Chicago Is The Urban Solar Capital. For Now...

By JoshMogerman in News on Apr 15, 2012 9:00PM

Quick. Can you guess the location of the largest urban solar array in the country and perhaps on the planet? For now, it is right here in Chicago. But, while Illinois hardly has a sun-dappled image, the General Assembly could quickly make the state into an urban solar powerhouse by helping move an even bigger project forward in East St. Louis.

Both city solar farm projects are built around a desire to transform huge, polluted, brownfield properties from community blight into something economically and environmentally useful. Back in 2009 the old Dutch Boy Paint and International Harvester properties, which had stood vacant for decades in the West Pullman neighborhood on the South Side, were lined with enough blue photovoltaic panels to power 1,500 homes. And now, the Illinois Senate has voted to approve something twice as large in East St. Louis, where an abandoned 220-acre Alcoa Aluminum plant site slathered with red bauxite “mud” would host a 20-megawatt solar farm. The House will likely vote on the bill soon.

In both places, no positive options for the property have appeared in more than a half-century, turning them into symbols of urban decay and making that "brownfield to bright field" transformation into an attractive, albeit expensive, way to use the space. For solar developers, they offer an unusually attractive combination of access to open, noncontroversial tracts of land very close to sizable electric markets. As solar prices shrink and state renewable energy portfolios kick in around the region (both Illinois and Missouri have laws on the books that require them to generate a significant portion of their power from clean energy sources in the next decade, as do many other states throughout the Midwest), all of those factors could come together to make these sorts of projects more common. In the meantime, enjoy the shiny crown Chicago...for now.