By Hannah Grover

Renewable energy development on public lands has skyrocketed in recent years amid efforts at both the national and state levels to transition away from fossil fuels.

State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard and former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland touted how renewable energy increased on public lands during their tenures heading up the public lands offices. 

Garcia Richard served as the keynote speaker at the Electrify NM conference. After her speech, the organizers played a pre-recorded video message from Haaland.

Garcia Richard said when she was elected to lead the State Land Office, there were 400 megawatts of renewable energy sited on state trust lands. Now there are 2,700 megawatts — a nearly seven-fold increase, Garcia Richard noted. She said that 2,700 megawatts represents 51 projects compared to the 12 projects that existed when she took office six years ago.

“When I got elected six years ago, we declared the state land office open for business, and that meant, ‘come and build your renewable energy on state land.’ That wasn’t a sound bite. It was a rallying cry for diversification,” she said.

Meanwhile, Haaland said that during her time heading the U.S. Department of the Interior, the federal agency “facilitated the development of over 29 gigawatts of clean energy on public lands, enough to power more than 12 million homes.”

That included the SunZia transmission project in New Mexico.

“We invested hundreds of millions of dollars into our clean energy future, but we know that funding alone isn’t enough,” Haaland said. “Real progress requires partnerships between federal, state and local governments, between the public and private sectors and between that means ensuring that tribal communities, rural areas and workers whose livelihoods are shifting have a seat at the table. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still work to do together.”

Garcia Richard said New Mexico has some of the best renewable energy potential in the country and the State Land Office was the perfect agency to lead the effort to build out renewable resources.

She then spoke about how she created an Office of Renewable Energy within the State Land Office, which was later codified through legislation in 2023.

“So what that means is that we have more chances in the coming decades to secure large scale wind and solar projects that create hundreds of jobs in the construction and maintenance of sites and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for our public schools and universities,” Garcia Richard said.

She spoke about efforts at the State Land Office to protect cultural resources and promote community solar development.

“Aggressive expansion of renewable energy or any kind of development without consulting our Indigenous communities is just a non-starter for us,” she said. 

Like Haaland, Garcia Richard said there is still work to do.

“This hard work takes all of us and it requires a balanced approach,” Garcia Richard said.