The Policy2050 Newsletter: Where innovation, investment, and impact meet.
Four projects moved in October, in solar, aluminum, cement and nuclear. Two are on, or being studied for, land that has already been used once: formerly strip-mined land in Missouri and a former coal plant site in Indiana. The other two are built to take a waste stream: used beverage cans in Alabama, and slag from steelmaking in Indiana.
A solar plant on strip-mined land
Clearway Energy Group has closed financing and begun construction on the Swan Energy Center, a 650 MW solar facility on portions of formerly strip-mined land in northwestern Bates County, Missouri. It is the company’s first project in the state, and the company said it is contracted under a 20-year power purchase agreement. According to the company, a bank consortium led by Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, DNB Bank ASA and National Australia Bank is financing the $1.5 billion project. The company said the plant will use American-made panels, begin commercial operations in 2028 and produce enough electricity for approximately 200,000 homes.
An aluminum plant built to recycle used cans
Novelis has produced the first coil on the cold mill at its $5 billion aluminum recycling and rolling plant in Bay Minette, Alabama. The plant includes a recycling center that the company says will be able to process more than 15 billion used beverage cans a year. When fully operational, the company said, it will add 600 kilotonnes of annual rolled aluminum capacity for beverage packaging, automotive and specialty markets. According to the company, it is the first fully integrated aluminum recycling and rolling plant built in the United States in more than 40 years, and customer qualifications and commercial shipments are expected in the second quarter of 2027.
A cement mill fed by steelmaking slag
Ozinga has opened a slag cement mill in East Chicago, Indiana, with capacity to produce 1 million tons of slag cement a year. The slag is produced during steelmaking and is first processed at Ozinga’s Burns Harbor operation, at the site of the Cleveland-Cliffs steel mill. The company says the plant’s location and its process of recycling the slag address the economic challenges of making cement. According to the company, its CarbonSense blends deliver up to 80% reductions in embodied carbon compared with traditional Portland cement mixes, and the plant will ship by barge, rail and highway. The company said it will create approximately 50 permanent union steelworker jobs at full operation, split between the mill and the Burns Harbor operation.
A reactor study on a retired coal plant’s site
American Electric Power has signed a joint development agreement with X-energy to evaluate the feasibility of a 960 MW advanced nuclear project at a former coal plant site in Sullivan County, Indiana, the company said. The site under evaluation is that of the retired Breed Generating Station. The initial design would use 12 Xe-100 units of 80 MW each. Amazon is supporting development through a funding agreement. If the project reaches a final investment decision and is built, Amazon intends to buy the power under a long-term contract covering the costs of the facility and its operations, according to AEP. No final investment decision has been made.
What it means
For anyone backing or building in this space, the useful question this month is what is already on, or next to, a site.
The two kinds of leftover work differently. Land that has had one industrial life is a place to build. A waste stream is a supply, and it ties the new business to someone else’s output: a steel mill that keeps producing slag, a collection system that keeps delivering cans.
None of the four yet claims the leftover made its project cheaper, faster or easier to permit; the nearest is Ozinga, which says the plant’s location and its recycling of slag address the economic challenges of making cement. That case is still to be made in numbers. What October does show is four teams, in four different industries, treating used land and waste streams as a place to start. That approach is worth watching, and worth backing where the numbers hold.
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