17 Clean Energy Projects Announced for Former Coal Sites in Appalachia

A collaboration between The Nature Conservancy (TNC), TNC’s Cumberland Forest Limited Partnership, Sun Tribe Development and ENGIE aims to transform 17 former coal mining sites throughout Appalachia into clean energy projects.

In total, the projects include 14 solar energy projects with 49 megawatts of energy generation and three battery storage projects with 320 megawatts of expected storage. Together, the projects span 360 acres formerly occupied by coal mines.

TNC intends to use these projects to benefit the “3Cs” — climate, conservation and communities. 3Cs is a framework that TNC applies to projects to determine and measure their benefits. In the case of the newly announced projects, the transformed clean energy sites are slated to provide an increase in local tax revenue and construction jobs, TNC announced.

The project leaders anticipate that the solar and battery projects will power the equivalent of 6,638 homes per year in Appalachia, with projects slated for sites in Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky.

“Locating solar and battery storage on former mine lands makes perfect sense to us,” Danny Van Clief, CEO of Sun Tribe Development, said in a statement. “These sites and the communities they rest within have powered our country for more than a century — all we have to do is reimagine them for today’s energy technology.” 

According to the announcement, some of the projects plan to incorporate Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) incentives to lower costs. However, the IRA, which former President Joe Biden signed in 2022, is currently facing freezes and changes under the new administration. 

President Donald Trump froze IRA funds by executive order shortly after taking office, but the move was blocked by a court order. Still, states have said they are being denied funding, and a federal judge has since ordered the administration to comply with the block to the IRA funding freeze, CBS News reported.

The risks to federal funding have already affected other clean energy and tech projects around the country. Projects to replace diesel-fueled school buses for electric, remove lead paint, weatherize homes for improved efficiency, plug abandoned oil wells, and improve resiliency to wildfires and flooding have all been affected by the freeze and threat to pull IRA funding, NPR reported. 

“I think what sometimes gets lost in the story about Appalachia is that there is actually a tremendous amount of local energy and innovation, because people love the place, and they stay here because they love it,” Dana Kuhnline, senior program director at ReImagine Appalachia, told NPR. “And so you have a lot of folks with the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding who really had that first chance in a generation to start to kind of really do some big, big things. They tried to dream big and do a big economic improvement for their local community, and ended up in this really impossible situation.”

It is not clear whether the progress of the projects is dependent on the IRA incentives, and some projects may not be affected at all by the risks to this funding. 

However, TNC addresses the potential threats to climate policy on its website, stating, “We also jump into defense mode when it appears that conservation and climate policies are going to be scaled back. We do so, in part, by sharing stories about farmers, fishermen, forest landowners and the many other people who benefit from government policies. Wins at all levels of government are meaningful. What is most important between now and the end of the decade is to keep the momentum going by continuing to help create, implement and defend policies that make conservation and climate action possible.”

The newly announced projects add to eight previously announced clean energy projects by TNC, Sun Tribe and Dominion Energy. These projects will be developed around the Cumberland Forest. The first project is a solar plant in Virginia that will begin construction by 2026. This project alone could generate $800,000 in tax revenue for the local community in addition to providing clean solar power and cleaning up a former coal mine site. The other solar energy projects are expected to be completed by 2029, TNC reported.