Maybe you’ve never heard of Big Muskie before, but it was a giant, coal-eating, walking crane that sucked it’s last diesel in the early 1990s after more than two decades of service. It dug through a site near Zanesville, Ohio, removing up to 220 cubic yards of rock, earth and coal in its bucket. Big Muskie’s former stomping grounds will soon be home to one of Ohio’s, if not the Midwest’s, largest solar farms, the 49.9-megawatt Turning Point Solar farm.

Turning Point Solar is being built on approximately 750 acres of reclaimed coal-mining land.

“It was the largest dragline in the country,” said AEP Ohio spokesperson Terri Flora.

The project is being made possible through a partnership with the former site owner’s subsidiary, AEP Ohio, Agile Energy Inc. and New Harvest Ventures.

AEP Ohio is a unit of American Electric Power (NYSE: AEP). Construction will begin in the summer of 2012 and is expected to be fully operational in 2015.

It’s the second solar facility for AEP Ohio and the first that AEP Ohio will operate, Flora said.

“We have another plant or facility, Wyandot solar. It’s a 10-megawatt plant. We don’t own it or operate it. But we do purchase the power from that,” she said.

But they have a new approach for the Muskie plant.

“This is a project that’s much bigger than that. We originally looked at purchasing the power, but have now entered into the agreement to operate and maintain it once it’s built,” Flora said. “I think it made sense for at least this project. It’s on land that we had once mined and reclaimed. It made sense for us to be more a part of this project than we had been in the past.”

The project will help AEP Ohio meet Ohio’s renewable energy standard, according to Flora. Under the state’s requirements, AEP Ohio must supply 0.06 percent of its load in 2012 with solar generation, ramping up annually until reaching a total of 0.5 percent by the end of 2024, according to the company.

The project will use monocrystalline photovoltaics made by Spanish company Isofoton, according to Flora.

Isofoton will locate a manufacturing facility in Ohio as part of the agreements made with Agile and New Horizons.

The manufacturing plant will employ up to 330 people when fully operational. Another 300 positions will be created by the construction of the Turning Point project itself.

Image courtesy of Big Muskie's fansite.