and the National Parks Conservation Association, have welcomed the Western Solar Plan. The National Audubon Society, which worked with a coalition of conservation groups to recommend improvements to the plan during its draft stages, described it as striking a “clearer balance between solar energy development and wildlife conservation.” 

Proponents of the Greenlink lines, meanwhile, say that they will connect the imminent build-out of new solar to the grid and help combat climate change. 

“If you care about the planet and want to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, you need to build at a rate that you can’t do by building on rooftops or in parking lots,” said Peter Weiner, a California-based lawyer who represents several prominent solar companies developing in Nevada. 

Weiner disputes the characterization that the boom unfolding in Nevada amounts to a land or resource rush. When the BLM released the proposed Western Solar Plan earlier this year, it said that the Biden administration aimed to achieve a 100 percent clean electricity grid by 2035. The federal government will likely have to approve a large number of new projects on public lands to reach such goals. And none of it, Weiner contends, can be done without transmission lines like the Greenlink projects.

“A renewable energy plant without transmission is called a cemetery,” he said, quoting a colleague. 

The Greenlink effort, said NV Energy in a statement, “is an important transmission and substation project that will allow NV Energy to meet future energy demands by increasing transmission capacity in the state, while increasing system resiliency and reliability, leading to sustainable economic growth and job stability.”

Still, the BLM estimates that 700,000 acres of public land are needed to reach federal renewable goals. The Western Solar Plan would make 45 times that amount available.

Opposition continues to build, including in places like Nye County, where conservative local officials and some local environmentalists have made common cause to oppose aspects of the renewables boom. Public records show that the BLM and NV Energy have paid attention, quietly monitoring key figures who speak out against development. 

According to records obtained by Type Investigations and Inside Climate News through a Freedom of Information Act request, Kevin Emmerich, a former park ranger, was one target of this monitoring. He and his wife, Laura Cunningham, now lead the conservation organization Basin and Range Watch. He is staunchly against the Greenlink lines and is actively fighting a slew of solar proposals along the Greenlink West route.

When Emmerich was intensifying his campaign against the transmission lines back in January 2022, the records show, an NV Energy vice president forwarded information to a BLM Nevada staffer about a Zoom meeting that Emmerich organized to discuss the Greenlink West project. “Our friend Kevin is holding his own Zoom Greenlink transmission meeting,” Helseth, the renewable energy branch chief, wrote to colleagues after receiving the heads up from NV Energy. 

BLM Nevada’s communications director suggested doing nothing publicly, but “it may be helpful for someone to attend on their ‘off time,’ if they are interested in providing some intel/info about the meeting.”

“I will be on Kevin’s call,” Helseth said in an email the next day. 

After Donnelly, the conservationist, posted a comment on social media concerning the environmental review process for Greenlink North, Helseth wrote to a colleague: “We just need to keep an eye on him, not get into a discussion, counter the facts and let the emotions be what they are.” In another email, the NV Energy vice president sent a PBS video featuring Donnelly to Helseth and other BLM staff.

Emmerich said he was surprised to learn that BLM officials were keeping tabs on him. “Why did they pick me out?” he said. “I would guess because we are really the only local environmental group doing an organized opposition.” 

Emmerich, tanned, wiry, with a sonorous drawl, said his objections to the Greenlink projects stem from his deep love for the desert and its wild creatures. A stretch of the Mojave Desert between Las Vegas and the old mining town of Beatty is top of mind: Greenlink West will pass near here along Highway 95, and he is worried about its impact on the struggling federally protected desert tortoise. This portion of desert, which links the Las Vegas Valley to less developed desert valleys along the western edge of the state, is important connectivity habitat for tortoises. The reptiles rely on it to maintain a healthy exchange of genes among their various populations. Emmerich fears the transmission line and associated solar development could compromise their survival here.

According to the final environmental impact statement for Greenlink West, project impacts on tortoises will include direct mortality from being crushed by vehicles during the transmission line’s construction and loss of connectivity habitat. (To partially mitigate the impact of the project, transmission line structures in tortoise habitat will be designed to discourage ravens, which prey on tortoises, from perching or nesting.)

Greenlink West also drew concern from the National Park Service, to the irritation of BLM officials shepherding the Greenlink lines through environmental review. The Park Service has a legal mandate to protect the Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, a 22,000-acre area at the northern edge of Las Vegas with paleontological wonders from the Ice Age. Fossils found there include mammoths, dire wolves and American lions.

When Congress created the monument in 2014, it also designated a portion of land along the monument’s boundary as a transmission corridor. But the present corridor is insufficient to meet Greenlink West’s needs, and NV Energy asked the Park Service for permission to run the line through an area of the monument where ground-penetrating radar studies show anomalies that likely indicate the presence of ancient fossils. 

“We have tried multiple times to work with NPS folks …,” the BLM’s Helseth wrote to his agency’s Nevada director in late 2021, “however, we experience no help, no clear understanding of this project’s importance, and now multiple uncalled for comments by NPS to my contractor and applicant during a meeting.” 

The Park Service separately filed official comments with the BLM, writing that construction of Greenlink within the monument’s boundaries will have the “potential to impact paleontological resources, including an undetermined number of fossil remains and unrecorded fossil sites.” Nonetheless, the transmission line received federal approval, with the Park Service ultimately finding that “the transmission line would not result in impairment of [Tule Springs] resources or unacceptable impacts,” according to a BLM spokesperson. More radar studies will be conducted before construction to search for signs of fossils, the Park Service said in its decision.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a watchdog group focused on environmental agencies, said it is considering a lawsuit over the impact to Tule Springs. 

“The Bureau of Land Management’s decision sets a dangerous precedent by allowing a project to move forward that will damage park resources,” said Tim Whitehouse, PEER’s executive director. 

“It was something our board said we have to take a stand on, because if we don’t, who will?”

— Shaaron Netherton with Friends of Nevada Wilderness

Friends of Nevada Wilderness, a conservation organization, said it is also likely to sue over both Greenlink West and the Esmeralda 7 solar complex, due to their impacts on a proposed conservation area in Esmeralda County. 

“We have never done litigation on our own before, that is not who Friends is, but this was too much,” said the group’s executive director, Shaaron Netherton. “It was something our board said we have to take a stand on, because if we don’t, who will?” 

Records from 2021 and 2022 show BLM staff held regular meetings with NV Energy on the Greenlink lines—not unusual for a project of this scale. But the agency also enjoyed access to NV Energy headquarters when it needed space to hold meetings in Las Vegas, including at least one meeting with renewable energy interests at which NV Energy staff do not seem to have been present. And messages between BLM and NV Energy staff were sometimes indistinguishable from a chat between friends. 

In various emails, the BLM’s Helseth, the state renewable energy branch chief, described federal employees and NV Energy staff as “one big happy family,” told one NV Energy employee “LOL you are the best” and said “you da man” to another. The BLM declined to speak about these communications, and Helseth declined to comment through an agency spokesperson. 

Neither the BLM nor its parent agency, the Interior Department, specifically addressed why staff kept an eye on opposition to development plans. NV Energy did not answer questions about its relationship with the BLM or the monitoring of activists.

“We will continue to meet with states, Tribes, industry representatives, nonprofit and non-governmental organizations and any other interested parties regarding this work and our efforts to support a responsible clean energy future as part of a balance of the multiple use mandate on America’s public lands,” the Interior Department said.

A Fraught Tour of Nevada’s Renewable Energy Boom 

Donnelly, the local conservationist, felt all along that Greenlink West was guaranteed to receive the federal approval it ultimately did. That approval now paves the way for an influx of industrial-scale projects up and down western Nevada. 

Donnelly drove a reporter through the landscape that Greenlink West is going to transform, starting from Las Vegas, northwest along U.S. 95, up the Amargosa Valley into Beatty and then beyond toward Esmeralda County. In valley after valley along the route, and deep in the mountains too, renewable proposals and projects are sprouting up like mushrooms after a monsoon. Since the release of the Western Solar Plan in late August, renewable energy developers have applied for seven more solar projects on nearly 40,000 acres of federal land, much of it near the Greenlink lines. 

After driving up treacherous washed-out roads near the California border, Donnelly stopped for the night in Fish Lake Valley—a place of wildflowers, salt flats and a few farms, where desert travelers camp out under the stars and rise early to soak in hot springs. It was a quiet night under a pitch-black sky—save for the booms and blaring lights of a geothermal energy operation’s exploratory drilling. 

Donnelly set off the next morning to travel along the proposed Greenlink North route, which parallels Highway 50. Though Greenlink North has not yet been approved, the Biden administration’s solar plan makes many large chunks of land near the route available for solar development—including imperiled sage grouse habitat in the remote Great Basin landscape of north central Nevada. Sage grouse populations have declined rangewide by more than 40 percent since 2004, and Donnelly is alarmed about what’s to come. 

The grouse is extremely vulnerable to human disturbance. It’s known for abandoning its breeding grounds if development gets too close. According to the draft environmental impact statement for Greenlink North, there are some 58 leks—or sage grouse breeding sites—within a four-mile buffer along the proposed Greenlink North route. In a 2022 email exchange, Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) employees discussed the impacts the transmission line might have, following an inquiry from a staffer from the Nevada Land Trust. 

“I know there are concerns that this might be an effort to open the central part of the state up for solar energy development in presently undisturbed wildlife habitat and I was wondering if anyone [from] NDOW has discussed this issue with NV Energy?” the land trust staffer asked. 

“Yeah, I’ve been following and have had meetings with energy developers who absolutely intend to site projects around that transmission corridor,” a NDOW staffer wrote to their colleagues. 

Of the two Greenlink lines, the not-yet-approved Greenlink North strikes Donnelly as the greater threat to Nevada’s landscapes and wildlife. “This project could be the mother of all lek killers,” he said.

According to an internal BLM email from June 2022, the district ranger of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest said that his agency, the Forest Service, would reject NV Energy’s application to run Greenlink North through a portion of the forest near Austin, Nevada, due to its impact on sage grouse habitat. 

“The single biggest issue is sage grouse.”

— Interior Department fact sheet on Greenlink North

The Greenlink North project, the BLM’s Helseth wrote of the Forest Service’s concerns, “is not conducive to a simple rejection, due to its extremely high infrastructure status.” 

“This is likely to raise eyebrows and require attention” of higher ups, he added. 

Lance Brown, the district ranger for the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, said in a statement that “the initial proposal NV Energy submitted did not meet the screening criteria,” but that alternative routes developed since then would “avoid, minimize, and/or mitigate effects to greater sage-grouse habitat.”

According to the draft environmental impact statement for Greenlink North, the BLM’s preferred route for the project could still negatively impact sage grouse.

Top Interior Department leaders in Washington, for their part, know the sage grouse could present a serious obstacle, if not for Greenlink North itself, then for the renewable energy projects poised to be built near it.

“The single biggest issue is sage grouse,” states an October 2022 Interior Department fact sheet on Greenlink North. “Likely not to affect the line; however, has a tremendous impact [to siting] wind-solar-geo.” Of the projects already proposed near the Greenlink North line, for instance, the renewable energy company Arevia Power is pursuing a solar project called Pantheon that would plug into a substation near Ely, connecting it to NV Energy’s transmission network. The project, according to a late 2021 email from the BLM’s Helseth, “is knee deep in Sage Grouse country and has no chance until the BLM … carves out a couple of competitive areas out there for solar.” 

Proposed wind farms near the Greenlink North route, including Arevia’s Stagecoach project, have also struggled with sage grouse issues. “These are not good projects,” Helseth said in the same email, “and it is really NV Energy driving the bus, because they want wind power.”

Arevia Power said in a statement that its Pantheon Project is located in “the lowest priority habitat for the species. We have worked diligently with the BLM to ensure this site is suitable for solar development.” As for the Stagecoach project, the company said that “it is the early stages of design, and we have paused the application while awaiting updated guidance from the BLM on sage grouse habitat.”

In November, the BLM released a proposed update to its management plan for the sage grouse. The plan would ban utility-scale solar and wind projects on lands designated as priority habitat for the bird, but some conservationists said the plan has many weaknesses. Developers could still propose utility-scale solar and wind projects in some priority habitat areas if the projects meet certain criteria, and the BLM has previously granted exceptions for drilling in priority grouse habitat.

After traversing the Greenlink North route, Donnelly pulled into a gorgeous valley of sage, piñon pine and juniper nestled in federally managed mountains just north of Ely. He wanted to visit his friends, Delaine and Rick Spilsbury, mother and son, both trained engineers and members of the Ely Shoshone. Delaine Spilsbury, now in her late 80s, is a master archer who has traveled the country on bowhunting trips, her walls full of awards and the taxidermized bodies of big game. 

Delaine (left) and Rick Spilsbury oppose the industrialization of the mountains near their home, where the White Pine Pumped Storage project is being proposed. Credit: Jimmy Tobias for Type Investigations and Inside Climate News

From her wooden home in Duck Creek Basin, where wild quail twitter among front-yard shrubs, she and her son have long labored to protect the lands of their people, waging a years-long battle against a coal-fired power plant in the region. Now they are fighting major industrial renewable projects proposed in their corner of Nevada, including the peaceful valley and ridges near their home.

In the publicly owned mountains nearby, a Utah-based renewable energy company and its subsidiary want federal permission to build a pumped storage facility, an enormous hydroelectric battery of sorts that will be used to store power from wind, solar and other forms of intermittent renewable energy. The facility will require the creation of two reservoirs, roads and other infrastructure. The project will plug into a substation outside Ely, connecting it to the Greenlink lines and the broader NV Energy transmission network. 

“We will be objecting to everything they do,” Delaine Spilsbury said of the project. 

rPlus Energies, the company behind the pumped storage facility, said in a statement that its team “deeply understands the importance of protecting the water resources and natural beauty of the Mountain West – and this project is being constructed and designed with environmental responsibility in mind.”

The Spilsburys and Donnelly took a rough off-road drive in September 2022 to scout the project location, arriving at an open ridge where developers wish to stake their claim. A stern wind blew over the high mountains. Delaine Spilsbury pointed out elk tracks pressed into dry mud. 

“It is a beautiful, natural place,” Rick Spilsbury said, “and they are trying to turn it into an industrial park.”