Environmental Protection Agency acting administrator Andrew Wheeler toured a solar power plant on Wednesday, calling the plant an example of the positive impacts of the agency’s flagship clean-up program under Trump.
Wheeler toured the New Bedford solar plant as part of a visit to EPA’s Region 1 headquarters in Massachusetts to mark the anniversary of a 2017 task force report that began the process of removing contaminated industrial areas from the list of Superfund sites.
Scott Pruitt, the former EPA chief who resigned July 5 because of numerous scandals, had made the Superfund program a priority under the Trump administration. But he did not typically take pains to discuss the benefits of any EPA program on renewable energy development. One exception was his visit to a hydropower dam with a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission official earlier in the year.
EPA said in a readout of Wheeler’s trip that the solar array is “another example of the impact the Superfund program can have.” The Sullivan’s Ledge Solar Array was built on a landfill.
Pruitt tended to emphasize fossil fuels, declaring often that the “war on coal” under the Obama administration was over, and that the EPA was pursuing efforts to reverse climate rules that favored renewable energy over fossil fuels.
In contrast, the EPA tweeted out pictures of Wheeler standing in front of the large solar power plant with Region 1 officials and others.
Wheeler was in Massachusetts to mark the one-year anniversary of the release of the Superfund Task Force Report, which was issued under Pruitt’s watch. Pruitt used the report in an effort to move former industrial sites off the Superfund list of cleanup sites, to those that have been restored and made available for other uses.
“EPA can proudly say that we have made tremendous progress moving sites toward deletion and expediting the cleanup and redevelopment of sites for the benefit of the surrounding communities,” Wheeler said in a statement.
He also discussed the progress being made at one of the largest cleanup sites in the nation, the New Bedford Harbor Superfund Site, which had been left with an estuary polluted by high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, a toxic chemical that EPA banned in the 1970s, and heavy metals.
“The New Bedford Harbor Superfund Site is a great example of EPA working with state and local partners to accelerate cleanup and redevelopment simultaneously — a model for other sites around the nation,” Wheeler said.
Dredging efforts with the Army Corps of Engineers continues to remove the hazardous chemicals from the estuary’s sediment.
