SITE HISTORY

Abstract

the city has an ethnically diverse population of approximately 95,000. It is home to heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano and the world’s first centrally powered electrical station, constructed by Thomas Edison in 1883 – giving Brockton the nicknames ‘City of Champions ’ and ‘City of Firsts’. It is thus fitting that one of the nation’s first brightfields was constructed here and that the Brockton Brightfield is New England’s largest photovoltaic (PV) facility. The term brightfield, coined by the Clinton administration in the late 1990s, is defined as: “the conversion of contaminated sites into usable land by bringing pollution-free solar energy and high-tech solar manufacturing jobs to these sites, including the placement of photovoltaic (PV) arrays that can reduce cleanup costs, building integrated solar energy systems as part of redevelopment, and solar manufacturing plants on brownfields. ”