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"Something like that would be a good thing. For that matter, why not windmills, too?" said Township Manager Rod Hawthorne, who noted that he was not speaking for the township commissioners on the subject.
Calls to a representative for Glenn Springs Holdings, which is managing the 257-acre site for OxyChem, were not immediately returned Tuesday.
The solar park idea has been proposed by the Alliance for a Clean Environment, which has been a watchdog over the cleanup of the federal Superfund site. The idea is to cover portions of the site with photovoltaic panels that generate clean, renewable electricity.
"Science fiction? Hardly," ACE wrote in a proposal that is being circulated, and which Hawthorne confirmed has been presented to the township commissioners; although, they have not yet discussed it publicly, he said.
According to the information provided, "there is a growing movement to turn Superfund and brownfield sites into "brightfield" sites," as the U.S. Department of Energy has termed its initiative.
The Energy Department has already helped to fund several "brownfield to brightfield" projects, including at Superfund sites in Hanford, Wash.; Brockton, Mass.; and on the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
The federal projects are partnerships with state programs.
This suits Pennsylvania just fine, said Steve Weitzman, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development.
"Pennsylvania is becoming fairly well-known as a destination site for alternative energy and there are already a number of companies that have relocated to Pennsylvania," Weitzman said Tuesday.
He said final rules and procedures are now being assembled for the Alternative Energy Investment Fund that will target $428.4 million toward the development of alternative energy resources, Weitzman said.
Which is not to discount existing business incentives already on the books in Pennsylvania, Weiztman said.
He pointed to a $9 million state investment that helped a German company choose Allegheny County as the site for its first solar mirror production facility in the U.S., creating 300 manufacturing jobs.
In fact the state's "alternative energy portfolio requires that by 2011 at least 18 percent of all electricity sold at retail comes from "clean, advanced energy resources."
By 2021, the state should benefit from more than 850 megawatts of solar-produced electricity, according to information on the DCED Web site.
In fact the entire country could benefit from an economic development focus on the green economy, according to Green Recovery," a report issued this month by the Center for American Progress and the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
In Pennsylvania, as many as 86,000 jobs could be added to the tax rolls by adopting a few simple policy changes that promote this kind of investment, according to the report.
"We don't have to choose between a clean, safe environment and job creation — we can have both," Joseph Otis Minnott, executive director for the Clean Air Council, said in helping to issue the report in the Keystone State.
"The solutions to global climate change offer tremendous opportunity to use environmental policies to create good, high-paying jobs and new markets for American businesses," Minnott said in a statement that accompanied the report's release.
The report, written by Robert Pollin, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz and Helen Scharber, was issued nationwide and a breakdown was provided for each state. The report advocates a $100 billion national program to invest in the "green economy" defined as six major areas, including building retro-fitting, mass transit and freight rail, smart-grid electrical transmission systems, wind energy, solar energy and advanced bio-fuels.
Pennsylvania's share would be $4 billion and the jobs created would reduce the state's unemployment rate, which stood at 5.3 percent in June, to 4 percent in two years, the report asserted.
The report also concluded that many of these projects would generate jobs in a variety of fields including all types of engineering, HVAC, carpenters, electricians, steel workers, construction laborers, welders and mechanics.
According to the report's analysis, $1.2 billion of Pennsylvania's share should be applied to wind, solar and bio-fuel power sources.
A project to locate a solar generating facility at the former OxyChem site "sounds like the poster child for this kind of initiative," said Katie Sweeney, a global warming policy analyst for the Clean Air Council familiar with the "Green Recovery" report.
"You want to take a Superfund site and transform it into a site for renewable energy. It sounds like a good idea but projects like this take investors, good government policy, community support and action to get these things off the ground," Sweeney said.
Certainly, it's not a project that will happen tomorrow, if at all.
In April, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it had settled on a method to remove about 38,000 cubic yards of a toxic sludge contaminated with vinyl chloride and dioxin from two lagoons at the OxyChem site.
The sludge will be removed and shipped to a landfill in Canada, according to the EPA decision.
ACE, which has complained that the level of cleanup is inadequate to allow for a full range of options for the site's re-use and restricts its re-use to "yet another industrial polluter located at the site," has proposed the solar park as an alternative that provides jobs and "would benefit the environment, area property values and the area's image and economic future."
The group cited a number of similar projects, including a solar energy plant planned for the Philadelphia Naval Yard and a 16,500 solar-panel plant next to the GROWS Landfill in Bucks County.
"The 'Brightfields' program, a U.S. Department of Energy initiative, specifically promotes the redevelopment of brownfields to use solar technology, clean energy and produce revenue for the community," ACE wrote.
"Solar technologies and photovoltaic systems are especially well-suited to application on brownfield sites. They require very little maintenance and can stand directly on the ground without penetrating the surface or disturbing any existing contamination," ACE wrote.
"We believe that our proposal for a PV installation would have many positive benefits for the community and will help promote Pennsylvania's emerging renewable energy industry," wrote ACE, adding that a recent study showed solar technology creates more jobs per megawatt than derived from fossil fuels.
"Concerted, forward-thinking leadership will be necessary to ensure that the Occidental site's future is brighter than its past," the group wrote.
