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The Steel Mill That Helped Build the American West Goes Green

Wind and solar power will replace coal at a Colorado furnace.

Continuous cast steel billets are prepared to be cut to length in the Evraz Rocky Mountain Steel Mill. Soon the mill will operate on electricity generated by solar power.Credit...Joe Amon/The Denver Post, via Getty Images

Mr. Gillis, a former environmental reporter for The Times, is a contributing opinion writer.

PUEBLO, Colo. — Sparks flew a hundred feet in the air. Bare metal shrieked as powerful jolts of electricity passed through a furnace that melts scrap — like old cars and tossed-out refrigerators — into puddles, turning them into shiny recycled steel.

As I watched recently, the great arc furnace at one of the nation’s most storied steel mills was sucking in more electrical power than any other machine in Colorado, produced in part at a plant a few miles away that burns Wyoming coal by the ton.

But the electrical supply for the mill is changing.

A huge solar farm, one of the largest in the country, is to be built here on the grounds of the Evraz Rocky Mountain Steel mill. In addition to producing power for the giant mill, the farm, Bighorn Solar, will supply homes and businesses across Colorado. So far as I can tell, Evraz Rocky Mountain will be the first steel mill in the world that can claim to be powered largely by solar energy.

The announcement at the plant a couple of weeks ago, by Gov. Jared Polis and other dignitaries, was a striking turn of events in the history of American industry.

James Herald, president and chief executive of Evraz’s North American unit, declared that the mill “will produce the greenest steel and the greenest steel products in the world.”

There is a caveat: The mill operates 24 hours a day and solar panels do not, of course. Over the course of a year the solar farm is expected to produce electricity roughly equal to 95 percent of the mill’s annual demand. On sunny days, excess power will be sold to the Colorado grid, but at night the mill will draw power from the grid, which still includes a good bit of fossil energy.

But that is getting fixed, too. Xcel Energy, the utility that supplies the Pueblo mill with electricity, has made one of the most ambitious commitments in the country to clean up its system. Luckily, about the time solar panels are going dark, strong winds whip up across the plains of eastern Colorado, where wind turbines will turn it into power.

Alice Jackson, who runs the Colorado division of Xcel, told me that at certain hours during the night, wind farms can supply as much as 70 percent of the power on the state grid, and that is likely to be true more and more often as the company signs contracts with new wind farms.

But, remarkable as it may be, one steel company going green is only a start on the kind of change we need.

A vision is developing, as we see electric Teslas, Bolts and bikes scooting through traffic, of how we might squeeze dirty fossil fuels out of our transportation system. That goes for buildings, too: Nearly a dozen cities in California have largely banned gas burning in newly constructed buildings, and the moment nears when gas bans will jump to other states.

The foundation for cleaner cars and cleaner buildings will be a cleaned-up electric grid to power them, and the country is making headway there. But that’s just one step. The production of the vital materials on which human society is built — iron, steel and cement — is responsible for more than 15 percent of the global greenhouse emissions that are overheating the planet. Many other industrial processes use dirty fuels, too, and we have barely begun thinking about how to clean all that up.

The task is beyond urgent, not that you would know it from listening to the nonsense spewing from Washington. But state governments led by Democrats are pushing forward, with Governor Polis and a handful of other governors and legislatures in the vanguard. A Republican senator from Colorado, Cory Gardner, turned up at the announcement to lend his support.

Why would a steel mill install a solar power plant next door? The company cares about going green, certainly, but this is also about money.

We do not know the exact price the company will pay for its solar power — that is a secret under Colorado law — but we do know that the cost of large-scale solar farms has plummeted. To improve its finances, Evraz seems to be locking in low-cost power for the long term.

Yes, solar projects like this still receive federal subsidies, but those are scheduled to be phased down. We seem to be heading quickly toward a world where solar panels, unsubsidized, will be the cheapest way human beings have ever found to produce electricity.

The steel plant here, founded in 1881 and known for most of its life as Colorado Fuel and Iron, is the mill that built the American West. Most of the steel rails that bound the region to the rest of the United States came out of the mill, and high-quality rails are still among its most important products.

In the early 20th century, the plant was the centerpiece of a coal-and-steel industrial complex spread out across the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, and that industry endured one of the bloodiest episodes of labor strife in American history. Up to 200 people may have died in the violence.

The blast furnace that once produced virgin steel here shut down decades ago, but the mill found a new life recycling steel, and still employs more than a thousand workers. Evraz, a Russian steel conglomerate, bought the mill in 2007.

A symbol of the ravages of unfettered capitalism in the early 20th century, the mill has now become a symbol of environmental progress in the early 21st. Anybody running a railroad and wanting green steel will certainly be taking a fresh look at this mill as a supplier.

To be sure, some of the steel recycled here will go into making pipes to be sold to the oil and gas industry for producing yet more fossil fuels. We have not reached Nirvana yet. On the other hand, the company responsible for installing hundreds of thousands of solar panels at the mill will be Lightsource BP, a venture partly controlled by the giant oil company formerly known as British Petroleum.

As I walked deep into the bowels of the old mill the other day, looking at buildings and signs from the 19th century, I could sense the ghosts of the immigrants who came here to build America, some of whose descendants still work at the mill. Then I noticed something else: From just about any vantage point in the old mill, you could look outside and see the sun shining.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Justin Gillis, a former Times editor and environmental reporter, has been a contributor to the Opinion section since January 2018. He is working on a book about energy policy. @JustinHGillis Facebook

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