WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY: Good afternoon and happy Thursday, readers! While it may not feel like fall in the D.C. area yet, football season kicked off yesterday, with more games set for today and this weekend. Maydeen will be rooting for the Los Angeles Rams to go all the way this year! 🍂🏈🐏Welcome to Daily on Energy, written by Washington Examiner energy and environment writers Callie Patteson (@CalliePatteson) and Maydeen Merino (@MaydeenMerino). Email cpatteson@washingtonexaminer dot com or mmerino@washingtonexaminer dot com for tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email, and we’ll add you to our list. Brownfield and Superfund sites could emerge as locations for data center development.
Chris Barnard, the president of the conservative American Conservation Coalition, is advancing the argument that building data centers on such sites could help defuse the growing angst over development. “There’s a lot of land out there that exists that people can’t currently use,” Barnard told Maydeen, referring to Brownfield and Superfund sites. “If there’s a way to use that land for data centers and have that land be remediated at the same time, it’d be a win-win for communities, for local environments, and then also for developers,” he said. Superfund sites are properties designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as having environmental contamination risks, but the cleanup process varies by site, depending on the severity and type of contamination. Barnard wrote an op-ed last month arguing that developers should be allowed to build data centers on brownfield and Superfund sites in exchange for cleaning them up. The administration has taken steps to not only accelerate the development of data centers but make it easier for companies to consider using these sites as locations for their AI facilities.Last month, the Energy Department announced a partnership with NextEra Energy and several other companies to develop the Paducah Site, a former nuclear site, into a data center campus. The site was designated as a Superfund site in the 1990s.In July, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the EPA to identify contaminated properties that could be suitable for data center development. The agency has since released guidance for communities or companies looking to develop on these sites. Location, location, location: However, not all brownfield or Superfund locations are the same in terms of cleanup status, level of contamination, or ease of access to energy.“If the site is suitable for commercial development, it may indeed be suitable for a data center,” Walter Mugdan, former EPA Region 2 Deputy Regional Administrator and Superfund Director, told Maydeen. These sites are “certainly something [data center developers] ought to be looking at,” Mugdan said.But, he added, “it’s more a question of location, location, location, which I’m using as a shorthand for all the elements about a site that make it intrinsically appropriate for a certain kind of use.” Who pays for the clean-up? In some cases, new owners of a contaminated site could be legally obligated to contribute to cleanup costs.Mugdan said contributing to the cleanup can help the buyer obtain a prospective purchaser agreement, or a PPA, with the agency. A PPA is a contract with the government that can protect a buyer from liability for existing pollution on a property as long as they contribute to the cleanup costs. Mugdan said these sites carry a liability risk, and new owners want to make sure they don’t inherit a costly legal or environmental problem.Barnard said that developers should be given Good Samaritan liability protections for voluntarily cleaning up contaminated sites, so they aren’t held liable for pollution they didn’t create.
