Buffalo Niagara is a part of the Great Lakes region of North America, comprising most of western New York in the U.S. and the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario, Canada. The Regional Institute of the University of Buffalo has defined the region as including the eight westernmost counties in New York, as well as the Regional Municipality of Niagara and Hamilton in Ontario.

These eight counties in New York include: Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie, Genesee, Niagara, Orleans and Wyoming. The two municipalities in Canada that comprise the region are Regional Municipality of Niagara, Ontario, and Hamilton, Ontario

The region's hub is certainly Buffalo, N.Y., and the city with a population of 1,254,066 residents has demonstrated its importance to renewable resources and the reliance on power generated by wind, water and solar energy sources.

But this rebirth came after some upheaval occurring in the latter part of the 20th Century. In 1990, the city had fallen back below its 1900 population levels. The rerouting of Great Lakes shipping by the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway was a factor in this decline. Moreover, the closing or relocating of many of the steel mills and other heavy industries in the area also contributed to the decline.

A green rebirth
But these days, look around and it's apparent that the city's resilience has shown through, in spades. It's a reliance on green-centric excellence that has catapulted Buffalo to new heights.

The Buffalo Niagara Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) landed the American Solar Energy Society and North American Association for Environmental Education's (NAAEE) conference in 2009 and the National Solar Energy Conference, the premier conference on renewable energy and energy efficiency in the nation, in 2010.

The CVB was able to secure these conferences due to innovative energy-related efforts that are being forged in Buffalo, as well as a commitment to making the local hospitality industry greener. For the NAAEE conference, the CVB had to submit a proposal that highlighted how the local hospitality industry would address becoming more "green."

Those who descend on Buffalo with blueprints for land revitalization projects on brownfield parcels must be sure of one thing: architectural integrity and green building in Buffalo are of the upmost importance. One of Buffalo's many monikers is the City of Trees, which describes the abundance of green in the city. Buffalo has more than 20 parks with multiple ones being accessible from any part of the city.

The Olmsted Park and Parkway System is the hallmark of Buffalo's many green spaces. Three-fourths of city park land is part of the system, which comprises six major parks, eight connecting parkways, nine circles and seven smaller spaces. Begun in 1868 by Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux, the system was integrated into the city and marks the first attempt in America to lay out a coordinated system of public parks and parkways. The Olmsted designed portions of the Buffalo park system are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and are maintained by the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy.

Other examples of architectural prowess and green design are all around. The Burchfield Penney Art Center's new 75,000-square-foot home, designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, recently opened in November 2008. The new LEED-certified building is an elegant structure of interlocking forms and an innovative combination of materials, surrounded by a series of gardens and walkways. The first art museum built in Buffalo in over 100 years, the BPAC offers three times more exhibition space to house its comprehensive collection of works by the great watercolorist Charles Burchfield and regional artists such as Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, as well as an extensive learning lab for Buffalo State College students.

The Brownfield effect
As the Buffalo Niagara region examines its brownfield redevelopment opportunities, land use that involves commercial, residential and light industrial properties are available, but they are not the new wave of development that the region had identified.

Where a brownfield doesn't make economic sense for commercial development due to high cleanup costs or low demand for the finished property, a stand-alone renewable energy facility is seen as a viable option.

For example: Once housing one of the largest steel mills in the world, Steel Winds, located in Lackawanna, N.Y., is a 20-megawatt wind farm with eight turbines generating enough electric power for 9,000 residents. Turbines deliver power to the area power grid through electrical infrastructure that remained from the previous uses. It ceased operations in the early 1980s and has been largely idle since.

Image courtesy NASA/GSFC/MITI/ERSDAC/JAROS

Of course, the region is synonymous with the great Niagara Falls, where the capability to rely on vast water resources to produce hydroelectricity (the production of power through use of the gravitational force of falling or flowing water) is the most widely used form of renewable energy. Compared to wind farms, hydroelectricity power plants have a more predictable load factor. If the project has a storage reservoir, it can be dispatched to generate power when needed. Hydroelectric plants can be easily regulated to follow variations in power demand.

Overall, brownfield opportunities in the region has not experienced the visceral affect that regions like the Midwest—particularly Michigan, Indiana and Ohio—have.

One reason for that, states David Flynn, Esq., Partner, Phillips Lytle LLP, Buffalo, is that upstate New York never had a bubble, so to speak, in which to burst, as it relates to brownfield projects.

"From a brownfield perspective, the region always had slow methodical growth, and as a result it's not suffering from the economic slowdown in projects like other regions are," said Flynn. "We went through what Michigan is going through now because years ago Buffalo had a lot of steel and chemical plants that eventually went offshore back in the 1980s."

Flynn reinforces the notion that the region's sweet spot is to recognize brownfield properties as prime parcels to serve as the nucleus of power generation to not only use it on-site but to re-sell power to the market, which can bring the cost down 18-20%. "And it all started with a brownfield," said Flynn, who had a hand in the development of Steel Winds. "Marry up wind or biomass or even solar [to brownfields]: It can be a real powerful economic result."