Enormous Alcoa site outside Austin

It's been many years since Alcoa Corp. decided to sell the site about an hour northwest of downtown Austin. Prospects came and went — an unsuccessful and long-shot pitch for Amazon.com Inc.'s second headquarters was even lobbed earlier this year — but the listing agent for what's now known as Sandow Lakes Ranch said he expects the 32,000-acre property southwest of Rockdale to be sold by the end of the year. Before then, the goal is to stitch together several leases to turn the dormant property into a revenue-producing site that Alcoa can then turn around and sell. At the end of it all, a limping part of Texas once a haven for blue-collar workers who smelted aluminum for Alcoa and ran a coal-fired power plant by Luminant could be re-energized by a bustling business park full of tenants focused on technology, renewable energy and next-generation industrial operations. Those thousands of modern workers — hundreds of them mining bitcoin — would be surrounded by thousands of acres of solar farms to boot.