The United States moves towards renewable energy in spite of our craven political leadership. Unpopular President Donald Trump can pretend that there are imaginary coal jobs on the horizon for Americans, but there aren’t. In fact, there are only going to be less and less of those jobs and more and more jobs in the renewable energy sectors. New England’s largest—and one the last—coal-fired power plants shut down last Wednesday.
The plant has burned coal since 1963 along Mount Hope Bay in Somerset, near the Rhode Island border. It has generated controversy for almost as long, with residents, fishermen and environmentalists decrying the damage that its cooling canals — nicknamed “killing canals” by activists in the 1970s — caused to fisheries.
The coal plant’s final hours came on the same day that President Donald Trump’s administration said he expects to withdraw the United States from a landmark global climate agreement. The Republican president has moved to delay or roll back federal regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions while pledging to revive long-struggling U.S. coal mines.
The serious work needs to begin now, as the company who is closing the plant has no immediate plans on developing anything new on the site, and there are people whose lives were built up around the plant, and this is the nail in the coffin for coal in this area as another nearby plant closed to 2010.
Many of the plant workers are in their mid-50s or early 60s, said Clark, the union president.
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“We were our own little economic engine for this area,” he said. “All the employees made good money. We all bought homes. People sent kids to college. The contribution to the gross domestic product was huge. It was a massive contribution, which is all gone.”
One of the issues is that a big driver in ending coal in places like Massachusetts is cheaper domestic natural gas, and more regulations on pollution, which has made coal much less economically viable in tandem with the costs to upkeep and upgrade these old facilities. In the case of the Brayton Point Plant, the company who owns it now didn’t invest in new energy, instead opting to upgrade the facilities in hopes of continuing coal-energy production.
The coal plant was the state's number one emitter of toxins into the environment, and hot water discharged into the bay was killing fish. A decade ago, plant owner Dominion Energy spent a $1 billion to clean up its act and comply with court rulings, but it was too little too late.
Peter Shattuck, director of the Acadia Center's Clean Energy Initiative, says Dominion didn't realize there was a revolution going on in energy production — away from coal to natural gas, renewable resources and efficiency.
But what has happened next, according to WBUR and Tyson Slocum of the energy project at Public Citizen, is more distressing. Dominion Energy sold the plant to Energy Capital Partners in 2014, and a few weeks later, Energy Capital Partners announced that they would be closing the plant in 2017.
"Energy Capital Partners was able to make a lot more money selling less power," he said. "They knew that when the bought Brayton Point."
Slocum charges Energy Capital Partners deliberately manipulated the wholesale market for electricity, single-handedly turning the region's energy supply from a surplus to a deficit.
"Their whole plan was to buy Brayton Point so that they could prematurely close it in order to create an artificial shortage to drive prices up," he explained. "Prices went up by more than a billion dollars — a huge price increase — all to be paid for by New England ratepayers. It's exactly what Enron did."
So when you watch billionaires and other business “geniuses” cringe at consumer and worker protections, remember this: these guys only know how to do one thing, make money the quickest easiest way possibly, and then they move on. Trump moved on from worrying about coal-workers the second the words “coal” left his mouth.
