No New Coal To Make Electricity, Utilities Tell State Lawmakers

Coal generates nearly 90 percent of West Virginia’s electricity, making it more dependent on that fuel than any other state.

American Electric Power, FirstEnergy and Dominion Energy told members of the legislature that they’d maintain their coal assets in West Virginia. In the future, though, they said they would not be building new coal plants.

Del. Henry Dillon, R-Wayne, pushed Bob Bradish, AEP’s senior vice president of regulated infrastructure investment planning, to explain.

“So you referred to building out new generation capacity to meet demand during your presentation, I heard mention of renewables, wind, solar. I heard natural gas mentioned. Heard nuclear. I heard coal mentioned, but it was exclusively in a legacy sense of maintaining existing coal fired capacity. But I didn’t hear any mention of any new coal fired generation facilities,” Dillon said. “Why is AEP not prioritizing investment in new coal fired generation?”

Bradish responded that in spite of a friendlier regulatory environment for coal under President Donald Trump, it still carries too much risk for the company.

“So the plants take, you know, years to build, and the question that you have to wrestle with right now the law of the land, 111D (of the Clean Air Act), which basically tells you retire it or convert it to gas at this point,” Bradish said. “So I think there’s a lot of risk around someone who wants to go after and build something like that in this environment. So we have not pursued new coal at this point.”

Numerous states, including West Virginia, have sued to block U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rules limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. The Trump administration has pledged to unwind the Biden-era rules.

Still, John Scalzo, vice president of regulatory and finance for AEP subsidiary Appalachian Power, said gas was the safer bet.

“In the future, we’ll be looking at adding resources,” Scalzo said. “But when you’re making a 40 year investment, right now, the safest investment would be, we’ll be looking at natural gas.”

Nationwide, natural gas has become the dominant fuel for generating electricity, displacing coal.