Fourteen wind turbines stand in a row along Route 5 in Lackawanna, on the strip of Lake Erie shore where Bethlehem Steel used to unload ore boats. They are not built on soil. The 30 acres under them is mostly slag, the glassy leftover rock the blast furnaces poured off for eighty years, piled up and left there. Somebody looked at a heap of industrial waste, ran the numbers on the wind coming off the lake, and decided it was a foundation.
Why here
The former Bethlehem Steel plant covers roughly 1,600 acres with about 2.2 miles of lakefront. After steelmaking ended, most of it sat behind fence while state and federal environmental agencies worked through what a century of heavy industry leaves in the ground. EPA's cleanup work (contaminated soil removed, a protective cap installed, groundwater monitoring wells put in) reached the point in early 2006 where 30 acres could be built on.
Wind projects usually go up in farm country, where land is cheap and nobody is nearby. This one had advantages a cornfield doesn't. The mill's access roads were already graded and already went where the turbines needed to go. The transmission lines that once fed a steel plant were still standing, and they now push power the other direction, into the New York Independent System Operator grid. Reusing all of it took a large bite out of the construction budget. The land is also, as brownfields go, about as unwanted as land gets, which is the point. New York's 2002 brownfield law gave the site's owner relief from remediation liability, and without that nothing gets built here at all.
Eight turbines, then six more
Construction on the first phase started in September 2006. Eight Clipper Windpower Liberty turbines went up, 2.5 megawatts each, 20 megawatts total. They were pushing power to the grid by April 2007 and reached full commercial operation on June 5, 2007. The Liberty units were assembled in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and at the time they were the largest wind turbines manufactured in North America. Steel Winds was the model's first commercial deployment, which is a polite way of saying Lackawanna got to find the bugs. Installation ran late, partly because the wind off Lake Erie was too strong too often to safely lift a 144-foot blade into place.
Phase II added six more turbines and 15 megawatts, going active in early 2012. That brings the site to 14 turbines and 35 megawatts, enough electricity for somewhere around 15,000 homes by EPA's estimate. UPC Wind, later First Wind, developed and operated the project with BQ Energy. POWER magazine, which named it a 2007 project of the year, called it the largest wind farm in the United States developed in an urban setting; you will also see it described as one of the largest urban wind farms in the world. Either way, the unusual part isn't the size. It's the address.
What it is and isn't
Be clear about the scale of the trade. EPA counted five permanent jobs at Steel Winds and about 140 construction jobs. The plant that stood here employed close to 20,000 people. Nothing built on this ground since 1983 has replaced that, and the turbines don't pretend to. What they do is produce revenue on acreage that was producing nothing, pay some tax into a city that lost roughly $4 million a year when the mill closed, and keep the land in use instead of in limbo.
They also changed what the drive looks like. For decades the view south from Buffalo along the lake was rusting sheds and empty stacks. Now there's motion in it. Lackawanna's mayor at the time of the first phase, Norman Polanski, told NBC News the project had "changed the attitude of people here." That's a modest claim, and it's probably the accurate one.
Standing where the furnaces stood
Lackawanna's three landmarks are one story told in sequence. A company built a city and ran it for eighty years. It left, all at once, and took most of the tax base with it. Our Lady of Victory Basilica went up on the hill during the good years, paid for in quarters by mail, and it is still open and still feeding people. The turbines came last, spinning on the crushed rock the furnaces spat out. Nothing here is a clean ending. It's just a place that kept going.
Wear it
The Steel Winds row is one of the few skylines in Western New York that didn't exist twenty years ago, and it reads instantly from Route 5, the Skyway, or a boat. Our Steel Winds tee is part of the ALL America City collection, one real landmark per shirt, drawn from the places people here actually navigate by. See the rest in the full town-by-town guide.