Robbie Harris reports
Former coal mines within the Cumberland Forest Project—nearly 253,000 acres of land managed by The Nature Conservancy in Southwest Virginia, Eastern Tennessee, and Eastern Kentucky—could be the site of the first utility-scale solar systems built in the Central Appalachian coalfields
Credit The Nature Conservency
The Nature Conservancy has been acquiring land to build the solar installations in the Cumberland Forest, a quarter million acres comprising parts of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. The goal is to prove it’s possible to build solar arrays on land once mined for coal. But the bottom line for the Conservancy is these projects are to benefit people in the region without harming the forest.