Green Jobs? When A Coal Plant Shutters, Communities Are Left Devastated

The vast divide between the government’s understanding of the needs of the people they serve and the people themselves was never more excruciatingly apparent than it was this past week at a Pennsylvania town hall meeting. [emphasis, links added]

The two-hour event, sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency Interagency Working Group Rapid Response Team, was supposed to be for the IWP to answer questions from local residents, elected officials, small business owners, and furloughed power plant employees about the grants they were promised to revitalize their borough after the closure a year ago of a coal-fired power plant.

But the forum ended up being a 100-minute talk from the IWP panelists about how great the interagency was. This left just twenty minutes for over 70 people to try to get a question in.

Sen. Bob Casey announced the formation of the IWP and its Rapid Response Team last fall with a lot of fanfare, with Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Gov. Josh Shapiro, and Biden Administration officials in attendance.

He said then the response team’s creation was “to support economic revitalization and workforce development for Pennsylvania energy communities.”

In theory, it sounds great. But these are people’s real lives we are talking about — lives uprooted forever because of the power plant’s closure.

Alas, the meeting was filled with so much gibberish and very few answers to real-life problems it is difficult to pinpoint where to start, so let’s begin with the simple things like the titles, rapid response, and interagency working group.

Despite the title of the Rapid Response Team, most people at this meeting would have assured you that since the team’s inception, nothing has been either rapid or responsive.

And experience dictates that if there are multiple agencies from the government “working together,” rest assured they are not, which means nothing is being done.

When the Homer City Power Generating Station was shut down last July, William A. Wexler, the CEO of the private equity group that owned the plant, said at the time the decision to close it was based on factors that included “the low price of natural gas, a dramatic spike in the cost of its ongoing coal supply, unseasonably warm winters, and increasingly stringent environmental regulations.”

For over 40 years giant plumes of steam pouring out of the towering stacks of this 1,800-megawatt plant were a constant in this area. It was a site that could be seen for miles in every direction from its perch in the Laurel Mountains.

The last time the power plant ran at capacity was in 2005 when coal was the dominant source of electricity in this country. Last year, the plant ran only 20% of the time as politics and policies took their toll on the industry.

Now, there are no great plumes coming from the stacks, the jobs are gone, the jobs that supported the jobs at the plant are gone, and most residents of the tiny borough of 1,800 are all sitting at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania athletic facility listening to government officials talk to them about “deliverables, grants, identifying needs and honoring community voices and desired outcomes.”

The slideshow presented by the IWG said their mission was to “ensure no communities are left behind in the energy transition” and their job for the past year has been “to provide coordinated, efficient, responsive, targeted governance.”

They listed their accomplishments so far as allocating $228 million to energy communities, creating awareness by having 150 stories in the media about the IWG working group, attracting 800 people to enter their portal to ask questions, and sending two reports to President Joe Biden on these accomplishments.

The two-hour event was supposed to be for the community stakeholders to ask questions about all of the grants they’ve applied for (and haven’t received), the monies that were supposed to be used in their now energy-less community to rebuild (no evidence of that), and how to better access this program.

When one small business owner said she had replied for a grant and never heard back, one of the government officials taking the questions told her to apply again. Even University President Michael Driscoll expressed his frustration in not being able to unpack just exactly what was being offered to the community.

“It is unclear to me that the federal government has a full plan here,” Driscoll said to the panel. When he received crickets in response, Driscoll emphasized he was someone who was accustomed to navigating complicated issues.

“Did I mention that I have a doctorate in electrical engineering and that we need a good plan for addressing aging infrastructure,” he said, clearly exasperated.

His big issue, as both an administrator at the university and also as a resident, was one shared by all of the community members in the room: job opportunities so that their greatest treasure, their people, don’t leave.

No one had an answer for that.

No one seems to have an answer for any of the communities that have lost their power plants over the past six years — but in every borough, town, or township where it has happened, the economic impact has been devastating.

A study done by Ohio University and the University of Maryland showed that if the Dayton Power and Light coal fire power plant closed in Adams County, Ohio, it would not only cost thousands of direct and indirect jobs but also that those displaced workers transitioning to emerging occupations with similar skill requirements would experience wage decreases and millions would be lost in tax revenue for local governments.

Which is exactly what has happened here.

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