While fossil fuel companies in the U.S. are busily wrecking vast sections of the country’s natural heritage, a new energy resource has been quietly emerging from an unlikely source: parking lots.  More parking lots are being converted into solar energy farms that create clean, renewable power while also creating more green jobs in solar cell manufacturing, installation, and sales.

One relatively new player in the U.S. solar parking lot field is EEPro, an offshoot of the German company EEPro GmbH, which started up operations in North Carolina last year. Its main product consists of photovoltaic units mounted on steel frames, which dovetails neatly with support for renewable energy by the United Steelworkers and other labor groups that see a rich trove of new green jobs in the emerging green economy.

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The U.S. EPA has just announced that is is allocating an additional $16 million in funding for projects to reclaim brownfields, which are former industrial sites with varying degrees of contamination.  The funds are targeted to brownfields projects that create new green jobs in nearby communities.

So far, the EPA’s brownfields/green jobs program has provided more than $96 million in revolving loans and grants to dozens of projects, which in turn has leveraged more than $2.5 billion in reclamation and redevelopment investments.  The EPA estimates that the program has created almost 6500 new jobs relating to site remediation, construction, and redevelopment.

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It’s a sustainable cure for the industrial hangover: take those old abandoned factories, former mines and dump sites, and use them as sites for solar, wind, hydropower, and other clean energy.  The EPA has powered up a formerly patchwork reclamation effort into a program called Re-Powering America’s Lands that is also designed to bring new green jobs into communities distressed by factory closings.

We’ve written about the link between green jobs and brownfields reclamation before at CleanTechnica, and Environmental Leader has a nice article up on the topic that mentions some of the individual projects.  It’s worth taking a look at the details to see how brownfields reclamation is unlocking a great potential for economic growth that in many cases has been languishing for decades.

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If you take all the abandoned and classified former industrial sites and dumps across the U.S. and add them together, you get 14 million acres of cheap, available land that could be used as sites for new solar installations and wind farms.  Right now the U.S. EPA is pushing forward with just such a plan, with the National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) helping to assess brownfields and Superfund sites for renewable energy. The program is called Re-Powering America’s Land. It also has a green jobs angle, through  Recovery Act funding. Many of the potential sites are located in or near existing communities and could provide new jobs for local residents.

But wait, there’s more.  In addition to providing new green jobs and clean energy for local use or the wider grid, the program also focuses on green remediation, which uses renewable energy to power equipment used for site cleanup. When you add that up – harvesting clean energy from land that is blighted and usable for not much else, while creating jobs and restoring the site, you gotta wonder why anybody would want to continue blowing up America’s mountains, compromising our water supply, and destroying the Gulf of Mexico in pursuit of fossil fuels.

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The utility company National Grid has teamed up with solar specialist Rivermoor Energy to build a 1-megawatt solar array at a former industrial site in Haverhill, Massachusetts.  The new project is more than double the size of its closest competitor, a 425 kilowatt solar array located on the site of a former brownfield in Brockton. The new installation is another notch on the solar belt for Rivermoor, which also started construction on the largest rooftop solar installation in Boston earlier this year.

Beyond that, the whole idea of reclaiming brownfields to create new green jobs in sustainable energy by reclaiming brownfields has been taking off with a big push from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  It’s a restorative approach that offers a stark contrast with the destruction caused by fossil fuel harvesting, the latest example being British Petroleum’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

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In the search for a high efficiency algae biofuel, a team of researchers lead by Texas A&M University has been delving into the inner workings of the Botryococcus braunii green algae, and they have discovered a direct connection between the algae and deposits of  petroleum and coal.  The discovery is significant because it could lead to the development of new strains of algae that produce the highest yield of biofuel compared to the amount of space needed to raise them.

Biofuel from algae and other plants is on the verge of mainstreaming as a form of renewable energy, but in terms of long term sustainability one sticking point has been the amount of land needed to raise biofuel crops.  Texas A&M’s finding raises the possibility of creating a viable platform for small-scale algae biofuel farming on brownfields and other underused land, or even in (or on top of) reclaimed buildings — which in turn would help create another opportunity to invest in green jobs.

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The poplar tree has entered the crowded field of sustainable biofuel crops, and now it seems that China, Israel and the U.S. are racing to tap into its potential.  Poplars have a couple of big advantages over conventional biofuel crops, especially food crops like soy and corn.  For one thing, raising poplars is potentially more fuel efficient and generates a lower carbon footprint than annual food crops.  Depending on the growing conditions poplars don’t need as much pest control or soil enhancement, and they don’t necessarily need to be harvested each year – cut them back and they just keep growing.  Also, a  properly managed biofuel woodland can be part of a viable wildlife habitat, and could potentially coexist with human populations or recreation areas.

One roadblock is the slow growth rate of poplars relative to nonfood biofuel darlings like crambe and camlina.  That may not be a factor much longer.  Last fall an Israel-China research partnership was formed to develop new poplar variants for biofuel production in China.  And here in the U.S., the National Science Foundation has just announced a $3.2 million grant for the University of Maryland and Bowie State University to create new high-yield poplars for biofuel.

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The U.S. EPA has launched a program to push to recover brownfields for renewable energy generation. The initiative, called RE-PAL for RE-Powering America’s Land (pdf alert), is focusing on solar energy, wind and biomass projects that provide local economic benefits in the form of new jobs.  In doing so, RE-PAL pulls together five powerful trends: the use of low cost “green remediation,” the repurposing of brownfields to revitalize blighted communities, the generation of energy locally instead of building expensive new power plants, the promotion of green jobs, and the development of genuinely clean, renewable energy options for communities that refuse to tolerate new fossil fuel energy facilities.

Surely RE-PAL can’t be an accidental an acronym for a program like this, so let’s give our new best friend a shout-out.  The program is kicking off with a study of twelve sites spread across the U.S. including one in Puerto Rico, but in fact it’s been flying under the radar on an ad hoc basis for a while now, racking up some impressive brownfields-to-energy credits along the way.

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“Mixed use” development is an exciting term in city planning. Mention it to a planner and chances are their eyes will widen, they will stand up straighter, and they will start talking with you in an excited tone about all the benefits of mixing land uses. When it gets down to it, these places are just more efficient, more vibrant and create a real sense of place.

Now, mixing wind and solar projects with landfills and brownfields may not create a great “sense of place” or make the place “vibrant” with life, but it can surely achieve that first benefit — more efficiency.

Thus, some are looking into the potential of such “mixed use” projects. A UK engineering firm is looking into invest £100 million ($152.5 million) to install up to 80MW of wind energy capacity at UK landfill sites. And the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is targeting former brownfields for solar, wind and other renewable energy projects.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a Google Earth-based interactive website that pinpoints opportunities for solar, wind or biomass siting on contaminated properties. The site combines the Google Earth platform with an EPA database that lists each property’s attributes for renewable energy development.

According to the EPA, many lands tracked by the agency, such as large Superfund sites, and mining sites offer thousands of acres of land, and may be situated in areas where the presence of wind and solar structures are less likely to be met with aesthetic, and therefore political, opposition.

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