Solar farm is better than nothing for toxic waste coal site
The state Department of Environmental Protection should accelerate a plan to bring a large solar farm to a sprawling waste coal pile in Washington County. The solar farm, pitched by energy firms Copia Power and Tenaska, wouldn’t remediate the toxicity of the waste coal, but would allow this blighted land to produce energy again.
Federal assistance for the project is available under a $450-million program for clean energy projects on current and former mine land. If successful, the regional project could inspire similar energy conversions across Pennsylvania.
An estimated 30-70 million tons of gob — “garbage of bituminous” — rests at the Champion Processing site in Robinson Township, near U.S. Route 22 and Pennsylvania Route 980, the largest such site east of the Mississippi. The waste pile leaches contaminants into groundwater and waterways, despite a treatment facility operated by Champion that mitigates the damage.
Burning this waste coal, leftover from major mining operations, can produce electricity; in fact, burning gob is one of the only ways to get rid of it. The problem: It produces worse pollution than higher quality coal.
Over the past 40 years, companies have proposed several ways to make this legacy of the coal industry a power-production site. None have panned out, however. The pile remains a poisonous pimple on the landscape.
This solar project, aligning Pennsylvania’s economy with environmental and market trends, would produce hundreds of good-paying skilledlabor jobs. That should excite the Shapiro Administration. The resulting regulatory nightmare also would present a perfect test case for the administration’s commitment to streamlining permitting for major economic developments.
Copia Power and Tenaska say the Robinson Township site could produce 215 megawatts of power, plus house storage for an additional 100 megawatts. With more than 750 similar sites across the commonwealth, the project could show how to produce enormous amounts of clean energy by capping waste coal with solar panels. A federal government study claims such projects, if spread across the country, could power 30 million homes.
Naysayers will cite Pittsburgh’s notoriously cloudy weather. Solar success, however, doesn’t depend on maximum exposure to the sun. In fact, too much sun in too-hot weather hurts panels’ productivity: Some of the continent’s best sites are in the misty Pacific Northwest.
Allowing coal waste sites to have a useful second act won’t fix them, but it will make the land they’ve blighted useful again. And that’s far better than nothing.