Solar panel installers are up before dawn, loading pallets into trucks at a warehouse in Huntington, West Virginia. Today’s job sites include a backyard in the hills south of the city and the roof of a homeless shelter.
This scene was hard to imagine 15 years ago, when mines employed almost twice as many people in West Virginia as they do now, and it’s partly thanks to the Biden administration’s climate law.
The Inflation Reduction Act has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable energy and manufacturing across the country, with additional money for “energy communities” that include almost the entire state of West Virginia, whose economy has always been dependent on coal. That federal money is helping promote job training programs and efforts to diversify West Virginia’s economy, which powered America through the 20th century and now teeters on the edge of another energy transition.
‘A stabilization pipeline’
Even before the Inflation Reduction Act, solar made sense for some people in coal country.
Jacob Hannah runs Coalfield Development, a nonprofit that installed 294 solar panels on its roof in 2021, with another 600 on the way next year. It remains the largest rooftop solar array in the state and offsets 100% of the electricity at its headquarters in Huntington.
That building was once the Corbin Limited Garment Factory, but the clothing manufacturer closed the plant in 2002. Today, the building’s sawtooth roof, built nearly a century ago and tilted towards the sun to maximize natural light, is a natural fit for photovoltaic panels.
On the horizon, green hills huddle along the Ohio River, while coal trains clatter by. It’s an appropriate setting for Coalfield Development, which aims to “rebuild the Appalachian economy.”
Hannah has been wrestling with how to do that for most of his life.
“Seeing my dad laid off from the coal mines when I was a kid was very challenging for me because the narrative was predominantly every solar panel installed is a coal miner job lost,” he says. “What do you do with the pride that you feel for the sacrifices that you know your family and neighbors have made? But there's got to be something better because I don't want my dad to get black lung. I don't want his back to go out from slag heaps falling down in a four-foot-tall mineshaft.
“We're not here to demonize an industry or the sacrifices that have been made,” says Hannah, a fifth-generation West Virginian, “but really honor that legacy.”
Josh West (left) and Phil Rogers, two employees of Coalfield Development, woodworking in the nonprofit’s West Edge building in Huntington, W.V. (Chris Bentley/Here & Now)
Coal mining jobs in West Virginia plummeted from a peak of about 130,000 in 1940 to about 10,000 today. The state lost about half its mining jobs since 2012 under new environmental regulations and competition from natural gas and renewable energy, but most of the industry’s jobs disappeared before the 1990s when the industry moved toward mechanization and less labor-intensive ways of mining.
The city of Huntington has lost about half its population since 1950 as the coal and steel industries declined, and there are lots of buildings like the former Corbin clothing factory, which had sat vacant for decades before Hannah and his partners revived it.
Today it houses art galleries, an event space and businesses doing everything from printing T-shirts to growing produce.
All of the people who work there are hired by Coalfield Development and paid for 33 hours a week. They also spend at least six hours a week getting a GED, an associate’s degree or some other certificate of higher education, as well as three hours in life skills classes teaching things like first aid or financial literacy.
“The goal is for us not to keep everyone but just a stabilization pipeline as they go along their journey of improvement,” Hannah says. “Whether you’re with us for four weeks or three years you’re getting paid, on-the-job training.”
It’s a good deal. So good that earlier this year, Hannah says a post for 11 job openings got more than 1,100 applications.
“Those with the most barriers to employment are at the top of the list for us. So if you’ve got a background in substance use, justice system involvement, been laid off, coal-impacted, single parent,” he says. “We say, ‘Without our program how feasible is it that this person could engage in the Appalachian economy?’
And if the answer is, ‘It would be very difficult,’ that’s the decision we make.”
Cindy Kings is sanding wood in the shop. Before Coalfield Development hired her three years ago, she says she barely knew how to use a tape measure. Now she’s making furniture and cabinetry out of wood salvaged from across the state.
She’s also studying alcohol and drug counseling at Mountwest Community & Technical College, pursuing a career that she says will help her give back to people that helped with her own addiction recovery.
Cindy Kings working in the woodshop at Coalfield Development, making furniture and cabinetry out of wood salvaged across West Virginia. She’s also studying alcohol and drug counseling at Mountwest Community & Technical College, pursuing a career that she says will help her give back to people that helped her on her own recovery journey. (Chris Bentley/Here & Now)
Kings is 43 years old and two years sober. She’s from a coal mining family in Summersville, West Virginia. She says it’s not too late for the state to reinvent itself, like she has.
“Back home where I’m from there’s a town next to me, Richwood, and it was basically all lumber, sawmills and stuff, and then it died down and the town just kind of faded out,” she says. “West Virginia has all kinds of things that you can thrive on, making a living instead of just focusing on one big thing until it’s run completely out, and then having to scurry around to find out what your next big thing is.”
‘An explosion in solar manufacturing’
The next big thing in West Virginia when it comes to energy is solar.
While still a minor part of the state’s energy mix, solar power is growing in West Virginia, in part thanks to a change in federal tax law that allows nonprofits to take advantage of federal clean energy incentives.
“Before the Inflation Reduction Act, someone living in a golf course community could get tax credits for solar panels on their home, but a food bank in southern West Virginia could not,” says Dan Conant, founder and CEO of the company Solar Holler. “We’ve fixed that now, and that has led to an explosion in installing solar.”
Conant’s company employs 95 people and has done more than 2,300 solar installations across West Virginia and neighboring states, including at the Huntington City Mission, a homeless shelter that is seeking enough tax credits and grants to possibly zero out its upfront investment in a solar array that could cut its electricity bills by 40%.
“This will allow us to feed a lot of hungry people from the cost savings and house them,” says David Duffield, a member of the Mission's board. “If we can produce energy with what God gave us for free without increasing costs every year, and we can feed a lot of homeless people, I believe I know how Jesus would have voted on that one.”
Solar Holler founder & CEO Dan Conant (right) on the roof of a West Virginia homeless shelter, the Huntington City Mission, during a solar installation on Oct. 1. (Chris Bentley/Here & Now)
Conant says solar installation work can help slow the brain drain of people leaving West Virginia and keep his state from getting left behind in the shift to clean energy.
“We powered the industrial revolution on West Virginians’ backs. Just because we’re shifting where that energy is coming from doesn’t mean we should leave behind my entire state,” he says, “We’re going to keep being an energy state. It’s just going to look a little different. Our logo, if you see our trucks driving around, is a shirtless coal miner driving a pickaxe into the ground. We’re proud of what we have done as a state for centuries.”
Conant says it’s also thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act that Solar Holler’s systems are made in the United States.
“We’re getting our panels from Georgia. We’re getting our inverters — the brains of our systems — from South Carolina. These racking systems right here are coming out of Canton, Ohio. All of a sudden we’ve got this explosion in solar manufacturing around the country that’s being driven by this single bill,” he says “If that bill ever went away what you’d be doing is turning your backs on all the factory workers and all the people who’ve dedicated their careers to making this stuff in America. I think we’ve just got too much momentum and the train’s kind of left the station.”
Fortunately for Conant, Congress is unlikely to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. For one thing, the vast majority of the nearly $350 billion it has sent out has gone to Republican districts, according to an analysis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Rhodium Group, leading 18 House Republicans to write a letter defending the law’s energy tax credits.
Mining the sun
While West Virginia’s first solar farm came online this year, renewable energy developers face considerable opposition in the state. Coal still provides 89% of electricity in West Virginia, compared to only 16% nationally. Local utilities have doubled down on coal in recent years, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep some plants open until 2040. The Solar Energy Industries Association ranks West Virginia 48th in the nation.
State laws limit the amount of utility-scale solar power in West Virginia, and the Republican governor — who owns multiple coal companies — recently vetoed a bill to raise that cap, in part he said to protect jobs mining coal.
There are plans to ramp up renewable energy development, however, by turning one of the region’s biggest liabilities into an asset. The 2021 Infrastructure law created a program to redevelop abandoned mine land, and in August West Virginia regulators approved plans for a 250-megawatt solar farm on land in Nicholas County that used to house two coal mines. That’s almost twice as much solar power as has been installed statewide to date.
There are similar plans in Kentucky, too, and Coalfield Development has its own small-scale solar project on former mine land in Mingo County, West Virginia. The Nature Conservancy estimates there could be millions of acres of mine lands and contaminated industrial sites — land that might otherwise sit vacant — suitable for clean energy projects.
In Appalachia that could help restore some of the property tax revenue lost from mine closures, says Brian Anderson, executive director of the government’s Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities, although he warns that putting solar farms on abandoned mine land will not solve coal country’s economic problems.
“We have to be very cognizant about the fact that during installation of a solar array, there's good construction jobs. But once the solar array is in place, the operation jobs aren't quite going to replace the jobs of a mine,” says Anderson, who keeps on his desk an aluminum bar made at the smelter in Ravenswood, West Virginia where he and his grandfather once worked.
Anderson says the region needs a “holistic approach” to industrial strategy that leverages Appalachia’s advantages.
“Appalachia is within an eight-hour drive of 50% of the U.S. population. So when you think of where you're going to build supply chains, geographically that makes sense,” he says. “Appalachians are also very proud of their work ethic. There's actually economic numbers that show that when companies land in places and across Appalachia, they keep their workers.”
Gina Milum, Operations Arts & Outreach Coordinator for West Edge at Coalfield Development in Huntington, West Virginia. (Chris Bentley/Here & Now)
That’s why Coalfield Development is expanding its model across the state, and partnering with the developers of that mine-turned-solar farm to establish a Coal Transition Workforce Center in the area.
A 2023 study by researchers at Wake Forest University and the University of Pennsylvania underscores the challenges for places like West Virginia amid the energy transition. It found the number of workers moving directly from a “dirty” job to a “green” one has grown dramatically in recent years, but that workers without a college degree are significantly more likely to remain in carbon-intensive jobs.
Coalfield Development’s Gina Milum says West Virginia needs the industries of tomorrow, and they need West Virginia, too.
“As Appalachians, we’re often the butt of a lot of jokes. People in a region will take on those stereotypes and start to feel that about themselves. West Virginians, as much as we get a bad rap about being backward and homespun, we’ve always been a forward-looking people,” she says. “We built the steel and kept the lights on. The people of West Virginia are very smart. They want green jobs because they know that’s where the future is.”