By Ramona Schindelheim for WorkingNation.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for West Virginia News Service reporting for the WorkingNation-Public News Service Collaboration
As the country transitions to green energy, and natural gas has become more affordable, the appetite for coal continues to fade. By 2025, electricity powered by solar energy is forecast to jump significantly in the United States, while coal production is expected to hit its lowest level since the 1960s.
Employment in the coal mining industry has been on a steady downward path since the mid-1980s when there were 178,000 people employed in the industry. Compare that to roughly 43,000 today.
For regions like Appalachia, once the country's leader in coal production, the impact is stark. West Virginia - the only state entirely in the Appalachian region - has been particularly hard hit.
At $27,346, its per capita income level is the second-lowest in the country, only slightly bigger than Mississippi. Its labor participation rate of 54.8% is also one of the lowest in the country and many young people are leaving the state to find opportunities elsewhere.
It's those kinds of financial realities that are the driving force behind a new generation of West Virginians determined to stay put and rebuild Appalachia's economy.
"We're not here to demonize the coal industry. We're here to build upon its legacy and continue our birthright to produce energy, but through new tools," says Jacob Hannah, CEO of the nonprofit Coalfield Development, which is training and hiring workers in growing industries.
Embracing a Diversified Economy That is Creating Jobs
"When folks look at Appalachia, you hear a lot about the loss of jobs, loss of employers, due to the coal companies shutting down and other companies shutting down because of that. There's a large amount of people who have given up looking for work because there's either not a lot of employment near their isolated community in Appalachia, or they've been impacted by the dilapidation of coal," explains Hannah.
Coalfield Development serves 21 counties in southern West Virginia and is headquartered in Huntington, one of the cities hardest hit by the opioid overdose epidemic.
"We focus on hiring people facing barriers to employment and connecting them to our personal, professional, and academic development model. These are folks coming out of incarceration, coming out of recovery, and coming from being laid off from the coal mines or other industries."
Hannah says there's a combination of need and opportunity right now in West Virginia and the nonprofit's strategy is to learn from the past and move away from an economy that was so dependent on one industry.
"Our solution to avoiding those challenges, and reversing some of the damage, is to go from a mono economy to a diversified economy where there's multiple opportunities and multiple markets that can bring up the workforce."
The nonprofit wholly or partially owns a number of employment-based social enterprises, "enterprises that exist for the purpose of advancing the well-being of its employees."
It's through these businesses that Coalfield Development offers paid on-the-job training in what it sees as industries with a future in West Virginia, including renewable energy, construction, manufacturing, re-use and recycling, and agriculture.
"We have what you would call 'brain drain' in the region. A lot of people in their 20s have left for other opportunities. That leaves a large swath of people either just coming out of high school, or folks in their 30s or older. We've had trainees as old as in their 60s," says Hannah.
He adds, "There's no shortage of people that need jobs and there's no shortage of employers that need the people. It's a matter of connecting the two."
The most comprehensive program requires a three-year commitment. Workers receive 33 hours a week of paid on-the-job training, six hours of community college to obtain an associates degree, and three hours of mentoring and coaching to remove barriers such as regaining a driver's license for people who might be justice-impacted. A shorter model offers paid on-the-job training as an introduction to one of the sectors, along with mentoring support for six months.
"You're also in a union job, so it's paying good wages with good benefits," says Hannah.
There is also a free one-month program offered around in-demand industries such as solar energy and construction. "They're not on our payroll. They're community individuals that are looking for information on a topic that aligns with the employment demand in the community or region," he adds.
Mining the Sun in West Virginia
Coalfield Development has hired more than 1,700 people for local jobs through its training programs since its founding in 2010. Hannah estimates that 75% of the trainees have remained in the workforce, with another 25% choosing to continue their education.
The nonprofit has supported or started 72 new businesses, creating another 800 new jobs, according to Hannah.
The biggest social enterprise in the Coalfield Development ecosystem is Solar Holler, one of the largest solar installers in West Virginia. The jobs provided through the training program are IBEW union apprenticeships.
Solar Holler's website says its mission is to "Mine the Sun" and touts that "For generations, Appalachians have powered America. We continue that legacy with clean energy that empowers our neighbors and renews our communities."
In just over a decade the company has completed more than 1,400 solar installations in homes, businesses, and nonprofits.
Solar Holler and Coalfield Development are part of a broader coalition called ACT (Appalachian Climate Technology) NOW that competes for federal dollars to have a bigger impact. The coalition has been awarded roughly $88 million dollars in federal grants and matches from non-federal sources.
That investment has translated into a bigger push to train workers in the solar energy industry in the region, a trend that is evident around the country. The demand for solar installers nationwide is expected to grow 22% over the next eight years.
In West Virginia, where the minimum wage is $8.75 an hour, solar installers average nearly twice that amount at $17.31 an hour.
'I was pretty much just scheming to get out, pretty much as soon as possible'
When 21-year-old Dylan Albright discovered there was a free, one-month program to learn more about solar energy jobs, he was intrigued.
He says he and his friends have long been interested in sustainability, but after high school he went to a trade school and boot camp for computer systems repairs. While he was offered part-time jobs, he says the wages were not much different that what he was earning in a warehouse for a retailer and believed he'd need to leave West Virginia.
"For pretty much my entire middle school, high school, and even some of my early adult life, I was pretty much just scheming to get out, pretty much as soon as possible," says Albright.
When they learned about the free program at Coalfield Development, he and his friends signed up.
"When we heard that there was a program teaching people about the ins and outs of solar, including installation and how it worked, it was kind of a no brainer for us to hop on that and learn as much as we could about it," says Albright.
Last fall, Albright says, he learned everything from design and installation of solar panels to how to operate a forklift and eventually earned certifications that included the OSHA 10-Hour Construction Certification.
He now works full-time as a solar installer for Solar Holler, with insurance and benefits through his union. "I'm comfortable knowing that if I needed to, I could live alone without a roommate. I could support myself and still be building savings."
Albright says he likes his new job, but cautions it may not be for everyone.
"You're working long hours, up on a roof, and on a harness. It does get the back and upper body working, for sure. But if you like moving your body, and you like having a variety in the tasks that you can do, it's a pretty nice job." he says. "Honestly, it's the best job I've had by far, I feel pretty good. I feel like I could stick around for a lot longer than I used to think."
'For me, it's deeply personal'
Coalfield Development CEO Hannah is a fifth generation West Virginian. Three generations of his family worked in the coal industry and he is personally invested in building a better future for Appalachians through a more diversified economy, one that builds on the energy that powered it for so long.
"We're not here to just mine coal, we're mining the sun. Coal is just sunlight that's trapped in the soil for a billion years and we are just cutting out that middle man of the billion years and going straight to the source.
"For me, it's deeply personal. It's deeply spiritual. It's what I consider a just transition, something that's been needed for the last 100 years.
"This work is what I would have wished my dad had the chance to do. I saw him get laid off from the coal mines and get his last check in the mail. I've seen businesses in my community shut down. I, myself, had to leave to go to school to find better opportunities.
"Now, it is seeing folks be able to have agency and dignity again, and for our region not to continue to be this battleground area for this narrative that it's down in its mouth, down on its luck, and just doesn't wanna work. None of that's true. This is a way to give us the tools to prove that in a way that honors our legacy, as well."
Ramona Schindelheim wrote this article for WorkingNation.
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New York's Building Code Council is set to include the All-Electric Buildings Act in its 2025 code update.
The 2023 law bans natural gas and other fossil fuels in new buildings. All-electric cooking and heating will be required for new buildings of less than seven stories by 2026, and 2029 for taller buildings.
Michael Hernandez, New York policy director with Rewiring America, said it's one thing to pass laws and quite another to implement them.
"It is vitally important that we stop digging ourselves in a hole by building new buildings with fossil-fuel combustion systems installed in them," said Hernandez. "Those fossil-fuel combustion systems would be in place for the next 20 years, if not longer."
He added that it's impractical to install fossil-fuel systems that would be phased out before the end of its lifespan.
The council will hold a public comment period before voting on the new code language. Buildings are 32% of New York's annual greenhouse gas emissions - making them the state's largest emitter.
To meet its 2050 net-zero emissions goal, the state has to install 396,000 heat pumps above expected sales.
While the new language applies to new buildings, other programs exist for homeowners and building owners to go green.
Hernandez noted that funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are helping existing buildings convert to electricity.
He said this all begins with a free home energy audit from NYSERDA.
"They'll have a qualified contractor come look at your house," said Hernandez, "and say, 'okay, these are the energy efficiency measures that you would benefit from, and these efficiency measures will make your energy costs go down.' "
Those contractors can help homeowners receive state and federal rebates to implement the recommended measures.
Low-income New Yorkers can qualify for 100% of electrification and climate efficiency rebates depending on a person's household income.
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By Ysabelle Kempe for SmartCitiesDive.
Broadcast version by Eric Galatas for Colorado News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Ambitious climate goals are bringing cities and counties face-to-face with a serious reality: the need for carbon dioxide removal.
Years ago, those concerned about the impacts of climate change were optimistic that reducing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide would be enough to address the problem. That era has passed. We've reached a point where carbon dioxide must also be removed from the atmosphere to meet international climate goals, according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Although the private sector is spearheading many of the carbon dioxide removal projects currently underway, some U.S. local governments are beginning to consider leading such efforts. A survey of 128 city and county climate action plans revealed that about a third include specific mention of carbon dioxide removal, according to a 2023 report by carbon management firm Carbon Direct and Boulder County, Colorado.
"A growing number of [cities] have discovered that it's not going to be easy to [accomplish net-zero emissions] just through decarbonization," said Chris Neidl, impact director at Rethinking Removals, a nonprofit that aims to grow the carbon removal industry. "Carbon removal is [a strategy] that the vanguard of those places has already arrived at."
It's still a new concept for local governments to be the ones taking the lead on carbon removal projects. Even among the 128 local climate action plans highlighted in Carbon Direct and Boulder County's report, many describe carbon removal as a secondary benefit of actions that primarily address other issues. Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, plans to plant trees for shade. The fact that trees suck up and store planet-warming carbon dioxide is a bonus, the report says.
The term carbon removal casts a large net, describing the process of drawing planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it for decades, centuries or longer. Carbon removal strategies are usually categorized in two buckets: nature-based solutions like reforestation and technology-based solutions like direct air capture.
"The localities have often focused on nature-based [solutions] because the technology-based are more expensive. There's less known about them," said Wil Burns, co-director of American University's Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal.
However, local governments could play a meaningful role in bringing down the cost of the technology by serving as laboratories for testing small-scale projects, he said. "Because the cost is so high, we're not getting sufficient demand for carbon removal," he said. "But we're not going to get sufficient demand until the costs come down."
Local projects "can show what doesn't work before we start trying to spend huge amounts of money at the national level," Burns said. Already, the Biden administration has poured billions of dollars into supporting direct air capture technology.
But carbon removal, especially done with technology-based solutions, is controversial. Critics including scientists and climate advocates worry that it's a distraction from the unfinished imperative of transitioning off fossil fuels - a concern bolstered by oil companies' public enthusiasm for carbon removal as a way to continue selling fossil fuels for years to come. Additionally, environmental justice advocates have criticized the fact that some operations for carbon removal projects are sited near neighborhoods long burdened with industrial pollution.
Local carbon removal in practice
Undertaking a carbon removal project can be daunting for local governments that lack the technical expertise, staff and money to "do it right," Burns said. "There's ways to do [carbon removal] responsibly," he said, "and there's ways to do it irresponsibly."
Even seemingly simple nature-based projects must be carefully planned to deliver the intended effect. "If you don't have the capital to maintain those trees, a lot of times those trees die in a couple of years," Burns said.
Measuring the amount of carbon dioxide such projects remove presents another technical hurdle. "If you can't measure, it didn't happen. That's no overstatement," Neidl said, noting that measurement, reporting and verification processes are improving.
Burns pointed to Boulder as the type of jurisdiction poised to succeed at carbon removal. "They're backed by a large research university there that does a lot of its own carbon removal," he said. "The state of Colorado provides resources."
Boulder County is also a founding member of the 4Corners Carbon Removal Coalition, a network of six local governments in Colorado, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico committed to undertaking locally led carbon removal projects.
Last year, the coalition's first campaign awarded $390,000 in grants to four local projects that store carbon pulled from the atmosphere in concrete.
In Flagstaff, Arizona, for example, a masonry plant will be retrofitted to capture from the air carbon dioxide, which it will use to cure concrete blocks. A project in Durango, Colorado, will build wall panels from industrial hemp, which removes carbon from the air via photosynthesis faster than any other agricultural rotation crop, according to 4Corners. That project will also store carbon in the form of biochar in cement-like building materials. Biochar is a stable, durable form of carbon created by partially combusting organic matter in the presence of limited oxygen.
Concrete-focused projects have emerged as a promising carbon removal avenue for local governments for several reasons. The process of storing carbon in concrete is well understood, Burns said. Plus, municipalities are some of the largest concrete customers, 4Corners co-founder and Director Ramón Alatorre said. "There are concrete facilities pretty much scattered all over the world, nearby any sort of urban and non-urban space," he said. "Any projects that we could demonstrate as being able to work at a block facility in Flagstaff, that's inherently replicable."
Alatorre said that at this early stage, his group is more concerned with projects' scalability and replicability than how much carbon they individually remove from the atmosphere.
"That said, we want to see good measurement," he said. "We want high-quality carbon removal, but if it's a project that's only going to remove less than 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide, that could be fine in terms of wanting to catalyze something that has potential."
Now, 4Corners is working on a campaign to support projects that leverage what it calls "liability" biomass to remove and durably store carbon from the atmosphere. That biomass can be small trees, branches and other residue that accumulates in overgrown forests or is left by logging operations, or it could be yard waste and municipal organics. Such biomass sources are rich in carbon that has been removed from the air, but without intervention, they soon release carbon back into the atmosphere as they decompose or burn, Alatorre said. The forest residues also pose other risks, he added: They can increase wildfire risk and challenge reforestation efforts.
What's next for local carbon removal
Carbon removal efforts by municipalities outside of what Burns calls the "usual cast" of communities that are progressive on climate action, like Boulder, "may bode well" for the uptake of locally led carbon removal projects, he said. But it's not yet clear whether such homegrown efforts will become mainstream, he said.
"A lot of cities are contemplating that carbon removal is going to be part of their net-zero plans," Burns said. "But I think most of [them are] contemplating they're just going to farm out and buy [carbon] credits."
For local governments interested in this work, explicitly incorporating carbon removal into net-zero plans "is a really important first step," Rethinking Removal's Neidl said. Local and state decision-makers can incorporate environmental justice requirements in carbon removal policy, he added, pointing to a Massachusetts bill that would require state-supported projects to be approved by the director of environmental justice.
A California group is looking to create a model for bringing the community into the development of industrial carbon removal. The Community Alliance for Direct Air Capture - equipped with $3 million in federal funding - plans to work with residents in the San Joaquin Valley to determine whether and how a carbon removal facility should be built in the community. If the project doesn't gain the community's support, the coalition has promised to halt it, E&E News reports.
Local governments can also recruit "objective" consultancies, nonprofits or university groups to help manage carbon removal projects, Burns said. "They can help provide some initial guidance to avoid some of the pitfalls."
As state governments become increasingly savvy on carbon removal, local governments can also look to them for resources, he said.
"You have states like Washington, California, New York and Massachusetts that are increasingly viewing carbon removal as part of their state plans," he said. "They're contemplating that local governments are going to be partners with them, so they're starting to develop the kind of resources that can help local governments to facilitate those things in a way that's sensible."
Ysabelle Kempe wrote this article for SmartCitiesDive.
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Kentucky Power, one of eastern Kentucky's largest utilities, has a new energy efficiency and conservation proposal for its customers. The state's Public Service Commission is expected to make a decision on the plan this fall.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, taking even small steps to conserve energy, such as turning off lights and electric appliances when not in use, can help lower energy bills.
Chris Woolery, energy projects coordinator for the Mountain Association, said aside from a weatherization program for low-income residents, the utility has not offered any extensive energy efficiency programs until now. He argued eastern Kentucky residents need more options, as they experience ongoing rate hikes, higher energy bills and increasing extreme weather.
"They really need robust investments in energy efficiency and battery storage," Woolery pointed out. "That could lower their bills and make their homes and communities more resilient. "
Kentucky Power said it is looking to defer the need for new sources of power in the future and help lower ratepayers' usage and bills. The proposal includes a Home Energy Improvement Program and Commercial Energy Solutions Program. Both programs offer energy audits performed by professional contractors for qualified customers, and new incentives for upgrading to more energy efficient products.
Woolery emphasized while the proposal is encouraging, it is not enough to offset cost in one of the Commonwealth's most energy-burdened regions. He contended the proposal could include measures that help customers install solar, and investments in smart appliances and battery storage; adding other states have developed models Kentucky could follow.
"Green Mountain Power in Vermont is one example that is investing in battery storage to reduce outages," Woolery noted. "They're doing it in a way that is cost-effective and helps the whole membership, because they save money during peak power times. They saved over a million dollars in one week during the heat wave."
He added the Kentucky Public Service Commission is increasingly paying attention to public comments.
"In a recent case with the same utility, Kentucky Power, they have made a ruling on a rate increase proposal that cited public comment," Woolery emphasized. "That shows that public comment works."
The Commission is accepting public comments on the case until Oct. 31. Residents can find more information on how to submit a comment by visiting the Kentuckians for Energy Democracy website at k4ed.org.
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