Boom Towns, Second Boom
How Old Mining Hubs Could Anchor the Clean Energy Buildout Instead of the Next Desert Land Rush
On a January early morning in Nevada, the highway feels empty.
The town’s cafe serving coffee. Motel sign lights “vacancy”. A main street built for a boom that left decades ago.
Then you see it.
A fenced substation away at the edge of town. High-voltage lines peeling off in three directions. Steel and wire that, for some reason, never packed up when everything else did.
Welcome to the after-boom grid.
These are the places I keep coming back to. Towns that gave their best ore, coal, water, and kids to the first industrial century. Now they’re quieter, smaller, older. But still wired into the big machine.
I’m calling them Grid Boom Towns. People still live here, still coach Little League and show up for school board meetings. But the big money left. The grid did not.
Brownfields, not backcountry
Out in the West, big clean-energy projects keep landing on what looks, from a plane, like “empty” desert. Sagebrush seas. Tortoise country. Shrublands where pronghorn still slide under fences and golden eagles still ride the thermals.
At the same time, grid boom towns sit on degraded ground, next to substations and rail lines, surrounded by old pits and tailings. They’re brownfields with transmission, water hookups, roads, and workforces.
If we’re serious about protecting intact habitat and still building out solar, wind, and battery storage at scale, this is the obvious question:
Why aren’t grid boom towns at the front of the line?
Tonopah, Butte, Helper — a quick tour
Tonopah, Nevada.
Silver and gold built a main street that feels a size too big now. The mines rose and fell. But the town sits in the middle of serious wires between Las Vegas and Reno. A few miles out, the Crescent Dunes solar tower and its ring of mirrors mark one wave of “new energy.” Now there are proposals for even more solar and storage on nearby desert.
All the while, mine lands and disturbed flats closer to town sit right there. Already scraped. Already changed.
Butte, Montana.
“The richest hill on earth” tore itself open for copper, silver, and gold. The legacy is a Superfund landscape, water managed, the Berkeley Pit sitting like a toxic inland sea.
Butte has something most places don’t. Huge substations, big power lines, and people who know exactly what happens when an industry arrives at full sprint and leaves at full shrug. That makes it a prime candidate for carefully designed solar, geothermal, and storage on cleaned-up mine land.
Get it right, and Butte becomes a model of what a grid boom town can be. Get it wrong, and it’s just Season Two of extraction with different branding.
Helper, Utah.
Helper was named for the locomotives that “helped” trains claw over the grade into the Wasatch. Coal camps once packed the side canyons. Now most of those camps are foundations and stories.
But the grid never left. Lines cross the hills. Old coal plants sit retired up the road. There’s even talk of pumped-storage hydropower in the canyons above town. A giant, quiet battery in the cliffs. Meanwhile, downtown Helper is drifting toward art galleries, murals, and small-town revival.
On a map, Tonopah, Butte, and Helper look different. In the energy story, they rhyme. All three are grid boom towns with serious grid bones and scarred ground already sacrificed. All three could anchor clean-energy buildouts that spare more intact country from first-time industrialization.
The missing category
Here’s the weird part.
Federal rules technically like this idea in the abstract. We have:
Programs to put clean energy on brownfields and old mines.
Big planning efforts to steer solar and wind away from the most sensitive habitats.
Tax credits and loans for “energy communities” hit by coal closures.
But we don’t treat grid boom towns as their own, high-priority category.
There’s no national “grid boom atlas” that layers:
old mine and mill sites
existing substations and big wires
reclamation status
tribal nations and downstream communities
and key wildlife corridors
There’s no simple rule that says:
“If you already lived through the boom and the bust and still have grid capacity, you’re first in line for the next round of investment, if the community wants it and the cleanup pencils out.”
Instead, everything happens one project, one county hearing at a time. The cheapest flat land near a wire wins. Sometimes that’s an after-boom town. Too often it’s undisturbed desert or working farms that then become the next “sacrifice zones.”
The asterisk: tribal nations and old scars
There’s also a hard truth baked into a lot of after-boom ground: many of these mines never felt “after” for the people most affected.
Uranium scars on Navajo land. Hard-rock mines around pueblos. Copper and lithium pushed into landscapes that hold sacred sites, burial grounds, and the headwaters of communities’ only water.
Even if a site is technically off-reservation, it can still bleed into tribal aquifers and rivers. For many nations, “clean energy” pitched on old mining ground sounds less like a new chapter and more like a sequel: different product, same playbook.
So an honest after-boom strategy has to do two things at once:
Stop treating tribal lands and neighboring communities as default dumping grounds for “green” buildout.
Start centering tribal leadership and ownership in any project that touches their homelands, watersheds, or cultural landscapes. Whether or not the lines on the map say “reservation.”
Otherwise, we’re just repainting the machinery.
What an after-boom strategy could look like
If we wanted to make this real here’s the skeleton:
1. Map it in the open.
Build a public atlas of after-boom towns and mine-scarred districts with grid access. Include contamination, wildlife, water, tribal nations, and local demographics. No more “we didn’t know there was a community right there.”
2. Make “brownfield first” a real thing, not a slogan.
Layer extra tax credits, faster interconnection, and loan support onto projects that:
sit on already-disturbed ground in these after-boom zones,
meet strict cleanup and monitoring standards, and
come with local or tribal revenue-sharing and ownership.
If developers still want to go carve up intact desert instead, fine, but they shouldn’t get the same perks.
3. Give towns a real seat at the table.
Not just listening sessions. Hard leverage.
That might look like:
guaranteed local hiring and training pipelines (miners to battery techs, linemen to grid-storage operators),
community trusts funded by project revenue,
and clear veto points on design choices that affect dust, water, and viewsheds.
4. Lock in guardrails.
After-boom doesn’t mean “anything goes.” It means:
no building over fragile caps that keep toxins in place,
real air and water monitoring in public view,
and decommissioning plans with money actually set aside, not just promises in a PDF.
We already learned the hard way what happens when we skip the fine print. This time, the fine print has to be the point.
Why the after-boom grid matters
If we keep pretending every new energy project is a blank slate, the path of least resistance will keep sliding toward quiet valleys and wild ridgelines.
If we build an after-boom grid on purpose, the story shifts.
The towns that powered the first century of heavy industry get a chance to power the clean-up century, on better terms, with more say. The lines and substations that once fed smelters and draglines start feeding batteries, heat pumps, and electric buses.
And the deserts, grasslands, and forests that still feel whole? They get a fighting chance to stay that way.
The grid remembers where we’ve already taken our bites. After Grid boom towns remember too.
The real question is whether our siting rules, our maps, and our politics are finally ready to line up with that memory and let the places that gave so much become the places that help us do better.
Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.