Two Ohio coal-fired plants to close, deepening industry decline
| NEW YORK
NEW YORK Electricity company Dayton Power & Light said on Monday it would shut down two coal-fired power plants in southern Ohio next year for economic reasons, a setback for the ailing coal industry but a victory for environmental activists.
Republican President Donald Trump promised in his election campaign to restore U.S. coal jobs that he said had been destroyed by environmental regulations put into effect by his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama.
Dayton Power & Light, a subsidiary of The AES Corporation, said in an emailed statement that it planned to close the J.M. Stuart and Killen plants by June 2018 because they would not be "economically viable beyond mid-2018."
Coal demand has flagged in recent years due to competition from cheap and plentiful natural gas.
The plants along the Ohio River in Adams County employ some 490 people and generate about 3,000 megawatts of power for coal.
The closure follows negotiations between Dayton Power & Light, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and stakeholders like the environmental group the Sierra Club over whether the company should be allowed to raise electricity prices to pay for upgrades to keep the plants open.
"They are by far our largest employer and it will absolutely be devastating to our community here in Ohio," Michael Pell, president of First State Bank in Winchester, Ohio, said in a telephone interview. Pell, one of several local community leaders who have lobbied to keep the plants going, has become a spokesman for Adams County on the issue.
He said that as the industry moves away from coal, state and federal authorities should help the county create other jobs and clean up environmental damage from the plants.
The Sierra Club, which has been advocating coal plant closures for years to help combat pollution, argued that they were a bad investment. The group's "Beyond Coal" campaign director, Bruce Nilles, said the planned closures would bring the total number of U.S. coal plants due to be retired to 250.
"This milestone is a testament to the commitment Americans have to cleaner air and water - and the power of grassroots action to create healthier communities," Nilles said in an email.
The plants sit at the heart of a region Trump vowed to revitalize with more jobs and greater economic security during his 2016 campaign. As part of his pledge to reinvigorate the area, Trump also said he would "bring back coal."
A White House spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Dan Sawmiller, the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" representative involved in the negotiations on the plants, said in a phone interview he would stay in contact with local authorities to try to minimize the impact on jobs in the area.
"We like to see the pollution coming offline, but we really are keenly focused on the impact to the community," he said.
Cheap natural gas from record shale production over the past several years has kept power prices low, making it uneconomical for generators to upgrade older coal plants to meet increasingly strict environmental rules.
U.S. power companies retired or converted over 14,000 MW of coal-fired plants in 2016 after shutting a record of over 17,000 MW in 2015, according to Thomson Reuters data.
In 2015, coal used to produce electricity fell to its lowest level since 1984, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission data showed. That year, coal-fired generators produced 33 percent of the nation's total generation, down from over 50 percent in 2003.
(Reporting by Emily Flitter; Additional Reporting by Scott DiSavino in New York and Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Richard Chang)
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Wasn't Mr. Art of the Deal, going to make coal great again.
BTW, the two Ohio plants use West Virginia coal...
The use of coal has been declining for years, how is Trump going to make coal great again.
Jeez, K!!
This is your second "plant closure" seed today. Not possible! Must be fake news!
Our Glorious Leader would surely have picked up his telephone - or gone on Twitter - to save the day. He would never allow middle class Americans to be misused...
I know, these darn facts keep popping up.
I have a whole list of them to post soon. Thousands and thousands of job losses since Trump became president.
They just keep on coming.
The thing is... they're normal.
There are thousands of jobs destroyed every month... while thousands of others are created. A phenomenon that is not at all newsworthy... until the President puts a spotlight on it. Having taken credit for keeping a couple plants open, Trump now owns every closure.
With the two articles that I posted regarding the loss of jobs, one thing stands out.
These are the types of jobs that no college degrees middle class people hold. It's them that are getting hurt, with little chance of getting another job that pays what they are getting at their current jobs.
It's this group that is really going to suffer.
And yes, because Trump jumped into the game, he now owns all the closers. It all on him now.
It was obvious long before the election (to any lucid observer) that a billionaire TV PT Barnum would not be a champion of the Common Man. Duh!!
And yet... the Common Man elected the billionaire TV PT Barnum, who has proceeded exactly as that lucid observer knew he would, moving to raise taxes on the Common Man, while reducing taxes on the ultra-rich.
And yet... the Common Man is very happy with the billionaire TV PT Barnum. Polling shows that he is still the Common Man's hero.
So... why should the billionaire TV PT Barnum not continue to screw the Common Man?
If Trump really wanted to help coal miners he would stop the lie that coal is somehow going to make some kind of magical comeback and instead fund a series of community education grants for coal miners to retrain into other jobs, either in other trades, many of which are still in demand, or into other jobs. The mines are not going to come back and the mining jobs are never going to be what thy once were. Also his budget which eliminates funding help to Appalachian coal country completely ought to make the coal county people wonder why they voted for this con man in the first place and think twice about voting republican the next time. Remember, these are the people who just tried to take your Medicaid away.
Coal will probably return as a liquid fuel until enough nuclear power plants can be built to service a hydrogen economy.
Interesting, please expand on your comment.
Would it be cheaper or easier to produce than natural gas?
kerosene, or coal oil?
And are we really going to move toward a nuclear (which still has many, many issues we have not solved, such as waste) to power a hydrogen economy or are we going to move more toward an electric solar powered one?
It's also my understanding that in coal gasification a large amount of CO2 gas is created? Is there the same problem with liquidizing it?
"And are we really going to move toward a nuclear (which still has many, many issues we have not solved, such as waste) to power a hydrogen economy or are we going to move more toward an electric solar powered one?"
There are NOT many many issues with nuclear power. That's just a fiction produced by ignorant environmentalists. If we had ignored those idiots in the 70s, we would not have a carbon issue now. Anti-Nuclear fanatics created global warming based on their ignorance of science.
Solar power will never be sufficient for baseload no matter how many drum circles praise it's holy power. Engineering trumps ignorant faith.
What do you propose to do with the spent fuel rods?
Reprocess them into new fuel. The remaining waste would be sent to geologic repositories like France does.
Solar power will never be sufficient for baseload no matter how many drum circles praise it's holy power. Engineering trumps ignorant faith.
Solar power, along with wind power, has moved far, far beyond the far fetched ideas of a few environmentalists that were scoffed at 30 or 40 years ago and into the boardrooms of major electrical utilities. As the technology improves and storage batteries (for lack of a better word for how the energy will be stored) are made more efficient and smaller more and more electric utility companies will make the switch from coal or gas fired plants over to wind and solar powered plants. Many of them are already making the switch. It is taking awhile, but scoffing it it now is like you being a manufacturer of buggy whips scoffing at those newfangled horseless carriages. Engineering triumphs over the blind faithless. Never say never when it comes to advancements in science.
Oh and nuclear waste is not fiction nor a creation in the minds of people who don't understand science.
Yes, the nuclear waste problem is fiction. Ask the French. And no, neither solar nor wind will be baseload for any large part of the nation. The power density is simply not there. No amount of drum circles will change the reality.
Natural gas is not as useful for vehicles as liquified coal. Such a fuel would be a stop gap until hydrogen is produced in sufficient quantities from nuclear fission waste heat.
If Trump really wanted to help coal miners he would stop the lie that coal is somehow going to make some kind of magical comeback and instead fund a series of community education grants for coal miners to retrain into other jobs, either in other trades, many of which are still in demand, or into other jobs.
Ummm....... Randy...?
Are you really asking Donald Trump to say an unpleasant truth to his Faithful?
Of course your solution is the right one... but Donald has been saying that he will bring coal back. And Donald never changes his line...
LOL! The only way that Trump is going to bring coal back is if he buys it all himself and then tries to find a place to store it all. Maybe he can build a coal hotel with it?
if he buys it all himself...
Well... He is a billionaire... isn't he?
You know Fortune says he has $2.5 billion dollars, which is just a bit less then they said he had when he declared his candidacy. However when he declared his candidacy he said he actually had more then $4 billion. Then when he got the nomination he said he had $10 billion. Now it seems he is back down to $2.5 billion? Many people think that, after all of the money he owes world wide, that he may only have a couple of hundred million dollars or less. A few think he actually owes some people, such as Russians and the Chinese, more then he actually has in cash on hand. Must be why he decided to keep his salary after all. He needs the money.
Perhaps he is having some problems with his taxes. If he turns them over to me I'll take them down to H and R Block and have them look at them. I promise not to show them to anyone else. Truly I do.
And there's always the very real possibility that he doesn't know.
After all... it's complicated...