In December, I spoke to Cynthia Walker, a resident of the Lake Tamarisk Desert Resort, about 50 miles east of Indio in the Chuckwalla Valley. She’d just put her home on the market, hoping to escape the tsunami of solar panels encroaching on her desert oasis.
She expressed frustration about the lack of empathy displayed by the group of bureaucracies she and her neighbors were dealing with—including the U.S. Department of Interior, the Bureau of Land Management and the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, as well as the executives of several major industrial-scale solar companies.
“It’s as if we don’t exist,” Walker said.
Walker successfully sold her home. Meanwhile, Teresa Pierce and her most committed neighbors have continued to fight the expansion of solar projects immediately beyond the backyards of their homes. Pierce said Walker got lucky.
“They got out at the right time,” Pierce said via email. “They received their asking price. A guy from the (Chuckwalla Valley) race track out here bought it, and they were both happy. But it didn’t work out for other people toward the end of the season.”
In recent years, several large studies have attempted to quantify how much industrial-scale solar projects are affecting the values of nearby homes. A 2020 University of Rhode Island study looked at 400,000 residential real estate transactions, occurring between 2005 and 2019, for homes in Rhode Island or Massachusetts located within 3 miles of an industrial-scale solar array. It concluded that “solar installations negatively affect nearby property values,” decreasing the values of the homes within 1 mile by an average of 1.7% when compared to others. “This helps explain local concerns and opposition, and gives pause to current practices of not including proximate residents in siting decisions or compensating them after siting has occurred.”
The study also showed the prices of homes located within a tenth of a mile of a solar array declined by a whopping 7 percent when compared to the control group. Many Lake Tamarisk homes are just 750 feet away from solar panels—roughly 0.15 miles.
In March 2023, another widely referenced study was released by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It looked at residential property prices for homes in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina and New Jersey, and included more than 1.8 million property transactions that occurred within six years before and after a utility-scale solar installation was constructed. This study concluded that, on average, the values of properties within a quarter-mile declined 2.3%—though there were no effects on homes more than a mile away.
Mark Carrington, another long-time resident of Lake Tamarisk who serves as the senior technical adviser to their solar committee, said some people might look at these studies and think that property values being lowered by 1-2% is not a huge deal. “On the other hand, not a single one of those (homes being studied) was surrounded on two sides by solar developments—and we’ve got them on three sides. None of these really pick up our situation, because nobody else has had to go through this.”
During a recent interview with the Independent, Pierce said the solar installations are definitely making it more difficult to sell homes.
“Here in this community, we have people in their 80s and 90s, and they can’t stay here any longer,” Pierce said. “It’s too much for them. They’ve got health issues, and they can’t sell their properties. … Owners have tried dropping their prices by $20,000 to $30,000, and people still aren’t buying.”
Pierce said she’s worried about her own financial future.
“This is the only home we have now,” she said. “If we can’t get any money out of it to move somewhere, we’re sunk. We’ll just be living in our fifth-wheel after years of working toward our golden years and our retirement.”
Carrington said a next-door neighbor on 10 acres of land hasn’t received a single offer.
“He’s already dropped his price by almost half,” Carrington said. “They’re not even coming out to look at it, because of the solar coming in here and the potential for even more—especially since (the solar companies) have little regard for our community or anybody else, which they’ve made pretty clear now.”
Seven industrial-scale solar projects, encompassing 18,700 acres, have been built or are under construction in the Chuckwalla Valley surrounding the Lake Tamarisk Desert Resort. Two more projects, Easley and Sapphire, are in the scoping phase of approval and would cover another 6,000 acres.
While the sheer density of solar panels, inverters, substations and transmission lines has resulted in the property-sales challenges, that’s just one of the concerns being raised by members of the community. Other concerns include current and potential negative health effects (ranging from dust-caused ailments to stress), the destruction of the natural desert aesthetics, an anticipated rise in temperatures (resulting from the heat generated by the solar-project components) and the negative impacts on the area’s biological resources.
But perhaps the greatest concern involves water. The Chuckwalla Valley, like our Coachella Valley, obtains its potable water supply from the aquifer below it. According to many sources, that aquifer is already in a state of overdraft—and the situation is worsening due to the heavy water-use demands of the solar projects, particularly when under construction.
A Desert Center resident, John Beach, reports that there are 20 operational wells in the Chuckwalla Valley, including those owned by government and commercial entities (including Lake Tamarisk), those owned by handful of large farms, and a host of small private wells. He said two have failed—including his own—since the most recent Oberon Solar Project began construction at the end of last year.
“(One well) had to go 50 feet (deeper), and another 150 feet,” Pierce said. “… We talked to David Alvarez, a development specialist at the Riverside County Planning Department, about that water, and he said if the well goes dry, then (the county) can truck water out here to us.
“Hello! How’s that going to work? It’s not like you can fill the aquifer up with trucks of water.”
While the residents aren’t happy about the quality of their communications with Riverside County District 4 Supervisor V. Manuel Perez’s office and the Riverside County Planning Department staff, at least there’s communication.
Since the start of the year, the six-person Lake Tamarisk solar committee has been reaching out to county, state and federal elected representatives and agency leaders, trying to inform them of the increasing threat to residents. On three separate occasions, they’ve sent emails to all five Riverside County Supervisors, to management and staff at the Palm Springs office of the Bureau of Land Management, and staff at Intersect Power, the industrial-scale solar developer which owns three of the nine projects either built or about to be built. They followed up with phone calls, too, they said. While they received a few confirmations of receipt, the emails and phone calls resulted in no conversations.
A Desert Center resident, John Beach, reports that there are 20 operational wells in the Chuckwalla Valley. He said two have failed—including his own—since the most recent Oberon Solar Project began construction at the end of last year.
Next, the Lake Tamarisk team escalated their outreach to higher levels of management, including the state and national offices of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Department of Interior. They got no responses, they said.
Their final attempt to generate some governmental interest in their plight: the mailing of hard copies of their documents, with individual cover letters, to 10 elected officials, including their congressman, Dr. Raul Ruiz—who has a working relationship with Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.
Those packets were sent by the Lake Tamarisk committee on March 16—and they have yet to receive any direct response from anyone, including Ruiz, they said.
When the Independent reached out to Ruiz’s office to request an interview on this subject, we received this statement from his spokesperson: “The office has received the constituent letters regarding the Lake Tamarisk community. The congressman’s top priority is his constituents’ health, safety and well-being, and we are looking into the issue in more detail.”
Meanwhile, the Lake Tamarisk residents continue their battle. They said they recently discovered through their research that Intersect Power staff had presented two scoping plans for the Easley Project—still in the approval process—neither of which, they say, should be allowed under the National Environmental Protection Act.
They also say they’re cautiously optimistic about the BLM’s plan to update its entire Western Solar Plan of 2012. That plan has heavily impacted the BLM’s decisions on where to approve renewable-energy projects in recent years—but what would be the result of such a re-examination?
“We did see an (item in) the Federal Registry that said … the BLM wants to protect all the desert out there,” Pierce said. “So it’s like one side is saying, ‘We’re going to increase all of these areas of protected land,’ and then the other side is saying, ‘But we want to use all of this land (for solar).’ Both come from the BLM. It seems that one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing.”
Meanwhile, Carrington said he just received the Riverside County Planning Department’s notification to residents regarding the start of scoping and related environmental impact report processes for the pending Sapphire solar project, slated to be built by EDF Renewables Development Inc. just five miles north of Lake Tamarisk. Carrington said the document doesn’t mention his community’s existence.
“Where is true environmental justice for all citizens of every race and economic level?” he said.
This area is designated for solar and the residents
That was very well done, thank you Kevin
Excellent article. The people responsible for making the Riverside East SEZ twice the size of BLM’s next largest solar energy zone were motivated by greed and not by common sense. Sure there’s enough BLM land in the Chuckwalla Valley to pave it over with solar projects, but the bosses didn’t bother to look under the ground to evaluate the water source.
The Chuckwalla Aquifer holds a limited amount of ancient groundwater and cannot accommodate endless demands. The formation of the Chuckwalla Aquifer Water District will provide the missing governmental oversight and control that keeps the spectre of Owens Valley, whose water was stolen by Mulholland for Los Angeles a century ago, right in front of our faces.