EPA

The Department of the Interior’s move last month to accelerate development of large-scale solar power plants on federal land in six Western states could give an edge to companies that have already staked lease claims in 24 new “solar energy study areas.”

The initiative covers 670,000 acres overseen by the department’s Bureau of Land Management in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah. During the solar land rush of the last two years, scores of developers large and small have sought the best solar sites, and the bureau is currently reviewing 158 lease applications for solar projects covering 1.8 million acres.

But the B.L.M. has yet to approve any leases and the new program is supposed to speed processing of land claims by identifying large tracts of the desert most suitable for solar development and then giving priority to projects proposed for those areas.

California’s huge electricity market and renewable energy mandates have made the state a magnet for solar developers, including FPL Group and Chevron as well as solar developers First Solar, Tessera Solar, Solar Millennium, SolarReserve and Solel as well as wind farm builder enXco, a subsidiary of French energy giant EDF.

Across the border in Nevada, Goldman Sachs subsidiary Cogentrix Energy has filed lease claims on 35,996 acres within solar energy study zones, according to B.L.M. records.

“It’ll help them compete against other projects not in the zone,” said Nathaniel Bullard, a North American solar analyst at New Energy Finance, a London-based research and consulting firm. “But I don’t think it will make a project vault past projects on private land.”

That’s because the B.L.M. process, fast-tracked or not, can still be an 18-month affair. In fact, the Interior Department said it won’t complete its evaluation of the solar zones until the end of 2010.

Still, the solar initiative appears to have sparked something of a mini-land rush. On Monday, the B.L.M. received two solar project proposals for land in that state’s study areas, according to Eddie Arreola, the Arizona renewable energy program manager for the B.L.M., who declined to identify the solar developers until their applications are deemed complete.

For smaller solar developers, lease claims in a solar zone may make them an attractive acquisition target, said Mr. Bullard.

For instance, when First Solar, a Tempe, Ariz.-based solar cell maker and power plant developer, acquired the assets of OptiSolar in March, it cited the company’s B.L.M. lease claims as a driver of the deal.

And Spain’s Iberdrola, the world’s largest wind developer, jumped into the solar business last year by quietly acquiring Pacific Solar Investments, a Henderson, Nev., start-up and with B.L.M. lease claims in Arizona, California and Nevada.

Also sitting in the catbird seat in California is Bull Frog Green Energy, a Nevada start-up co-founded by Dan Kabel, the chief executive of Spanish solar developer Acciona Energy’s American operations. Among Bull Frog’s solar lease claims are two tracts in the California solar energy study areas.