BROWNFIELD TO WIND FARM: RENEWAL

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An Old Steel Mill Retools to Produce Clean Energy
David Staba, May 22, 2007 (NY Times)

WHO
Norman L. Polanski Jr., Lackawanna, NY, mayor and former Bethlehem steel mill worker; Christine Real de Azua, American Wind Energy Association (AWEA);
Department of Environmental Conservation’s brownfields program; Mark Mitskovski, project manager; Michael Malyak, Lackawanna Steel Plant Museum
from the NY Times (click to enlarge)
WHAT
Steel Winds wind farm, 8 giant white 153-foot blade windmills have been installed on a former Superfund (cleanup) site where Bethlehem Steel once churned and burned, bringing new energy and new hope to a burned out city.

WHEN
- Bethlehem Steel stopped production in Lackawanna in 1993.
- Wind farm construction began September, 2006, after being cleared by EPA

WHERE
Lackawanna, NY, on the 2.2 mile shoreline from the Buffalo River to Lake Erie.

WHY
- Lackawanna was once an industrial and shipping hub, is now, where the steel mill was, a brownfield of low-level toxic waste. The wind farm may help rejuvenate the city. 7,300 workers lost their jobs when Bethlehem stopped making steel in Lackawanna. Population fell from 30,000 to 19,000.
- Turbines: Owned jointly by BQ Energy of Pawling, N.Y., and UPC Wind of Newton, Mass.; Produce 20 megawatts of electricity/year (7,000 homes), to be sold to local utilities
- Costs: $300,000 state and federal money for wind patterns research/environmental impact studies; Windmills, $4.5 million each. Power lines left from the plant carry the electricity, port roads and rail lines were used during construction.
- Steel Winds has permits for 2 more turbines, plans for 27
- 400 more acres of brownfield redevelopment planned. Steel Winds will ultimately employ a few dozen people, not the 1000s in the steel mills, but it might help restore the city’s spirit.
from the NY Times (click to enlarge)
QUOTES
- Polanski Jr.: “It’s changing the image of the city of Lackawanna…We were the old Rust Belt, with all the negatives. Right now, we are progressive and we are leading the way on the waterfront.”
- Real de Azua: “It’s a way to convert the Rust Belt to the Wind Belt…”
- Malyak: “As a kid, we’d be at the beach and you’d see the ladle cars going out there 24 hours a day…The sky would light up, and you’d see this red-hot slag rolling down the hillside.”
- Mitskovski: “It’s much easier to do this on farmland somewhere…But all the things you would need to build in a green field setting are already here…A community that has had difficulty moving forward has accepted a technology that leapfrogs other forms of energy generation…Decades of steel-making created this environmental legacy. But that also created the opportunity to take this fallow, contaminated land and reuse it.”