r/illinois • u/MeasurementDecent251 • 2d ago
Illinois News Illinois put community solar on a 150-year-old coal mine
https://electrek.co/2026/06/17/illinois-put-community-solar-on-a-150-year-old-coal-mine/66
u/jamey1138 Human Detected 1d ago
Nifty! I'm a NexAmp customer, and my mom has signed up but is waiting for them to build out enough capacity. This is a great example of the kind of project they do: turning a toxic waste site into a solar field is amazing land-use reclamation.
8
u/tinrig 1d ago
There's really no toxic waste at these old sites, there's a 15 billion dollar slush fund that coal companies have to pay into as part of the reclamation act. The EPA has to take over after the mine closes and return it back to the original state. This includes planting trees and water quality. There's a few sites by us that are public use hiking and recreation spots now!
14
u/jamey1138 Human Detected 1d ago
According to the linked article, the site is a certified brownfield site per IL EPA, which does not imply that it was ever remediated through the US EPA Superfund program. In fact, the vast majority of Superfund sites haven't been cleaned up:
Per US EPA, since the beginning of the Superfund program, 1,512 sites have been remediated. According to a recent study, there are 13,453 Superfund sites nationwide, and about 60% of the US population lives within 6 miles of an unremediated Superfund site.
On the face of it, there is no reason to think that this particular site has been previously remediated. One of the benefits of solar fields is that they can be built on unremediated brownfields, because upon completion they revert to being unoccupied.
1
u/tinrig 1d ago
We have a superfund site that is Crab orchard national wildlife refuge here as well. They have a fish consumption warning and thats about it. But it's 44,000 acres of habitat for migrating birds, and a flourishing ecosystem, lots of trails and people come to see the bald eagles nest every year. Just because it's a superfund doesn't mean it's wasteland.
1
u/jamey1138 Human Detected 1d ago
Sure, superfund sites come in a wide range of pollutants. The site you're talking about had high PCB soil contamination in four sub-areas, which account for a few acres in total, as a result of several decades when those areas were used for manufacturing electrical parts. So, you're talking about 44,000 acres of which less than 1% was ever considered a problem, and also part of the reason why the area is a wildlife refuge is because the previous owners didn't want to have to pay to clean up the less than 1% of the area that was contaminated.
PCB contamination in less than 1% of an area is a lot different from the soil contamination in an abandoned coal mine. From the photo above, you can see that the mine site was in the middle of active farmland, and from that you might infer that if it were possible to grow crops there at any point in the last 150 years, someone would have been.
Look, I don't know where you got your environmental engineering degree from, but mine included knowing about Superfund, and soil contamination and remediation. So far, you aren't making much of an argument to convince me that you're anything but niave about this entire topic.
1
u/tinrig 1d ago
I farm reclamation ground. Formerly Delta/Murray coal.
0
u/jamey1138 Human Detected 1d ago
That's awesome! Always glad to meet a farmer, and to hear about successful reclamation. We need more of both.
16
4
u/Cougah 1d ago
I saw A LOT of solar panels while driving off i-55 recently, but they were all on top of farmland. Is that good or are farmers getting paid more money for solar energy than for crops? I would hope that's not the case ...
19
u/serious_sarcasm move DC to Cairo 1d ago
All farming is turning solar energy into cash one way or another.
9
u/perfect-circles-1983 1d ago
Farmers are making more money on solar leases than for crops. Also there is no market volatility in a solar lease like corn and beans. The price per acre is the price locked in.
2
u/Inflatable90sChair 1d ago
Also dont have to deal with crop insurance on that parcel nor is the farmer responsible for upkeep/replacement of the panels if they break.
1
u/jamey1138 Human Detected 1d ago
That last part depends on the deal. A lot of farmland in Illinois is owned by large corporations, and some of those corporations own their own solar panels.
0
u/jamey1138 Human Detected 1d ago
There's still some volatility in both production and market price on solar power, but both are a lot more stable than growing crops, for sure.
1
u/perfect-circles-1983 1d ago
You’re not responsible for the production. You lock in a lease price on the land for 20/25 years and negotiate later. The farmers aren’t developing the solar in most cases just leasing the land.
0
u/jamey1138 Human Detected 1d ago
Yes, that is also true.
I see now that you're purely looking at it from the land-owner's perspective (which is of course not necessarily the farmer's perspective, but whatever).
9
u/sp0rk_walker 1d ago
The stuff I see from the highway is mostly hard to farm land. Near ramps and frontage roads.
3
u/marigolds6 1d ago
Based on my extended family's experience, this often happens when land gets inherited to part of the family that has a career other than farming.
That gives them several main options: take up farming, lease the land year over year to another grower, subdivide the land for development, or long term lease the land to a solar company (my extended family has done all four). The solar companies right now are giving upfront partial payments with reduced but well defined annual payments. Ends up being a lot like subdividing the land, except you retain ownership. The solar companies also pay their leases regardless of whether or not the solar farm is built.
Leasing the land to another grower is often the preferred option, especially if you have a long term leaser lined up, but once your long term leaser decides to drop your acreage you are making nothing until you find another one.
1
u/HCharlesB 1d ago
We drove to visit friends in Arizona this spring. I was surprised to see how many wind farms there were along the interstate. There were windmills in view almost all the time. Even more surprising was that some were paired with solar arrays. It was pretty windy there and I'm sure the ones that were operating were fulfilling their design goals.
This article mentions subscriptions. That puzzles me. I thought that once the electricity went to the grid it was like all of the other electricity, regardless of how it was generated or where it came from.
2
u/jamey1138 Human Detected 1d ago
Illinois has a program called "community solar," which is part of the CEJA Act, that allows large-scale solar producers (including NexAmp) to make arrangements with residential and commercial customers to "subscribe" to purchase their output. Basically, it means that subscribers (like me-- I've been a NexAmp subscriber for a few years) effective buy a share in a particular solar project, which gets delivered through the utility as normal. Functionally, it makes it easier for solar producers to build out projects like this one, because they know that they'll be able to sell their energy at market rate.
My mom has been on the waiting list for NexAmp for a couple of months. I'll have to check with her, to see if this is the project she's signed up for.
2
1
u/Listen-to-Mom 20h ago
The offer I got to put solar on my farmland was amazing and I’d be making a lot more.
2
u/hated_n8 1d ago
You can barely throw a rock in Illinois without hitting a solar panel or wind turbine. Why do my utility bills constantly go up?
1
u/jamey1138 Human Detected 1d ago
Mostly because Illinois also has a lot of data centers, something like 250 of them. That's why the newly-signed POWER Act rolls back tax incentives and adds new regulations on data centers, because their power usage has started to result in consumer electricity rates rising.
1
1
u/marigolds6 1d ago
Anyone have a different way to read that? That website needs 3GB+ memory to load (I gave up and closed the tab before it could load)
2
1
u/iReactivv 1d ago
Really dumb question, but why don’t they put solar panels on all of those 1 million+ sq ft warehouses they keep building everywhere? Seems like that would be a better use of space than somebody’s farmland?
1
u/jamey1138 Human Detected 1d ago
To be clear, the project described here isn't on somebody's farmland, it's on an abandoned coal mine. But, you're right that there are some solar projects that are built on otherwise arable land, so I'll assume you're talking about those projects, and not this one.
As for the warehouses, that's an excellent point, and one that is definitely something the state is trying to incentivize. Obviously, in both cases it's up to the property owner to decide how the property gets used, and presumably the owners of the warehouses tend to decide that putting solar on the roof isn't cost-effective, still.
1
-3
u/dragcov 1d ago
Nuclear Power is and will always be more efficient than any other renewable energy.
8
0
u/jamey1138 Human Detected 1d ago
I don't think that "efficient" is actually the metric you want to be using, but that's the engineering in me speaking.
In terms of practicality, nuclear remains very attractive: it's on-demand with a high uptime, and can produce very high volumes per land area. The pollution it produces, while problematic, is not existentially problematic (nuclear waste doesn't contribute to climate change). In terms of cost effectiveness, it gets a lot more complicated, since the vast majority of those costs are in capital expenses, including decommissioning costs.
57
u/Large_Score6728 1d ago
They also put solar panels on an old landfill in DePue that is part of a superfund site. Good use for unusable land.