West Virginia’s Biggest Utility Just Told the Governor Burning More Coal Is “Not Going to Happen”

West Virginia is coal country.  And so, given Trump’s promise to “put our [coal] miners back to work,” it’s no surprise that the state’s Democratic governor Jim Justice wants his state’s biggest utility to burn more of it.

But Chris Beam, president of Appalachian Power, the state’s largest utility, has some bad news.

Beam told the governor—a farmer and coal mogul himself—that all new power generation would likely come from wind, solar, and natural gas.  “The governor asked me, ‘I’d like you to burn more coal,’” Beam said according to the West Virginia Gazette-Mail.  “Well, we don’t have any more coal plants.  We’re not going to build any more coal plants.  That’s not going to happen.”

This isn’t an issue of pollution controls, however; Customers and economics are driving today’s energy agenda.  Beam says the debate over climate change, and the role of coal in it, is essentially over.  Appalachian Power’s parent company AES believes the regulation of carbon dioxide is inevitable.  In the coming decades, renewable energy and natural gas are poised to dominate the fuel mix.  “We’re past that argument as a company,” Beam said.

Appalachian Power’s residential and industrial customers, which include Steel Dynamics, Koch Industries, and Marathon petroleum, are now asking about switching to 100% renewables, says John Shepelwich of Appalachian Power.  In order to get out in front of this growing demand, the utility, which serves more than a million customers across the US mid-Atlantic region, has begun preparing power plans that would allow customers to stop using fossil fuels.

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