Solar farms are coming to abandoned coal mines in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, thanks to the Nature Conservancy.
“We put the Appalachians in a very rare company along with the Amazon, the wild lands of Kenya and the forests of Borneo.”scattered throughout Virginia coal country. Those mines have large areas that are flat and exposed to sunlight — a rarity in the mountains and the by-product of strip mining that literally takes the tops off of mountains to get at the coal below. What’s left behind are open plains where none existed before.
“In the coal field region, there’s about 100,000 acres that’s been impacted from mining,” says Daniel Kestner of the Virginia Department of Energy. “Better to build on a lot of these mine sites than some prime farmland or some areas that maybe don’t want solar in their community.” He’s also hopeful the projects will bring tax revenue and jobs to the area. Lou Wallace, chair of the Board of Supervisors for Russell County, Virginia is pushing for counties in the coal fields to diversify their economies. She’s been promoting the beauty of the area’s rivers and mountains for recreation and tourism. Her family relied on coal for generations.
“We’re very proud to be an energy producing community,” she says when asked about the new solar farms being built on abandoned coal mines. “This is helping us to re-imagine how we produce the energy. So we’re still able to say we’re keeping the lights on somewhere.” For more than 100 years, thermal generating stations have supplied America and the world with electric power. But creating it also blasts the atmosphere with waste products that threaten us all. The age of thermal is past. Renewables are the future. The question now is whether that transition will happen quickly enough to prevent the collapse of human society. Kudos to the
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