Thanks to Bridgett Ennis at Yale Climate Connections for expanding our coverage of brownfield remediation, which surprisingly has only featured in one previous post in our 13 years linking to environmental news stories. Now two:

Massive solar farm planned for coal mine site in eastern Kentucky

Solar developer BrightNight is set to transform the Starfire coal mine into an 800-megawatt solar farm, bringing renewable energy and jobs to southern Appalachia.

A massive solar farm is in the works at the site of one of the largest coal mines in southern Appalachia.

BrightNight, the developer behind the planned farm at the decades-old Starfire coal mine near Hazard, Kentucky, says the project could help reinvigorate a region where thousands of mining jobs have been lost. Construction on the first phases could begin as soon as 2026.

At 800 megawatts, the completed project would have almost double the electricity generating capacity of the 412-megawatt coal-fired unit at the E. W. Brown generating station a couple of hours down the road from the mine.

Yale Climate Connections spoke with Joseph Albrecht and Maribeth Sawchuck of BrightNight about why they think placing a solar farm on a coal mine is a no-lose solution.  Sawchuck is vice president of communications and Albrecht is the lead developer on the Starfire project.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

Yale Climate Connections: Can you tell us a little bit about the Starfire mine’s history and importance to the region?

Joseph Albrecht: Starfire has been an active coal mine since the early 1970s. It’s one of the largest, if not the largest, coal mines in southern Appalachia. Many different companies have mined up there and there are still active holes with coal coming out of the ground every day — thousands of tons at a time.

Starfire has an extremely rich history. It was one of the first sites to implement [the mountaintop removal] style of mining and was an extremely innovative mine for years, all the way up until recent history in terms of creating new mining strategies or methodologies. That mine’s quite substantially responsible for a lot of the coal production in the area and ultimately was able to help provide a lot of the fuel for the region’s energy over the last several decades…

Read the whole interview here.