Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, testified yesterday that his Department will be aggressive in looking for ways to balance the need for domestic, renewable energy with the needs of the environment and landscape in the land under the Department’s jurisdiction which is “20 percent of the land mass of the United States and 1.7 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf.
Salazar said in his prepared remarks that “these lands have some of the highest renewable energy potential in the nation. The Bureau of Land Management has identified a total of approximately 20.6 million acres of public land with wind energy potential in the 11 western states and approximately 29.5 million acres with solar energy potential in the six southwestern states.”
Getting the power generated in the wind and solar corridors will require that the government, “in effect, create a national electrical superhighway system to move these resources from the places they are generated to where they are consumed,” the Secretary said. “We will assign a high priority to completing the permitting and appropriate environmental review of transmission rights-of-way applications that are necessary to accomplish this task.”
— The Pickens Team