Nature Conservancy says it will build six solar power plants on old coal-mine sites it owns in southwest Virginia

Site of one of the proposed solar farms (Photo from the Nature Conservancy)

Six former surface coal mines in Southwest Virginia "are being transformed into solar installations that will be large enough to contribute renewable energy to the electric grid," Zoeann Murphy reports for The Washington Post. The sites "owned by The Nature Conservancy will be some of the first utility-scale solar farms in the region — and the nonprofit group hopes it’s creating a model that can be replicated" at other sites in Appalachia and nationwide.

Several thousand acres of old mines came with 253,000 acres of forest the Conservancy acquired in 2019, which it calls the Cumberland Forest Project. Why develop solar on an old coal mine? It's not just for the irony. Murphy reports: "Solar developers partnering with the Nature Conservancy, such as Dominion Energy and Sun Tribe, say the mine sites have vast flat areas exposed to sunlight that are a rarity in the mountains, and the sites offer advantages like being close to transmission lines." Sun Tribe and Sol Systems are partnering on the first two, the Conservancy announced last year.

Solar farms need a lot of ground, and "It would be better to build on a lot of these mine sites than some prime farmland or some areas that maybe don't want solar in their community," said Daniel Kestner, innovative reclamation manager for the Virginia Department of Energy.

Most of the project area is in Wise County, on the Kentucky border, The Coalfield Progress in Norton reported last year; some is in Dickenson County, to the northeast; some is Russell County, to the southeast. “We’re very proud to be an energy-producing community,” said Lou Wallace, chair of the Russell County Board of Supervisors. “This is helping us to reimagine how we produce the energy. So we’re still able to say we’re keeping the lights on somewhere.”