Accelerating Energy Innovation Through Brownfield Redevelopment
Clean energy is crucial to our country’s future, yet the current pace of adoption is not occurring nearly fast enough. Considering the imminent threats of global warming, the United States much significantly increase investment into new sources of energy production, including wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear. “Time is one thing we don’t have. Late in 2007, scientists noted that emissions of greenhouse gases were growing considerably faster than expected… Worldwide, nations must cut emissions in half over the next fifty years. To reach that goal, the United States will have to cut emissions by 80 percent”. The demand for renewable energy will require political mechanisms, large scales of innovation, cultural shifts in behavior, and other efforts from a wide variety of sources.
These new initiatives, sponsored and supported in large part by the recent U.S. Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, must be carefully designed using a framework that allows the industry to develop and evolve over time. The spatial configuration and organizational arrangement of facilities delineated for clean energy production must establish flexibility for future adaptation and inevitable transformation of the field.
The brownfield conditions of closed automobile plants will provide both a case study as well as a prototypical site for these new businesses. By examining the successes and failures of 20th century manufacturing facilities, the physical remains and infrastructure will yield a lens with which to examine the challenges facing the architecture of our energy future. As one struggling sector becomes obsolete, another is quickly emerging. Using the physical, as well as political and economic agendas from the automobile industry, ideas and proposals for a new, clean energy industrial revolution will generate.
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