Tuesday, July 20, 2010

14 Million Acres Of Property In US For Solar Power And Other Eco Friendly Products

By Esther Alarcon

The usage and development of eco friendly products should be prioritized to control the results of global warming around the world. If you take all the forgotten and categorized former industrial sites and dumps across the U.S. and add them together, you have 14 million acres of inexpensive, available land which might be used as sites for brand new solar installations and wind farms. Today the U.S. EPA is pressing ahead with just such a plan, with the National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) helping to evaluate brownfields and Superfund sites for renewable power. This program is known as Re-Powering America's Land. It also has a green jobs perspective, through Recovery Act financing. Most of the potential places are located in or near existing residential areas and could offer brand new work opportunities for local inhabitants.

But wait, there's more. Aside from providing brand new green jobs and clean energy for community use or perhaps the broader power grid, the particular program also focuses on green remediation, which makes use of alternative energy to power up products used for site clean-up. When you add that up - harvesting clean power coming from land that is blighted and functional for not much else, while creating work opportunities and re-establishing the site, you have to wonder why any person would like to continue blowing up America's mountains, compromising our water supply, and doing damage to the Gulf of Mexico in quest for fossil fuels.

Getting Back Land for Renewable Power

Among the actual fourteen million acres of classified land inside the U.S., conditions in the sites can differ widely. Along with brownfields and Superfund sites, EPA and NREL are looking at terrain classified within the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. That means the actual sites could range from individual abandoned factories with minimum hazardous resources involved, to a part of a toxic stew which blights a whole region, like the Hazleton area in Pennsylvania that includes the Jeddo Mine Tunnel, infamous for releasing countless gallons of contaminated water from abandoned mines every day for the past century.

Getting a Spot for Solar Arrays and Wind Farms

In addition to evaluating the places for factors that would enhance (or impede) power harvesting from the sun as well as wind, EPA along with NREL are also looking at the type of installation that a particular site could host. The conventional solar installation, for instance, doesn't need a cornerstone to be dug, so it could very easily be installed on top of a capped land fill. For wind turbines, a system of concrete footings and supporting cables can be built, rather than burrowing directly into polluted ground.

A Brand New Energy Potential

It may be said - so I'll say it - that at one time fossil fuels saved the U.S. from becoming a barren wasteland without trees. Really, it's hard to think about just how we might have powered up until now without burning each and every stick of wood across the nation. But times shift, and our fossil fuel friends have outlived their stay. These had been of marginal use at the birth of this particular nation, and as we continue straight into a brand new energy future they will go back to that condition. It is only a question of when, not really if.

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