Coal State of WV in Transition to Solar Energy [View all]

[Panich52]

A group devoted to creating alternative energy jobs in Central Appalachia is building a first for West Virginia’s southern coalfields region this week: a rooftop solar array, assembled by unemployed and underemployed coal miners and contractors.

From an Article by Mikala Reasbeck, Mint Press News, February 19, 2015

West Virginia may be best known as the source of the coal that built America and keeps its lights on, yet communities throughout the state are taking back their energy independence and going solar.

At just 9.70 cents per kilowatt hour, West Virginians pay the third-lowest electricity rates in the nation.* Yet they don’t enjoy the nation’s lowest electricity bills, and they’re not likely to in the future, either.

Indeed, from 2007 to 2011, electricity rates jumped an average of 50 percent across the state. And on Feb. 3, the state’s Public Service Commission approved another rate increase for Mon Power and Potomac Edison, subsidiaries operating under the Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. Together, these subsidiaries serve over 520,500 customers in 34 counties and the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia.

This latest hike is “just 7.4 percent more reason to go solar,” according to Joey James’ reading of the document from the commission.

James is a staff scientist with the Energy Program of Downstream Strategies, a Morgantown, West Virginia-based environmental consulting firm. ...

“There’s a community of young West Virginians who all have the same vision: What’s happened historically isn’t working. And we’re all looking ahead to something new,” James told MintPress News.

That “something new” is slowly, but surely, coming in the form of solar power. Over the past couple of years, community solar co-ops have been popping up on the hills and in the hollers of West Virginia, and more are in the works.

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“West Virginia’s coal built America”

West Virginia’s identity and economy has long been tied to the coal-based energy it produces not just for itself — the state generated at least 96 percent of its own electricity from coal last year — but also the nation.

“West Virginia’s coal built America. It fired its steel mills, lit its homes, and provided the cheap energy to create the wealthiest nation in the world,” Patrick Reis wrote for the National Journal in 2013.

Yet, as that article goes on to note, this hasn’t improved the lives of West Virginians. The state consistently ranks among the nation’s poorest, its residents scoring the lowest in well-being indices and with nearly the lowest life expectancy.

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*Can't prove that by my HREA bills. One would think the New Deal-era program would offer inexpensive electricity, but I pay more per month just to run a fridge and night-only flood light at my WV cabin than I do for whole house full of electronics in SW PA. How can that be?

It also distresses me that REA buts into, and strongly sells, coal-fired elec production.