Surface mined lands have been stripped and are very difficult to restore
From an Article by William Driscoll, PV Magazine, 2/27/20
Solar could be installed on a coalfield in West Virginia if The Nature Conservancy’s plans are realized. The Nature Conservancy, a global land conservancy with $1 billion in annual revenues, is exploring the options.
The conservancy is seeking a decommissioned mine site to purchase or lease, and is working with West Virginia’s Coalfield Development Corporation to secure funding to develop a site with large-scale solar energy, forestry, and infrastructure for tourism.
The conservancy, with $1 billion in annual revenue, has also purchased almost 400 square miles of land in the Appalachian Mountain region of Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia that includes thousands of acres of former surface coal mines, according to a report by the Reclaiming Appalachia Coalition.
The Nature Conservancy “would love to see some solar developed” on those coalfields, said Kelley Galownia, media relations manager for the conservancy’s Virginia chapter. “We are currently at the feasibility phase,” she said, “exploring options with state agencies, utilities, and solar developers.”
To date, there is just one well-known project on a former surface coal mine, a 3.5 MW array in southwestern Virginia.
The technical potential for solar on coalfields and other brownfields in central Appalachia has been estimated by the conservancy and West Virginia consultancy Downstream Strategies at 400,000 acres, which could host 50 GW of solar. That estimate is based partly on a similar analysis by Downstream Strategies that counted potential solar developments larger than 300 kW and within one mile of a transmission line, said a conservancy spokesperson.
The cost-effective potential has not been estimated, but as a possible upper limit, building half of the technical potential, or 25 GW of solar, would yield tens of thousands of jobs, says the report from the Reclaiming Appalachia Coalition.
Across central Appalachia, “identifying and mapping mine sites that are viable for solar development could help expedite” solar projects, says a report published by The Nature Conservancy, Downstream Strategies, and the Center for Energy & Sustainable Development at West Virginia University’s law school.
That report flags the issue of environmental liabilities associated with formerly mined lands, noting that “leasing from willing landowners, rather than purchasing land, would provide an opportunity to shield solar developers from previous environmental responsibilities.”
The Nature Conservancy’s website lists “tackle climate change” as its top priority, and says the organization is planting trees, and also promoting carbon pricing, clean energy research and development, technological solutions for carbon removal, and energy storage tax credits.
The Reclaiming Appalachia Coalition consists of Appalachian Voices in Virginia, Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center in Kentucky, Coalfield Development Corporation in West Virginia, and Rural Action in Ohio, plus Downstream Strategies.
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See also: WVU researchers lead $10 million bioproducts project | Biomassmagazine.com, July 15, 2020
Led by Jingxin Wang, professor of wood science and technology in the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design, the MASBio project will leverage research, education and extension strategies for increasing utilization of available resources in the Mid-Atlantic region.
“This region has over 10 million acres of mined and marginal agricultural lands that can be reclaimed to produce biomass crops without competing with food crop production for resources,” he said. “Additionally, timber harvest in the area produces more than 8 million dry tons of residue annually and will be a foundation for the multi-feedstock biomass.”
Plans include utilizing some of the mined and marginal lands to grow switchgrass, a hardy, self-seeding perennial crop, and hybrid willow, a short-rotation woody crop, which can benefit the land, economy and biomass feedstock production.
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Much of the stripped area is relatively level, and where not blocked by hills to the south should be easy to develop. The sites would have an access road to state road already built with stone base. Some of the stripped area might be unstable if pushed out too far or undermined by drainage, things that could be determined by an engineer.
A lot of weed and brush control would be necessary for solar panels in place for decades. If they were elevated somewhat, say five feet above the surface, that could be accomplished by grazing animals, cattle, sheep, goats, supplemented with herbicide spray.
This would add income to areas much needing it.
Most of this comes under the heading of False Solutions to Climate Change.
I wrote a six part series on that which was posted on resilience.org and then on OVEC’s website; I am now working with a group of people to update a booklet called Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: false solutions to climate change. When it’s done (early next year?) I will try to remember to send you a copy.
ONE of the proposed items looks like a good plan to me– solar arrays on MTR sites. They are not good for much else, having had their topsoil stripped away. The question, I believe, is whether the electricity generated can profitably be connected to the grid. These are remote sites, on top of mountains, far from demand.
Biomass either causes deforestation, in order to burn woodchips while emitting more CO2 than coal, on the pretext that since the trees will grow back this is carbon neutral…or it uses crops or crop residue. This either expands croplands (at the expense of intact biomes like forests) or turns crops into fuel for rich people instead of food for poor people. There is no solution here.
There there are the market mechanisms, shell games designed to allow polluters to keep polluting as long as it’s profitable (and even beyond, demanding subsidies) with a pretense that if they pay someone far away to protect a forest (often by kicking out the indigenous people who have lived in and protected the forest for millennia) or set up a digester at a livestock farm or something.
Or it’s a tax which theoretically speeds the transition to low carbon energy but always seems to be set too low to do any good, because of the power of the fossil fuel industry. The false solutions all stem from the desire of the wealthy and powerful to keep things the same–the desire of the corporations of the global North to keep extracting resources from the South and dumping burdens on them, and the desire of the relatively affluent consumers to maintain their lifestyles by doing some technical tweak.
The most dangerous magic wands are in the category of geoengineering, reckless experimentation with our only planet to see if there isn’t some way we can knock down GHG levels without changing the practices of the last two centuries and to some degree the last few millennia, which have caused the environmental crisis of which climate change is only the foremost part.
Mary Wildfire
Much of the stripped area is relatively level, and where not blocked by hills to the south should be easy to develop. The sites would have an access road to state road already built with stone base. Some of the stripped area might be unstable if pushed out too far or undermined by drainage, things that could be determined by an engineer.
A lot of weed and brush control would be necessary for solar panels in place for decades. If they were elevated somewhat, say five feet above the surface, that could be accomplished by grazing animals, cattle, sheep, goats, supplemented with herbicide spray.
This would add income to areas much needing it.