The West Valley’s energy future seems bright, but some new plans have conservationists running for the hills.

The Sonoran Solar project near Buckeye is, from any angle, a symbolic one. It represents energy independence, the promise of new jobs and, for folks such as Eric Gorsegner, the West Valley’s ultimate environmental catch-22.

The 4,000-acre project – small by utility industry standards – would be big enough to cover roughly 40 Tempe Marketplaces or half of Verrado, Buckeye’s sprawling master-planned community. On the other hand, the project also would harness Arizona’s abundant sunshine to help provide electricity to about 16,000 homes. It breaks ground in December.

It’s just the beginning, and conservationists stand with heads cocked in consternation. Should they support the raft of renewable energy projects planned for the far West Valley, or should they fight to preserve the land? When projects featured coal or nuclear power plants over the years, the choice was obvious.

But now that government officials are demanding that more energy come from renewable sources and are offering subsidies to create them, the environmentally minded have had to make a decision quickly.

“It’s very important, and it’s definitely understated,” says Gorsegner, who tracks development issues along the Sun Belt at the Scottsdale offices of the Sonoran Institute, a nonprofit that spearheads land conservation projects across the West. “This goes to the core of that nexus of renewable energy development and land conservation. From our perspective, they are not mutually exclusive.”

In other words, conservationists who tie themselves to trees are out. In are those who can wheel and deal before the growth begins again. Gorsegner says, “If we don’t do this now, we may not get another chance.”

Gorsegner is a man in motion. At any time, he may be meeting with officials at the State Land Department, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the City of Wickenburg, Luke Air Force Base and members of the local equestrian club.

Gorsegner is playing chess on behalf of the West Valley’s wild places, and he has two moves. He urges lawmakers to protect certain areas – such as the foothills of Signal Mountain and Woolsey Peak – under Arizona’s Wilderness Act of 1990 or encourages renewable energy companies to put solar panels on lands that are already a mess. (Tucson, for example, is considering installing solar panels at up to 10 landfills.)

For this high-stakes game, Gorsegner crisscrosses the West Valley. He treks to remote sites, and then he may go hiking on the weekend with the person who manages many of them, BLM state director Jim Kenna, to pick his brain about the projects.

Kenna says his agency currently has 33 applications pending to build renewable energy projects on 370,000 acres across Arizona. Most of the local projects are located in the southwest Valley because it is broad, flat, open and surrounds Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, the heart of the Valley’s electrical grid.

“These [projects] are not all going to be built. This is sort of like the California Gold Rush,” Gorsegner says.

Still, it raises a key question: What does the footprint of a renewable energy project look like in Arizona? Is it the size of a shopping mall? Does it sit near wildlife corridors? Over dumps? Kenna says his agency is working with the governor’s office and Arizona State University to host a public forum on the issue later this year.

Regardless of the outcome, Gorsegner should expect this land rush to last. At press time, Western Maricopa Coalition, the West Valley’s council for socio-economic development, had asked federal officials to create foreign-trade zones across the West Valley to attract all manner of solar businesses in exchange for tax and import/export incentives. Coalition President/CEO Jack Lunsford says the group will pursue the application “aggressively.”

“We think there are tremendous opportunities, particularly in the West Valley, to encourage and attract economic development in all the areas – from manufacturing to [power] generation,” Lunsford says. “We think we are helping to create a economic development environment that is extremely competitive for the future.”

The rush is on.