CLEVELAND, Ohio – The U.S. Environmental Protection agency has awarded a $129 million grant to a Cuyahoga County-led partnership to install solar panels on local landfills, mothball a coal-fired power plant and return a major brownfield to natural habitat.
The partnership, which includes Cuyahoga County and the cities of Cleveland and Painesville, is one of 25 applicants from across the country chosen by the U.S. to receive a federal Climate Pollution Reduction Grant.
The dollar amount is massive by Cuyahoga County’s standards, four times larger than the next largest grant the county has received since 2011, when it switched to its current charter form of government, said County Executive Chris Ronayne.
The incoming money also adds heft to Ronayne’s stated goal of taking on global warming at the local level, and all but assures the county’s fledgling utility, Cuyahoga Green Energy, will have plenty of projects to keep it busy in the coming years.
“We got what we asked for and I was really blown away,” Ronayne said.
The grant will pay for the development of 63 megawatts of solar energy across several sites, said Mike Foley, administrator of Cuyahoga Green Energy, and allow the city of Painesville to close its coal-burning power plant.
Painesville is forced to fire up its municipally owned plant a handful of times each year, City Manager Doug Lewis said, in order to meet high demand for electricity, such as during hot spells when air conditioners are being used.
“This is major,” Lewis said, as Painesville has been looking to close the plant for some time.
The largest deployment of solar panels will be at the 1,200-acre site of the former Diamond Shamrock chemical plant in and around Painesville, where the plan is to generate 35 megawatts of electricity. Solar fields will be spread across 140 acres of the property now owned by Occidental Chemical. The project also includes installation of 10 megawatts of battery storage.
Included in the grant is funding for West Creek Conservancy to establish public trails and fishing access to Grand River and Lake Erie on the Diamond Shamrock site. It also calls for converting the vacant industrial land into natural habitat that can serve as a stopover for migratory birds and insects. In between the fields of solar panels will be pollinator-attracting plants, such as milkweed and wildflowers, said Brett Rodstrom, director of conservation with the conservancy
The grant means restoration of the former manufacturing site should be able to begin several years sooner than expected, Rodstrom said. He’s also hoping the conservancy, based in Parma and specializing in conservation and brownfield projects across northern Ohio, will become a model for topping landfills with solar panels across the country.
Read the full article By Peter Krouse, cleveland.com