As Karen Swaim drove through the night in the North Livermore Valley, the California tiger salamander emerged from the dark shining under her headlights: stubby-legged and gleaming obsidian, with golden polka-dots. She wasn’t surprised to see the endangered amphibian, as it crossed a road and headed toward a large, grassy patch of unincorporated cropland on that rainy February night in 2021. It was perfect salamander weather (dark and damp) in perfect salamander country (vast grasslands, with livestock ponds for breeding).
What unsettled Swaim, a herpetologist who had surveyed salamanders for decades, was that the biologists who came before her had decided that cropland had “low potential” for salamander presence. That’s what they had written in in an environmental impact report on solar company Intersect Power’s plan to transform the valley into the Bay Area’s largest solar farm.
Swaim worked for three years to overturn the project, called Aramis, alongside residents and conservation organizations. They sued, and lost: construction begins next year on the 398-acre solar project, two miles north of Livermore, that will provide emissions-free power for San Francisco and beyond.
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Nevertheless, Aramis today includes more environmental protections than its first proposal several years ago—budgeting almost $10 million for conservation efforts, including protections for California tiger salamanders and the purchase of 458 nearby acres to restore for habitat, as a mitigation bank. Such concessions represent a “mixed blessing,” says Dustin Mulvaney, a professor at San Jose State University who studies solar siting, for a project that will impact important habitat but whose mitigation measures do go “a little bit above and beyond.” Robert Selna, a lawyer for the Save North Livermore Valley campaign against Aramis, calls the mitigation land “a small victory in … an unfortunate decision.” Albert Lopez, Alameda County’s planning director, says history will show approving Aramis was the right choice. An Intersect spokesperson declined Bay Nature’s request for an interview on the project.
Fights over solar projects are happening all over California, as local, state, and federal governments push for more clean energy (not least, via big tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act) while residents and conservation organizations protest their impacts. “As we build out more solar projects, we get more conflict,” Mulvaney says. California’s director of land use and climate innovation, Sam Assefa, has said that opposition to renewable energy projects now delays most about three to five years. One solar farm project has faced bitter protests for leveling thousands of Joshua trees. Others have had to make concessions to protect endangered desert tortoises; still more have struggled against farmers unwilling to cede their cropland. When these debates arose over Aramis, what immediately became clear was that there were two visions of the North Livermore Valley at play.
It’s a special place. But special how?
No matter who you ask, the wide, flat North Livermore Valley, nestled between Fremont and Stockton, has something special. As the last undeveloped patch in the Livermore area, it offers unique habitat for endangered and threatened animals—a rest stop for migrating hawks, a hunting ground for golden eagles, and a home for red-legged frogs, as well as the salamanders. Chris O’Brien, whose house neighbors the Aramis project site, witnessed a bobcat giving birth in his backyard.
The valley also offers an unparalleled opportunity to help the Bay Area meet its clean energy ambitions like San Francisco’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2040. Large-scale solar farms are difficult to find space for in the densely urbanized area. The valley has not only the space but also a PG&E substation, making a huge solar farm that much cheaper because laying the transmission lines is simpler.
Intersect Power, which had built large-scale solar in Texas and southern California, proposed the 100-megawatt Aramis project in the North Livermore Valley in 2018. As soon as it did so, two pictures of the valley began to emerge. Supporters—including local politicians, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the national Sierra Club—argued it was a place where a solar farm could be built with little environmental consequence. Luis Amezcua, who advocated for the project at the time for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, says the open space had been “heavily impacted by cattle grazing for a very long time.” Opponents, like biologist Swaim, said this very grazing had created valuable upland habitat for endangered species. A 400-acre array of solar panels could destroy or transform it.
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Aramis divided conservation organizations. Three Audubon chapters wrote letters critiquing the project’s impacts. The local Sierra Club chapter protested the national Sierra Club’s endorsement of Aramis, calling it “truly shocking.” The project’s opponents got the sense that the global momentum behind solar made Aramis a hard project for local government officials to turn down. There were a “lot of indications that the county wanted to be seen as supporting solar,” Selna says. William Hoppes, the lead of the Audubon Society’s local chapter, the Ohlone Audubon Society, says, “As soon as you talk about a renewable energy project, they just can’t … give it the same level of scrutiny.” (Lopez says the project went through “a rigorous community process.”)
This perceived double standard drove people like Selna and Swaim to spearhead a lawsuit, an appeal, and a crowdfunding campaign that raised $40,000 to overturn the project. The valley, they said, was only allowed—under a 2001 voter-supported measure—to have “limited infrastructure.” Their suit argued densely packed rows of solar panels had a much bigger impact than a lone power line—especially for the salamanders Swaim found living nearby.
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Intersect, for its part, couched Aramis as similar to other projects voters had permitted previously—such as wind farms, transmission lines, and quarries. Ultimately, their argument prevailed: there would be solar, and the valley would change. What happened to the salamanders, now, would depend on the environmental permitting process—how the machinery of local, state, and federal laws regulated Aramis’s construction, and how Intersect actually built the project at the end of the day.
Opponents failed. Did they influence the plans?
From the start, Intersect Power’s documents show company officials knew salamanders could be around. But the project’s initial environment impact report in 2020 documented “limited” presence of salamanders and frogs. A company spokesperson said in a statement that the project’s environmental review was “thorough and rigorous”; Swaim believed the surveys fell short of the required protocols for finding those species.
So, Swaim and other project critics told the federal government. She wrote to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service notifying them about the endangered species near the property. After it learned about the project, the Service submitted a letter to the county that cited Swaim’s research and recommended incidental take permits for the project—meaning, the solar project’s construction could kill or otherwise impact endangered species, and recommending that Intersect Power make a plan to protect them.
In July this year, Fish and Wildlife approved Intersect’s final Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) to manage the project’s impact on federally listed species, complete with associated take permits for red-legged frogs, California tiger salamanders, monarch butterflies, and San Joaquin kit foxes. It outlines mitigation measures to protect these species, like retrofitting electricity poles to be eagle-friendly, or timing construction around rains to avoid running over salamanders. It proposes the purchase and restoration of the 458-acre mitigation bank. (Ironically, Swaim—who led most of the biological surveys gathering evidence to protest Aramis—worked, unknowingly at first, as the biologist who assessed the mitigation bank’s conservation value.)
These environmental protection measures may still evolve. Burrowing owls, known to live in the valley, were in October declared an official candidate for the state’s endangered and threatened species list, which means Intersect may need to apply for a state permit to protect the owls. Intersect Power is surveying for the owls now, and a company spokesperson wrote in an email, “We anticipate no delays to the construction timeline.”
Aramis’s critics say this plan could offset the worst harms—at least, since their ideal alternative of no solar farm is off the table. Swaim says the plan is “sufficient” to “minimize the potential” of killing animals during construction. She is still concerned that the county required the solar farm to include an agricultural component, to comply with zoning. Chicken farming could impact listed species, she says. (Lopez says the state is working to locate chicken coops away from critical species habitat.) Ultimately, though the Save North Livermore group dissolved after the lawsuit failed, Swaim and other critics are waiting to see if Intersect fulfills its promises and follows its plan. “We’re going to be watching to see what they do,” says Chris O’Brien, a resident who fought the project and whose house overlooks the future solar farm.
O’Brien has begun negotiating with Intersect Power about how the company will create visual buffers around his property, as the county requires. He hopes it will plant drought-tolerant California pepper trees. Maybe it’s time to bury the hatchet. “Now it’s time to try and be good neighbors,” he says.
Update, Dec. 19, 2024: This story has been corrected to reflect that the North Livermore Valley is not the last undeveloped valley in the Bay Area, but represents a unique undeveloped area in the region.
Update, Dec. 13, 2024: This story has been corrected to delete a claim that California pepper trees are native. They are named for their long history in California, but they originate from South America and the Peruvian Andes.
