If you take all the abandoned and classified former industrial sites and dumps across the U.S. and add them together, you get 14 million acres of cheap, available land that could be used as sites for new solar installations and wind farms. Right now the U.S. EPA is pushing forward with just such a plan, with the National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) helping to assess brownfields and Superfund sites for renewable energy. The program is called Re-Powering America’s Land. It also has a green jobs angle, through Recovery Act funding. Many of the potential sites are located in or near existing communities and could provide new jobs for local residents.
But wait, there’s more. In addition to providing new green jobs and clean energy for local use or the wider grid, the program also focuses on green remediation, which uses renewable energy to power equipment used for site cleanup. When you add that up – harvesting clean energy from land that is blighted and usable for not much else, while creating jobs and restoring the site, you gotta wonder why anybody would want to continue blowing up America’s mountains, compromising our water supply, and destroying the Gulf of Mexico in pursuit of fossil fuels.
cleantechnica
