The use and development of eco friendly products should be considered first to suppress the results of climate change around the world. If you take all of the forgotten and classified former commercial sites and dumps across the U.S. and add them together with each other, you get 14 million acres of inexpensive, accessible property which could be used as places for brand new solar installations as well as wind farms. Right now the U.S. EPA is pushing ahead with just this kind of strategy, with the National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) helping to assess brownfields and Superfund places for renewable power. This program is known as Re-Powering America’s Land. Additionally, it has a green jobs angle, by means of Recovery Act financing. Many of the potential sites are located in or near existing communities and may provide brand new jobs for local residents.
But wait, there’s more. Aside from providing new green jobs as well as clean energy for local use or perhaps the wider power grid, the program also focuses on eco-friendly remediation, which uses renewable energy to power up products applied for site clean-up. Once you add that up – harvesting clean power from land that is blighted and usable for not much otherwise, while generating jobs and restoring the particular site, you have to wonder why any person would like to continue blowing up America’s mountains, compromising our water supply, and destroying the Gulf of Mexico in quest for non-renewable fuels.
Getting Back Acreage for Renewable Energy
Among the actual fourteen million acres of categorized land in the U.S., circumstances in the sites can differ extensively. Together with brownfields as well as Superfund sites, EPA and NREL are looking at land classified within the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. That means the sites can range from individual forgotten industrial facilities with minimum hazardous resources involved, to a portion of a poisonous stew which blights an entire location, such as the Hazleton area within Pennsylvania which contains the Jeddo Mine Tunnel, infamous for expelling countless gallons of contaminated water from abandoned mines every day within the last hundred years.
Finding a Spot for Solar Arrays and Wind Farms
As well as assessing the places for aspects that would enhance (or impede) energy gathering from the sun’s rays and blowing wind, EPA along with NREL are also exploring the type of installation that a specific place can host. The conventional solar set up, for example, does not require a foundation to be dug, so it can very easily be set up over a capped landfill. For wind generators, a structure of cement footings and supporting wires can be built, rather than drilling directly into polluted ground.
A Brand New Energy Potential
It may be said – so I’ll say it – that at one time fossil fuels saved the U.S. from becoming a barren wasteland without trees. Really, it’s hard to think about just how we might have powered up until now without burning each and every stick of wood across the nation. But times shift, and our fossil fuel friends have outlived their stay. These had been of marginal use at the birth of this particular nation, and as we continue straight into a brand new energy future they will go back to that condition. It is only a question of when, not really if.
In case you definitely care about your future, be eco friendly. We could do this by utilizing eco friendly products and participating in environment helpful activities. We only have one world to exist in so let’s stand up for this!
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