[The Lackawanna Eight, windmills located in Buffalo on the former site of a Bethlehem Steel facility; background via bing maps]

A partnership between the EPA and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is looking at the advantages of re-purposing contaminated sites as production sites for wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal power (dull report here and slightly more direct poster here). One study, conducted in Michigan, identified 44,000 acres of contaminated land suitable for harvesting wind and solar power, which, if all covered by solar arrays and wind farms, could “produce an estimated 5,855 megawatts of electricity – enough to power 1.8 million homes, or roughly half the homes in Michigan.” Siting renewable energy production on contaminated land is particularly advantageous in that it enables producers to skirt legal and regulatory challenges which are making it difficult for the Bureau of Land Management to grant permission to build facilities as quickly as it would like — making this pairing an effective strategy for combatting the paralysis of the contemporary legal landscape, which I find particularly interesting, as “NIMBYist political stalemate” is a major hurdle for any attempt to develop significant new infrastructures.

[via Daily Climate]