Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025 | 2 a.m.
As solar energy farms continue to pop up across the Mojave Desert, some residents are being squeezed out of their homes: the threatened desert tortoise.
And while developers take steps to find them new places to live, sometimes the tortoises don’t want to leave.
“When you take them and move them 10 miles away, they often come back,” said Laura Cunningham, a biologist and director of the Western Watersheds Project.
They can sometimes be seen crawling along the fence line of the solar farms, which puts them at risk against predators like badgers, Cunningham said. “They’ll pace back and forth on the outside of the fence trying to get back to their burrows,” she said.
As part of a planned 2,400-acre solar project southwest of Pahrump, developer Candela Renewables will temporarily relocate 114 adult desert tortoises — a species, listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, that has seen a 37% decline between 2004 and 2014, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The company is expected to start construction on the project, dubbed Rough Hat Solar, later this year, said Jim Woodruff, senior vice president for public affairs at Candela. It is projected to produce enough electricity to power more than 133,000 homes, he said.
Solar projects in the Mojave Desert are becoming more common. Western Watershed Projects has been following solar projects on public lands for years, Cunningham said.
The group, which protects and restores watersheds and wildlife through education, policy initiatives and advocacy, has seen an increase of applications for solar farms in the Pahrump and Amargosa valleys, she said.
Rough Hat Solar will minimize permanent disturbance of the land, with the goal of allowing tortoises to reoccupy the site, Woodruff said.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has reviewed the company’s plan to ensure it adheres to “the highest environmental stewardship,” he said.
Cunningham said solar projects ideally would be sited on already disturbed land, such as old alfalfa fields or abandoned mines. They should also avoid areas with large tortoise populations, she said.
Kevin Emmerich, co-founder of Basin Range and Watch, said relocating desert tortoises doesn’t always work, because it’s a species that is well specialized to the area it lives in.”
The tortoises often get “really disorientated and individuals try to come back,” he said.
Solar projects in the Mojave Desert are becoming more common, Emmerich said, citing recent examples such as the Yellow Pine Solar, which was commissioned in early 2024, and the Bonanza Solar Project, which is in the public review and comment period of the National Environmental Policy Act.
These projects will call for moving hundreds of the adult tortoise population because the young ones “are the size of a silver dollar or quarter and are difficult to find,” Cunningham said.
“All these animals are just disrupted,” she said. “And their ecosystem is disturbed and damaged, and they have to fend for themselves.”