By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

BARAGA, Mich. — The federal government is gearing up to study the feasibility of several renewable energy developments on sites that have been extensively contaminated.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is combining forces with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to evaluate the feasibility of developing contaminated land for energy projects, specifically wind, solar and hydroelectric. The sites in question might already have been cleaned up, or be in some stage of being cleaned up. Former and current mine sites are also potentially eligible for this kind of development.

The EPA is putting up $650,000 that will combine its expertise with contaminated land, along with the NREL’s expertise on renewable energy projects. Although the government is currently focusing on wind, solar and hydroelectric, it has been involved in the development of different kinds of projects before, such as biomass, according to Darryl Owens, project officer at the EPA.

There are 12 sites slated for evaluation. One of them is in the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC) in the Upper Peninsula. The other 11 are located in California, Florida, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

“We’ve signed an agreement with the NREL,” said Owens, who is project officer for the KBIC site. “They’re the experts on this; they’re going to do the work for us. They’ll see if it’s feasible at this site and what it’ll cost to do it.”

The timeline for the project is as follows:

The NREL will put up a wind tower in April. The tower will take wind measurements for one year. A report will be prepared after that and completed by June 2011. The tribe will then decide if it wants to try doing a wind park. If the government is going to be involved in any project after that, it wouldn’t be any sooner than the second half of 2011, Owens said.

The EPA touts these areas as both environmentally and economically beneficial for the following reasons: they are well suited to this sort of industrial development, since it’s cheap to reclaim the land; there’s a great deal of this acreage available and there aren’t many people living on it; there are few owners of the land; often these sites have transmission lines already in place, as well as roads and water lines; the availability of these lands makes it less necessary to try and develop other sites that are more pristine; and they provide job opportunities in areas that are often economically depressed.

Part of the agency’s job is to promote the success of these kinds of efforts. One such story comes from Newton, Iowa, where Maytag had long been the largest employer in a town of 16,000. Whirlpool acquired the company in 2006, however, and promptly closed the plant, laying off 1,800.

Left vacant were 1.9 million square feet of building space used as a warehouse, manufacturing site and offices. The entire site takes up 175 acres. Part of the site was contaminated with chromium and other potentially hazardous chemicals. The EPA worked with Whirlpool to get it to clean up the site.

“We can mandate that they do environmental investigations or cleanup,” said David Doyle, a coordinator for one of EPA’s reuse programs in the upper Midwest. “There was some kind of action that EPA took that required Maytag to clean up the site.”

Its actions yielded results. By 2008 154 of the acres were ready to be reused. TPI Composites, a wind turbine blade maker, constructed a new building on the site to meet its production needs and hired 500 new workers.

Another company, Trinity Structural Towers, modified a portion of the Maytag plant so it could build wind towers there. It is supposed to hire 140 new workers.