A bright idea for blighted property

A once-polluted former industrial site that lay fallow off Brockton's Grove Street for over 40 years will soon host New England's first ''brightfields," a facility for generating solar energy.

Over the next three months, a 425-kilowatt array of 1,395 solar panels will be installed across 3 acres of the old Brockton Gas Works site. The project, which will produce enough energy to power City Hall and meet a portion of the police station's energy demand, demonstrates that former industrial areas, landfills, and swaths of blighted land can be transformed into something more productive.

''There's a lot of potential for doing what Brockton is doing. . . . That's the significance of this project actually happening," said Richard Michaud, brightfields program coordinator at the US Department of Energy. Other towns and cities ''can look at it with their eyes open and think about doing this."

Communities south of Boston have been leaders in siting renewable energy on otherwise undesirable land. Brockton's brightfields construction is beginning this month, and Hull Wind 2, a 1.8-megawatt windmill built on a landfill, was producing electricity as of last week.

Brockton began working on the project over five years ago, with a federal grant that promoted economic development, renewable energy, and the cleanup of brownfields -- defined by the Environmental Protection Agency as properties whose future uses are limited by the presence of pollutants or hazardous contamination.

In the years since, the state has passed legislation to allow Brockton to build and operate the solar power facility, and the city has received grants and sought bonds to cover the project's hefty price.

In total, the solar park will cost $3 million, with $2.1 million in city funds and the rest from the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust and the federal Energy Department.

The payoff, supporters say, will be considerable; the solar panels are predicted to work for more than two decades, although the city has not estimated how long it will take for the solar panels to make enough energy to pay for themselves, according to Lori Ribeiro, Brockton's brownfields coordinator.

But sunlight -- the fuel that powers the panels -- is free, and the process will emit no carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas widely thought to play a key role in global warming.

To produce an equivalent amount of electricity by burning fossil fuels, 595,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere each year, roughly equivalent to the amount produced by 45 cars.

The future solar park will also have an educational display, to remind people of the city's role in the evolution of power generation. The former gas plant produced gas for lighting in the late 1800s through the early 1900s. But in the 1880s, Thomas Edison created the first centralized electric station in the city, with the hopes that electricity would eliminate gas lighting, Ribeiro said.

''That site, formerly used to create gas for lighting, can now be used to create renewable energy -- a way to use an idle, unproductive brownfields," she said.

When the Department of Energy first offered brightfields grants, Michaud said, he discouraged Brockton from applying because he didn't think the city had a chance. But today, the projects awarded initial grants, in Washington and New Jersey, have not moved forward, and none of the other grants has resulted in an actual project.

At the Environmental Protection Agency's brownfields conference later this year, Ribeiro hopes to give a presentation on putting renewable energy on otherwise unusable areas.

''The EPA puts out all this money to clean up brownfields, but usually they're capped and nothing happens," Michaud said. ''I think having been the pilot project, [Brockton] will get a lot of buzz. In about three months, when this thing is up and running, they're going to get a lot of interest."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.