When Obalaye Macharia was growing up in Cincinnati’s Winton Hills neighborhood in the 1970s, he would go on adventures to the landfill behind his house.

There are two dumps situated side-by-side in the predominantly Black community, next to housing projects and surrounded by factories. They accepted industrial waste, hazardous chemicals and household garbage from the 1950s until the last one closed in the ’90s.

Residents worried for years about the air they were breathing and the high instances of illness they noticed in their neighbors.

That’s not how Macharia saw it as a kid. He and his friends would play on the landfill, after trekking through the woods, running through sticky mud and swinging on vines to get there.

“We caught some of the coolest turtles and frogs and just wildlife,” Macharia said. “We were out in nature even though we’re from the Bricks — they call this Brick City.”

Macharia now leads the local community council, working as a liaison between the neighborhood and the city of Cincinnati. He wants his neighborhood to be a pollution-free farming community run by green energy. And he thinks transforming the old landfill sites into solar could be a part of that.

“I don’t know if it’s so toxic you can’t do human activities around this stuff, but we certainly can use that space for solar,” Macharia said.

The city had the same idea.

Cincinnati applied for, and won, $10 million from the federal Solar for All program to help build a solar array on one of the two brownfields, the city-owned Center Hill Landfill. But last year, President Trump terminated the program, and Cincinnati lost its funding.

The move halted many of the 60 planned solar projects across the country, which were aimed at serving lower-income communities.

Cincinnati decided to build its 10 megawatt solar array anyway.

How Cincinnati is powering forward

The city stitched together new sources of funding for the approximately $25 million project, kicking in $12 million from its capital budget, using federal tax incentives and partnering with a developer that will own half the solar array and sell the power to the city.

Ollie Kroner is director of the city’s Office of Environment and Sustainability. He says continuing to build clean energy is a worthwhile investment.

“The impacts of climate change are apparent and they’re expensive,” Kroner said.

He points out things like more intense storms that lead to sewer backups in homes, more frequent freeze-thaw events that create potholes and more extreme heat that hurts people’s health.

The solar farm is part of the city’s efforts to reach its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, which means increasing renewable energy and purchasing offsets. Cincinnati currently is powered by natural gas, nuclear power, some coal and, increasingly, by solar energy.

“This project will be the largest solar project inside the city limits,” Kroner said. “So that, in itself, is a notable accomplishment, but [it] is [also] a leap towards our 100 percent renewable energy goals, and has these co-benefits of cleaner air and very significant cost savings.”

Kroner notes the solar energy will power about 10% of the city’s facilities; rather than going to residents as was originally planned.

He says the solar array also will give a new purpose to the contaminated site that’s sat vacant for decades. The city finished remediating the former landfill in 2009, which prepared the site for redevelopment as a light industrial space. It’s not safe for housing or growing food.

What do neighbors think?

In Winton Hills, not everyone is sold on the solar array. Some say the money would be better spent on needs like housing or food stability.

Community council leader Macharia says the renewable energy project is still a step toward making the community greener and healthier.

“Even if the power is not going to us, it’s an example of what we need to do,” Macharia said.

He adds, it’s a goal for the community to add more solar that directly benefits residents by reducing their electricity bills or using underutilized spaces like the other former landfill.

The city broke ground on its solar array in April. It’s set to come online by late 2027.

Building solar on old landfills is a ‘win-win’

Across the country, there are hundreds of contaminated sites with potential for hosting renewable energy, says Matthew Popkin. He’s with the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on clean energy.

“Because you can rarely build much on that closed landfill to begin with, siting solar is a way to passively generate energy to meet our growing energy demand, and really is a win-win for communities that have some of these sites but don’t have many reuse options for them,” Popkin said.

According to the institute, putting solar on nearly half of the closed landfills in the U.S. could produce enough power for almost 8 million homes.

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