Green shoots rise from brownfields

Green shoots rise from brownfields

8 October 2009

Uncle Sam looks to eliminate the biggest hurdle to expanding renewable energy – the need for suitable sites to place commercial-scale wind and solar farms – by reusing hundreds of old mines, landfills and industrial sites.

By Scott Streater
for the Daily Climate

When the Bethlehem Steel mill in Lackawanna, N.Y., finally shut its doors for good eight years ago, it took away thousands of jobs and left behind a polluted and unsightly mess.

But in 2006, while the idle grain elevators and coke ovens sat rusting on the banks of Lake Erie, something unexpected happened. Wind turbines began springing up on a 30-acres section of the former Superfund site in this Buffalo suburb.
Today, the eight turbines at the Steel Wind project crank out enough clean, green electricity to power more than 6,000 homes in western New York, and the 400-foot-tall windmills have become a visual landmark. First Wind, the Newton, Mass.-based company that operates the wind farm with BQ Energy, plans to install six more windmills at the site.

Lackawanna is glad the turbines are there. "We embrace this project wholeheartedly," said Ralph Miranda, the city's director of development.

Steel Wind is one of the first, but President Obama and Congress are pushing to identify thousands of contaminated landfills and abandoned mines that could be repurposed to house wind farms, solar arrays and geothermal power plants.
Renewable energy is one of the fastest growing sectors of the U.S. economy, with the Energy Information Administration predicting 70 percent growth over the next two decades. But even with that expansion, renewable supplies will provide only a sliver – roughly 5 percent – of the nation's energy needs by 2030, according to the EIA.

Using already disturbed lands would help avoid conflicts between renewable energy developers and environmental groups concerned about impacts to wildlife habitat. These conflicts have stalled some high-profile projects despite the fact that renewable energy sources do not produce heat-trapping emissions of carbon dioxides, the primary greenhouse gas driving global warming.

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The EPA in November will kick off a series of five national workshops to allow state and local leaders, renewable energy developers and conservation groups to brainstorm. "The idea is to get them all together and say, 'OK we have all this great (disturbed) land, we don't want to see development of greenfield sites, what do we do next?' " Swingle said.

The kickoff meeting is scheduled in Detroit, in part because Michigan has some of the best brownfield redevelopment potential.

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