Greens & Feds Duke It Out Over Giant Solar Farm
Green vs. Green
SAN JOSE, Calif. (CN) — A federal judge on Friday described environmentalists’ request to block federal approval of a huge solar farm in California as “too complicated” to rule on immediately and took the matter under submission. The Defenders of Wildife, Sierra Club and other environmental organizations sued the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, claiming their approval of an industrial-scale solar project failed to take proper account of endangered species at the project site. Recently approved plans call for the construction of a 247-megawatt solar farm planned in Panoche Valley west of Interstate 5 and about 60 miles west of Fresno, which the plaintiffs have described as a “a lost landscape in California’s busy and fragmented Central Valley and surrounding foothills.”