A coal-fired power plant that started running more than a century ago is about to get a long-overdue retirement, and its electricity will be replaced by a solar farm and a battery storage system on an existing brownfield.

The project in Painesville, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, is one of about two dozen clean energy and emissions-reduction initiatives across the country that are sharing $4.3 billion in funding announced on Monday by the Biden administration.

It was a happy day for Doug Lewis, Painesville’s city manager. He and his colleagues have been considering how to close the city-owned power plant and replace it with a cleaner alternative. They also have wanted to redevelop the site of a long-shuttered chemical factory near the shores of Lake Erie.

The federal government will now pay about $80 million to install solar and batteries on the former factory land and to beautify the rest of the brownfield by planting a meadow of wildflowers and constructing a bike trail. The trail will provide a connection between Painesville and a regional trail that runs along the lake.

“It’s a major accomplishment,” Lewis said.

Painesville, with a population of about 21,000, has had a power plant since 1888. The current plant opened in 1908 and has a listed capacity of 47 megawatts, but Lewis said it typically runs at less than 20 megawatts. It’s a peaker plant, which means it only gets used on the few days per year when electricity demand is highest.

None of the plant’s original turbines are still in operation. The four current generating units went online in 1949, 1953, 1965 and 1990, according to the Energy Information Administration. Each one is about the size of a conversion van and they sit next to each other in the power plant building off one of the city’s main streets.

The solar farm will have capacity of 35 megawatts and the battery storage system will have capacity of 10 megawatts. It will be capable of running for three hours at that level before recharging.

The new construction will be on land that once was home to the Diamond Shamrock Corp. chemical plant, which operated there from 1912 to 1977 and occupied about 1,100 acres. The plant’s products included baking soda, chromium compounds and hydrochloric and sulfuric acids.

Since it closed, the community and the federal government have gone through the slow and trying process of removing pollutants to make the site safe for redevelopment.

The current project can serve as a case study for many things, including regional cooperation. Painesville, in Lake County, worked with officials in neighboring Cuyahoga County and the Cleveland city government to file an application with the federal government that included renewable energy projects for all of them.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the $129 million grant, which includes about $80 million for Painesville, about $30 million for the county and about $20 million for Cleveland.

“With these resources, we will be able to expand our solar infrastructure, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions,” Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne said in a statement.

Observers may ask if this money is well spent, and if the local governments might have been able to do the projects without the federal aid.

I asked Lewis this, and he said his city has been exploring ways to pay for the project, and would have needed more time to figure out how to cover costs.

For perspective, $80 million is close to the annual budget for the Painesville city government.

The federal money means the project gets done sooner and residents will be able to enjoy the benefits sooner. Those benefits include cleaner air and water because the coal plant won’t be operating, and avoided costs on electricity bills because the local utility won’t need a long-term loan to develop the solar farm and storage system.

The city should have access to the money later this year and the project will take about four years to complete.

“This is a crown jewel, for sure,” Lewis said.

I’ve long been fascinated by really old power plants, such as the one in Painesville. I wrote last year about an old plant in northeast Ohio, and how the city of Oberlin is trying to get to net-zero emissions at the same time that it continues to use the plant a few days per year.

In many cases, local officials have a sentimental attachment to the old plant that’s been in their town for generations while also understanding the costs of operation and the harm to the environment are almost impossible to justify.

Sometimes leaders need a nudge to close those old plants. That’s what the Inflation Reduction Act has provided in Painesville.