Currently the city of Los Angeles gets about one-fifth of its electricity from renewable resources. By the end of the decade this will increase to one-third. As the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the largest municipal utility in the United States with over 4 million customers, slowly phases out coal and some natural gas, solar parks in the deserts to the east are filling the void.

Utility-scale solar offers the cheapest and most practical form of clean energy for Los Angeles. But the forecast is not all sunny. As these solar parks come into view, so does the range of associated concerns. On the Mojave National Preserve, Oakland-based BrightSource Energy Inc.’s Ivanhoe Solar Complex has made ongoing and exceedingly costly efforts to accommodate the fragile desert tortoise population. Earlier this year, the Genesis Solar Energy Project in Riverside County, Calif., was held up when Native American burial remains were found on multiple occasions during construction, indicating the presence of sacred burial grounds.

Donna Charpied, a 57-year-old farmer who’s lived in Desert Center, Calif. (an aptly named town of 200 an hour east of Palm Springs on the I-10), for 30 years, has a number of issues with her new — and only — neighbor. “My heart aches every time I look out my window and see the construction over there,” says Charpied, gazing out from her recently renovated trailer towards the barren Coxcomb Mountains that define the eastern portion of Joshua Tree National Park in Southeastern California. “It’s just unbelievable, the destruction.”

Music emanates from a nearby shed encircled by agricultural equipment in various stages of disrepair. With no neighbors for over a mile there’s little reason for noise control, let alone clothing, on this isolated plain of desert. At least there wasn’t until recently. The Desert Sunlight Solar Farm, a 550-megawatt, 4,000-acre project being developed by First Solar and co-owned by NextEra Energy Resources and General Electrical, passes within 600 feet of Donna and her husband Larry’s 10-acre plot. According to the First Solar project overview, the facility will create enough power for 160,000 average homes and displace 300,000 tons of CO₂ annually, the equivalent of taking 60,000 cars off the road. Begun in September 2011, the project is less than one-fifth complete, but the Charpieds see it as a harbinger of the potential local impact large solar projects on public lands can have.

Los Angeles is far from the only region relying on big solar to reach renewable energy targets. The recently released “Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for Solar Energy Development in Six Southwestern States,” prepared by the Bureau of Land Management in partnership with the Department of Energy, proposes 17 Solar Energy Zones (SEZs). Riverside East, which includes Desert Center, is the largest of the SEZs, which are meant to facilitate environmentally responsible utility-scale solar energy development. Proposed to be 202,896 acres (821 square kilometers), Riverside East’s western boundary is approximately 0.7 miles from Joshua Tree National Park.

“This is a whole new form of gentrification,” Charpied says, referring to the Solar Energy Zones. “If all these projects come to fruition, people will simply not be able to live here. This is all seems like corporate welfare to me.”

Water consumption is one of the main local impacts of desert solar projects. Even though water is not needed for generating electricity in all cases, the projects use water to keep the dust down and rinse the panels. In Desert Center, this water comes from deep reservoirs that get little to no regular groundwater recharge. According to Charpied, the water they use was carbon tested to be 10,000 to 30,000 years old. Another one of Charpied’s main concerns is increased dust from habitat destruction. She says dust storms have notably increased in the area over the last year, and may gravely impact her farming of jojoba, a native shrub that produces oil useful in the cosmetic industry, which she and her husband rely on for their livelihood. Charpied has also seen more animals on her property since construction started nearby, indicating increased competition due to decreased habitat.

Donna Charpied.

“I really wish Obama would’ve given out that stimulus money to do rooftop solar instead,” Charpied says. “Like they’ve done in Germany.”

Jonathan Parfrey, a commissioner on the LADWP board since 2009 and executive director of Climate Resolve, an advocacy organization that builds understanding of climate change in Los Angeles, sympathizes with the Charpieds’ plight.

“I’ve been out in the desert; I know some of the people being impacted,” Parfrey says of the solar projects from his 15th-floor office in the LADWP building in downtown L.A. “I’m an enviro, I want to conserve that land. But it’s not just as easy as saying L.A.’s got to slap solar on rooftops. There has to be a balanced approach.”

Parfrey readily acknowledges that awareness of the environment in which solar farms are placed is critical; ideally they would avoid recreational spots or wildlife-rich areas. But he also asserts that in order to move forward with regional clean energy goals, these industrial-sized projects are imperative — it’s just the way the economics plays out. Putting solar on residences and businesses is expensive, as each job is custom and requires boots on rooftops, a liability issue. At this stage in the game, decentralized solar generation can also lead to voltage problems and challenges with distribution balancing.

Aside from the practical issues, there are also social and political realities to consider.

“In my view the transition to clean energy has to happen as inexpensively as possible,” Parfrey says. “Otherwise people will rebel and they won’t even want to pay for it in the face of climate impacts. They will say, ‘That’s too bad about what’s happening to the environment, but I can’t afford to put food on my table because my electricity bills are too high.’”

According to Parfrey, the LADWP is experimenting with ways of doing rooftop solar inexpensively. A solar feed-in tariff program, in which both residential and commercial power producers can sign contracts for up to 150 megawatts of solar power for above retail rates, was established this year. He sees the transition to clean energy as a slow but steady and secure one, with distributed solar eventually playing a much large role. In the meantime the city of Los Angeles is doing what it can with the available resources.

“L.A. is a wonderful city, but it is, however, not a wealthy city,” Parfrey says. “Our tax base is relatively low per-capita and 20 percent of our population is at or below the poverty line. So we simply don’t have the resources that San Francisco or New York might have.”

As decentralized solar potential grows and solar technology improves over the next decade, how to store that energy will become an increasingly important question. And alongside that, the question of how big utilities like LADWP can adapt to a decentralized grid in which there may be temptation for customers to go offline.

“If I could have my moment like in The Graduate where he says to Dustin Hoffman, ‘The future is in plastics,’ mine is how do we do distributed generation where we maintain the utility business model and we’re able to provide continual service for people,” Parfrey says. “When we find the magic key to that I think it will be a revolution. I think it will really help affect the transition away from fossil-fuel energy sources.”

I meet Tom Swetnam, director of the laboratory of tree-ring research at the University of Arizona in Tucson, on a Sunday morning because he’s leaving for Siberia in a few days and is otherwise totally booked. As part of the paleofire team that will be traveling to the “Alaska of Siberia, if you will” to study fire and climate, Swetnam will spend a few weeks immersed in the burn history — and possible future — of some of the largest forests on Earth.

“We’re trying to understand fire, climate change, and carbon emissions out of Siberia because of the huge carbon pool contained there in the soil, permafrost, bogs, and forests,” says Swetnam, a sturdy middle-aged man with an outdoorsy white beard. “This giant pool of carbon is beginning to burn in a massive way — the amount of area burning in Siberia is startling.”

Here in the Southwest, the same could be said. Already this year fires have scorched unprecedented swaths of New Mexico and Colorado, and although Arizona is yet to feel anything approaching last year’s record-breaking blazes, the hiatus offers little more than a breath of fresh air. Of course Swetnam knows all this and much more. As an expert in dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, he’s been determining historical drought, climate and fire patterns as revealed by forests across the Southwest and beyond for upwards of 30 years. Dendrochronology, said to be the only science native to the Southwest, originally gained widespread attention in the early 20th century as a way to date ruins from lost cultures in the region, such as those found at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde.

A dendrochronological drill. (Photo by Hannes Grobe/AWI.)

Swetnam runs through the fire history of the West like it’s his usual Sunday sermon. Dry years have traditionally led directly into large burn years. Fire patterns tend to correlate with precipitation patterns in the region such as those associated with El Nino and La Nina. Climate change is likely intensifying weather extremes and causing hotter and drier weather, both exacerbating fire danger.

Then he gets into the less established theories.

“It’s not just the drying and not just high temperatures that are increasing burns, but the extraordinary wind events happening as well,” says Swetnam. “It’s possible that this is associated with weather pattern changes. Kind of like massive cold fronts, with lightning.”

Or if not wind, maybe snow.

“It might be that for the high elevation and mountain areas snowpack is very important. This summer for instance we’ve seen burning in those wetter, higher forests in Colorado and New Mexico after multiple years of drought and little snowpack.”

Swetnam sees this as a very important question: When is it going to start burning at higher elevations where spruce and mixed-conifer thrive? Since 2000 there’s been a number of big fires in the Southwest, but mostly down in the middle and lower elevations. Looking back, 2012 may provide the answer.

“This year was classic in showing the connection between temperature increases and early snowmelt,” says Swetnam. “When we get an extended spring the snows leave early, so by true summertime the higher elevations are ready to burn.”

There’s also the issue of devastating re-burns, and not just at higher elevations. Take the Las Conchas Fire in the Northern New Mexico Jemez Mountains last year that re-burned over areas hit by the Cerro Grande Fire in 2000 and the Dome Fire in 1994. Swetnam estimates that the first time the forest burns it loses 30 to 40 percent of the overstory, or uppermost layer of forest canopy, because the landscape has a lot of understory fuel and dense thicket stands — often even denser than they should be due to the recent history of fire suppression by the Forest Service — thus leaving behind a patchy mosaic of burn scars.

“A lot of burned areas come back as shrubs, Gambel oak, or grasses at first,” says Swetnam. “If another catastrophic fire blows through you’re left with enormous canopy holes. It could be thousands of years before forest is able to grow back due to lack of seed source and extreme erosion.”

At higher elevations Aspen —  slender, deciduous trees that spread through a connected root system and grow in dense groves — might make all the difference in regenerating higher elevation forests because of their ability to grow back after a fire and stimulate groundcover. “Unless we get 2, 4, or 6 degrees C of warming,” says Swetnam. “Then all bets are off.”

A former Forest Service firefighter himself, Swetnam seems well suited for the outdoors but has adjusted to life in the cavernous corridors of the U of A football stadium, where the tree-ring lab is located until their new building is completed within the year. By the time he joined the Forest Service in the mid-’70s the Gila Mountains in Western New Mexico were one of the first places to reintroduce controlled burns after decades of total fire suppression. For Swetnam monitoring these fires was a major eye opener.

“We were out there for over a month just walking and riding horses around the fire,” recalls Swetnam. “Rather than just thinking about putting the damn thing out, I had the chance to wander around the low, creeping flames and smoke and just watch. It was a beautiful revelation about how things are supposed to be.”