Southern California is now poised to generate clean renewable energy that will help fuel its society and economy for generations to come. The state is geographically located in an area where renewable energy is available in the form of geothermal, wind, and solar. Plentiful solar energy allows for extraction of other energy derivatives, such as bio-fuels. Numerous issues, however, must be addressed in order to transition California from dependency on fossil fuels and imported natural gas to reliance on California's own renewable energy. This article will focus on the issues related to bringing solar energy produced in the high desert area of Southern California's San Bernardino County to local consumers.

The high desert of Southern California, encompassing a large portion of San Bernardino County, is a high insolarity zone. This means it is ideal for solar energy generation. Currently, there are only a few existing solar power plants and several planned small-, medium-, and large-scale solar power plants in the zone. These new projects have not been constructed as planned for several reasons, including:

Environmental: Last year, many large-scale projects were cancelled due to environmental concerns. Most large-scale projects require large contiguous areas ranging from a few hundred Acres to thousands of Acres. The Bureau of Land Management, a federal government agency, has been leasing the vacant land for these projects; however, due to a lack of pre-zoning, many of the projects were sighted in areas that were meant for desert conservation. After spending millions of dollars in development studies, many projects are no longer able to proceed until the environmental concerns are addressed. The federal government is now working on creating planning zones for government controlled land in order to correct this situation.