Is the Answer to Region's Energy Needs Blowing in the Wind?

APPALACHIA, Va. – Coal is central to this region’s past and part of its future, but a new future is taking shape on the strip-mined ridges in the heart of the Central Appalachian coalfields.

Even as a budding, $1.8 billion coal-fired power plant rises skyward on one end of Wise County, a field of wind turbines proposed for land on the Virginia-Kentucky line is signaling this region’s potential for a shift toward green energy.

“It is widely anticipated that there will be some form of carbon legislation in place in the coming years … and I don’t think you’ll ever see Dominion say we’re putting all our eggs in one basket,” said Emil Avram, director of generation business development for Dominion Virginia Power, which is working on the project in partnership with BP Wind Energy.

“We need to have a balanced portfolio to keep energy prices stable long-term,” Avram said.

Dominion won permits last year to build the coal plant. Now, the power company and BP Wind are expected to seek permits to mine a different sort of fuel: wind.

In addition to the Wise County proposal, the companies are pursuing a wind project in Tazewell County. Combined, the projects present a potential investment of more than $600 million. Together they could generate as much as 250 megawatts of power.

The sites in Wise County, being studied for up to 150 megawatts of wind power, are on the ridges along Black Mountain: Bluff Spur and Nine Mile Spur, both north of the old coal camps around the town of Appalachia, and Rogers Ridge, north of Norton and Pound.

Mike McCoy, a business developer for BP, said 50 to 100 wind turbines could be erected on the three Wise County sites. A public informational meeting on the project is scheduled Thursday at Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap.

In Tazewell County, the proposed site is on East River Mountain between Bluefield and Tazewell, where 60 to 100 megawatts of wind-power generation could be built along several miles of ridgeline. The companies have bought 2,600 acres for the project there.

Jim Madden, a BP business developer, said with renewable energy standards on the books in at least 28 states and under consideration at the federal level, 70,000 megawatts of renewable energy will be needed by 2025 – almost three times what currently exists.

Most of that, he said, is likely to come from wind.

“Wind power is still in its infancy,” Madden said. “You’re going to see a lot more of this nationwide.”

Avram said the Dominion-BP partnership is considering other wind sites in Southwest Virginia, but the companies aren’t far enough along to announce locations.

Construction of the turbines could begin as early as 2012¸ Madden said. But first, the projects must dodge at least three potentially fatal flaws: Is there enough wind? Are there environmental obstacles? Is the land itself, where mining has occurred underground, stable enough to support 50 to 100 wind turbines that weigh as much as 150 tons each?

Yearlong studies already are under way to answer all three questions.

If those studies, started in January, indicate that conditions are favorable, Dominion and BP will seek local, state and federal approval to start building the turbines.
And, as some in this region have suggested, those turbines will open a new door for the coalfields.

“If we sort of look at how TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] brought electricity to Appalachia in the early 20th century, I think there’s another phenomenal opportunity just like that today for wind and solar as well,” said Jeff Deal, spokesman for Appalachian Voices, a North Carolina-based organization that strongly opposed the Dominion coal plant but supports the wind project and hopes to see more like it.

“You can keep a wind turbine forever, unlike coal, which gets exhausted,” Deal said. “The fuel is free.”

A welcome opportunity

Local officials said they’re hopeful the project will be built because diversification could balance the bottom line for a region that still rises and falls with the boom-and-bust coal cycle.

“We’re trying to diversify ourselves and create a situation that would provide jobs for Wise County,” said Robby Robbins, chairman of the Wise County Board of Supervisors. “We’re very dependent on [coal], and we have to have things to take the place of that in the future. And if we wait until the future, when we come up on it we’re going to be up a creek.”

While local officials haven’t made projections about the tax revenues a wind project could generate, at the current tax rate, a $300 million facility would generate more than $1.7 million a year.

Madden said building the wind turbines would provide 100 to 150 jobs for a period of nine to 12 months, as well as significant work for local contractors. Ten jobs would be created to operate the turbines once the project is complete.

“We’re very pleased that Dominion is pursuing wind energy in Wise County,” said Fred Luntsford, the Appalachia town manager who also serves as a member of the Board of Supervisors. “We’re glad to have them over in St. Paul with the power plant, and we’re just as pleased that they’re exploring wind energy.”

Luntsford said it’s good to look to the future in a community dependent on a finite supply of coal – by some estimates 12 to 15 years’ worth at the current technology and rate of production.

“Change is coming,” Luntsford said. “I just hope our leaders have enough foresight to be prepared for it. … I always say change is the only constant in this world.”
 
Just the beginning

Luntsford said the region’s future lies not just in energy, but in tourism -- a development goal shared by Spearhead Trails, a regional recreation authority that wants to create a network of trails in Southwest Virginia.

Jack McClanahan, chairman of that authority, said the trails could wind through the same property where the turbines are built – and help bring money into the town by attracting visitors.

“It’s hard to imagine, but all these small towns … in the early to mid-1900s, there were thousands of people in these coal towns,” McClanahan said. “This [Appalachia] was the hub for the theater, for the banking, and you couldn’t drive here on a Saturday night. You couldn’t drive here for the people walking on the street. … And, we’re hoping these trails can help revitalize the economy here.”

McClanahan said he also sees hope in new technologies – specifically in carbon molecules called nanotubes that have a variety of potential applications.
“We could be the Silicon Valley of the mountains,” he said.

He’s not the only one pinning hopes on new technology to help in the rebirth of a one-time boomtown: The Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority presented $2 million to the Wise County Industrial Development Authority on Friday for an energy research center in Wise.

The Virginia Tobacco Commission already has contributed $5 million to that center, which will explore clean coal, coal-to-liquid fuels and nanotechnology.

“This whole area’s got potential … it just needs the right people to know about it and to realize what we do have here,” said Joe Diets, who grew up in Appalachia and now lives in Big Stone Gap. “I think a lot of these hollows … once they’re mined out, they could build dams. … We have all kinds of land here for lakefront lots.”

Making the shift

Even as coal trucks continue to roar down Main Street more than a century after mining began here, there’s a surprising level of support for wind projects and for a transition away from coal.

While some residents downtown Thursday didn’t want to comment on the relative merits of coal vs. wind energy, others were quick to point out that coal has always been both a blessing and a curse.

“Men have to have the jobs to feed their children, but if you live in a coal camp … you have to worry about letting the kids play in the front yard,” said Kandy Dillon, who grew up in the coal camp community of Exeter. “It’s [Appalachia] a dirty little town because of coal … a lot of people have asthma, and it’s the coal dust. We have a lot of lung problems here.”

Dillon said one of her grandfathers started working as a coal miner at the age of 15; the other started at 12. Both died of black lung disease. In those days, she said, women always prayed when their men went to work because sometimes they never came home.

“I’d sooner go out on the street and beg for money than let my husband go in the coal mines,” said Lisa Mullins, who lives in Derby, another of the coal communities around Appalachia.

Decades ago, if anyone had asked whether mining was good for Appalachia, they would’ve been laughed at for even asking, Mullins said, because coal was king. But because most of the jobs have left, it’s not that way anymore, she said. And she hates to see the trees taken and the mountains scarred by strip mining.

“When you leave Derby, there’s one mountain that makes you want to cry; there’s nothing there,” she said. “I think it would be a good thing if they stopped mining because it’s the only Earth we’ve got. And when she’s gone, where are we going to live then?”

Dillon, too, said it’s time for old coal towns like Appalachia to take their place in the national trend: at the forefront of developing renewable sources of energy.

“It’s time that we came into the future instead of living in the past,” Dillon said. “And even though there’s a lot of coal here still, it’s going to be a thing of the past.”

dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701