Transmission and Grading Disturbance

The installation of multiple utility-scale solar facilities across the California desert will have ecological impacts beyond sensitive habitat, such as impacts to landscape-scale ecological processes. We chose two variables as proxies for the amount of disturbance that a facility might have on the landscape:

• Distance to transmission was chosen because the farther away a facility is from existing transmission lines, more land will need to be disturbed when building new transmission lines and associated infrastructure to connect the facility to the grid. New transmission lines could interrupt ecological processes like migration by disrupting habitat connectivity.
• Slope of the proposed facility site was chosen as the second variable. Solar facilities require a relatively low slope, zero to six percent slope for most facilities, and therefore a higher slope at the facility site will require more grading and site engineering to make the land flat. Changes to the slope over large areas could impact ecological processes like the movement of water across the landscape.

Other infrastructure-based disturbances are inherent in the installation of utility-scale solar facilities and addition of other variables would strengthen this analysis.