As the country ramps up its stock of solar farms in the West, rural Nevada is bracing for impact. Especially so in one of the state's most-strained water basins outside of Las Vegas.

Following the release of the Bureau of Land Management's updated Western Solar Plan, some in Nye County's Amargosa Desert wrapped in a bitter, ongoing fight with federal land managers and solar companies have decided to submit official protest letters expressing their concerns. The protest period closes at the end of this month before the plan becomes final.

The plan opens up about 12 million acres of land in Nevada for solar development, 220,000 of which lie in the watershed of the fickle Amargosa River, a largely underground water source that runs from Beatty into Badwater Basin at Death Valley National Park. Nevada's BLM office declined to comment on concerns brought up by the plan.

"It's going to be an industrial park," said Carolyn Allen, town board president of Amargosa Valley, a 900 square-mile rural town where solar farms could border homes and schools as currently proposed. "They are blanketing everything for solar."

The BLM has said it plans to develop 700,000 of the 31 million total acres into solar farms over the course of two decades in the 11 Western states. That's more than seven times the size of the city of Las Vegas.

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