In October 2014, the final version of the RE-Powering America’s Land Initiative (the “Initiative”) Action Plan 2.0, was released, articulating the goals and objectives of the Initiative and the activities it expected to pursue over the next two years. In that plan, we committed to perform an evaluation of Initiative activities to help improve the usefulness of technical support, outreach and tools provided to communities, developers and other stakeholders involved in the Initiative. That work was done in two stages with the support of Industrial Economics, Inc.:

In April 2015, the first stage of the evaluation was to complete an evaluation scoping assessment. The assessment included a new logic model; posed questions of interest to assess resources, tools and knowledge products; and explored methods and data that would be used to answer such questions.

Based on the results of this scoping assessment, EPA identified several aspects of the Initiative to continue to evaluate and, in June 2015, began the next phase of the evaluation. In July 2016, the Evaluation of the RE-Powering America’s Land Initiative Report was completed.

The evaluation has benefitted from interviews with a host of stakeholders. Efforts to continue to reach out to stakeholders in a variety of ways will be ongoing, in order to help ensure that activities aimed to effectively encourage renewable energy on contaminated lands, landfills and mine sites are meaningful.