West Virginia will allow solar arrays on abandoned mine lands.
This article appears in the May/June 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
In the spring of 2020, West Virginia’s Republican legislature voted decisively to allow the state’s two major electric utilities to develop 400 megawatts of solar power resources on abandoned mine lands. The legislation reflects a grudging acceptance of the decisive shift in electricity generation economics from coal to solar and other renewables in a state that ranks second in coal production and where coal mining still exerts a powerful pull on the state’s psyche and politics.
Those economics have made West Virginia’s fierce attachment to coal increasingly untenable, especially when yoked to the climate change–driven episodes of severe drought and increased flash flooding that the state has experienced. Worse still, the state’s coal protectionism increasingly did not fly with prospective employers seeking renewable-energy resources that the state just did not have. Why tarry in coal country, they likely reasoned, when North Carolina, the number two solar producer in the United States, is right next door? General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Target, Walmart, and other firms that employ significant numbers of West Virginians and have adopted clean-energy goals all wanted those options. State lawmakers ultimately had to bow to renewables realities and these impeccably capitalist demands.
Today, more than 90 percent of the state’s current power needs are still met by coal-fired plants. A December report published by the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development of West Virginia University’s College of Law estimated that the state could generate more than 70 percent of its power from wind and solar by 2035.
For more than a century, coal mining has obliterated huge swaths of forests and mountain hillsides. Those abandoned mining sites—well, some of them—now could become home to solar facilities, though the process is strewn with obstacles. Potential solar operators must reckon with the scarred, polluted landscapes that coal mining operations left behind and the burgeoning costs to remediate them that are likely to prove too daunting for West Virginia or other coal-producing states.
Abandoned mine lands are regulated under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, the first federal industry-specific environmental cleanup mandate, which requires states and tribal governments to remediate and restore mining lands and water sources with no identifiable owners.
To help pay for those projects, the act established a federal abandoned mine land trust fund. Administered by the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the trust fund initially amassed about $12 billion through fees collected from coal operators to fund cleanups and reclamation for industrial, recreational, or wildlife habitat uses. Not surprisingly, however, those fees have been reduced since the fund’s inception, which has compromised its ability to backstop the states’ efforts. Indeed, after decades in which the funds have been disbursed to states and tribal authorities for reclamation projects and United Mine Workers health and retirement funds, only a little more than $2 billion remains in the trust.
Addressing the accelerating pace of bankruptcies in the coal sector will only further erode the trust fund’s staying power, tossing the bills for cleanup and reclamation costs to states and localities, costs that they may not be able to meet. In West Virginia, abandoned mine lands comprise some 100,000 acres out of the 400,000 acres throughout Appalachia. At the end of April, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) introduced a bill that would extend the fee program, which is set to expire later this year, for another 15 years. A second bill, the RECLAIM Act, would convey $1 billion from the trust fund to states for reclamation projects.
Some coal-producing states have been much more proactive than West Virginia in identifying and mapping potential sites for renewable facilities. Next door, Virginia has been a leader in encouraging renewable development. In early May, the Virginia chapter of the Nature Conservancy announced a new partnership with solar developer Sun Tribe of Virginia and solar operator Sol Systems of Washington, D.C., to build some of the first utility-scale solar projects in the Central Appalachian coalfields on six sites spread across approximately 560 acres. The tracts are part of the 253,000 acres that the environmental group secured across Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee in 2019.
Not every abandoned site is suited to solar generation. Sites must be relatively flat, and contain existing transmission and distribution lines and road access. (Many sites that have been identified in Virginia are already very close to transmission lines.) Some former mine areas and the surrounding communities might be better suited to wilderness habitat or recreation activities than to solar projects.
Bobby Hughes heads the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation and spearheads the group’s research into abandoned mine land reclamation and development. He views reclamation as a process that provides employment opportunities for the former mine workers who know such lands well. They can parlay their knowledge into surveying careers using workforce training programs that provide instruction in field surveying, geographic information systems mapping, and water quality monitoring.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that renewables’ share of electricity generation will more than double by 2050.
However, the notion of a “one-for-one replacement of coal jobs with solar renewables” is a fantasy, according to Ben Cahill, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “There’s a simplistic idea that you hear sometimes that we can replace coal jobs with renewable energy,” he says. “It’s a great idea to use that land for another energy project, but that won’t work everywhere; a lot of coal communities just don’t have the solar radiation—the sunlight—that they need to support viable solar projects.”
As Appalachia confronts the green-energy transition, the country’s top coal-producing state, Wyoming, has decided that holding out is a better strategy. Shannon Anderson, an attorney for the Powder River Basin Resource Council, an environmental group in Wyoming’s mining region, says that state officials have yet to seriously debate the consequences of the coal industry’s collapse, and instead are determined to prop up the sector even though the problem of sorting out how to deal with firms that go bankrupt and do not have enough funds to complete reclamation projects continues to grow.
With 18 active thermal coal mines, Wyoming remains firmly committed to coal, despite the market signals that thermal coal (used to produce electricity) is fading faster than metallurgical coal (used to make steel). Anderson notes that unlike some oil and gas companies that have diversified into renewables, coal firms have been hamstrung by their failure to shift gears: Many coal operators in Wyoming have been in and out of bankruptcy multiple times.
“Wyoming appears to be a little bit less enthusiastic about moving into the 21st century than some other states,” says Sean Gallagher, the Solar Energy Industries Association’s vice president for state and regulatory affairs. “Everything is moving in a different direction, and it seems that they want to go backwards on this. When they finally come to the ‘oops’ moment, they’re not going to be well positioned.”
The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that renewables’ share of electricity generation will double by 2050, from 21 percent in 2020 to 42 percent by 2050. Solar generation comprises most of that increase. Both coal and nuclear power are projected to drop by about half.
In April, United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts joined with Sen. Manchin to announce the union’s support for a green transition—contingent on the federal government providing a diverse set of job protections, new employment opportunities, and financial assistance for laid-off workers. Roberts also called for preserving UMWA jobs by employing carbon capture technology at coal-fired power plants; loans to help sustain the industry; infrastructure rehabilitation for coalfield communities; and incentives to bring steel production back to this country, specifically to utilize metallurgical coal.
President Biden has exhibited a firmer commitment to coal country than his immediate predecessors. Biden’s American Jobs Plan has called for some $16 billion to create jobs cleaning up and reclaiming abandoned coal mine lands, while last month, a report from the administration’s Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization identified the 25 most at-risk coal communities for immediate federal relief. There is an estimated $38 billion in existing federal monies that could be steered to these regions. Five of them are in West Virginia, the most of any state.
But union officials are less than optimistic that the federal government can translate its ambitious aims into an action plan that benefits workers already enduring massive job losses. “There’s never been a just transition in the history of the United States,” said Roberts, even as he bowed to the realities of the clean-energy revolution.
