Solar Project's Tortoise Miscalculation Cost $56 Million and Stopped Construction Cold

A Desert Full of Surprises

Before the bulldozers rolled into California's Ivanpah Valley in the Mojave Desert, just short of the Nevada line, biologists walked the site and counted. Their first survey of the 3,500-acre footprint found 16 desert tortoises. Refined estimates pushed the likely total to a few dozen, with 32 commonly cited as the upper bound. What followed was one of the most dramatic — and expensive — wildlife miscalculations in the history of American energy development.

Federal regulators wrote the permits accordingly: the $2.2 billion BrightSource solar project could relocate a maximum of 38 adult tortoises, with a hard cap of three accidental deaths per year. Exceed either number, and the whole project could be shut down. Those limits would soon look almost laughably optimistic.

Nearly 1,000 Tortoises — and Counting

As crews cleared land through 2010 and 2011, workers and monitors kept finding animals the surveys had missed, until biologists' estimates of the site's population reached 162 adults and 608 juveniles — roughly 770 tortoises on ground certified to hold a few dozen — and federal reviewers concluded that more than 2,300 additional juveniles lived within a couple of miles of the fences.

Every discovery pushed the company closer to its federal thresholds, and in 2012 the tortoise did what almost nothing else could do to a flagship energy project: excavation work found so many animals that construction stood still for three months. The financial toll was staggering. By the time the plant's mirrors were rising, the company had spent $56 million on protecting and relocating the tortoises — and divided by the animals actually handled, Ivanpah's tortoises rank among the most expensive wild animals ever moved, at tens of thousands of dollars a head.

When Good Intentions Weren't Enough

The money could not buy a clean outcome. The Los Angeles Times, which chronicled the effort, catalogued the mishaps: tortoises crushed under vehicle tires, army ants swarming hatchlings in the makeshift nursery, and one small tortoise plucked from the desert and carried off to a golden eagle's nest, the microchip embedded in its shell still pinging faintly as it receded out of range. It's the kind of detail that stays with you — a tiny signal from a tiny animal, lost to the sky.

Relocation itself is hard on the species; moved tortoises often try to walk home, and studies of past translocations have found elevated death rates from predators, exposure, and stress. BrightSource, which was paying to have as many as 100 biologists on site at one time, began seeing red, with the company warning that tortoise mitigation was jeopardizing Ivanpah's viability.

A Warning for the Clean Energy Era

History has shown the tortoise to be a stubborn survivor, withstanding upheavals that caused the grand dinosaur extinction and ice ages that wiped out most living creatures. But unless current recovery efforts begin to gain traction, this threatened species could become collateral damage in the war against fossil fuels.

Costly conservation efforts by state and federal agencies and solar companies have created a mishmash of strategies that one scientist describes as a "grand science experiment," according to Jeff Lovich, who studies the impact of renewable energy projects on desert tortoises for the U.S. Geological Survey. The Ivanpah saga is a cautionary tale that the renewable energy boom cannot afford to ignore: building a greener future on the wrong piece of land can come at a cost — ecological, financial, and moral — that no permit anticipates.