The state Supreme Court on Wednesday affirmed the PSC’s January conclusion that Appalachian Power mismanaged its fuel supplies in 2021 and 2022.
The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals has ruled in an Appalachian Power lawsuit against the Public Service Commission.
The state Supreme Court on Wednesday affirmed the PSC’s January conclusion that Appalachian Power mismanaged its fuel supplies in 2021 and 2022. However, it also threw out the PSC’s decision to punish Appalachian Power for its fuel management practices.
The price of coal rose dramatically during that time as the economy recovered from COVID-19 and after Russia invaded Ukraine. Appalachian Power’s plants ran short on coal supplies.
The company tried to pass on the higher costs of coal to electricity consumers. The PSC approved the recovery of more than $300 million in January, but disallowed more than $200 million. Appalachian Power then sued.
The court threw out the PSC’s disallowance and sent that matter back to the commissioners for further review. It is not yet clear how the court’s ruling will affect electricity customers.
Appalachian Power recently tried again to seek PSC approval for a base rate increase. Its previous application was dismissed.
Plans for a controversial water bottling plant in the tiny Jefferson County community of Middleway have been delayed after local officials deemed them incomplete.
Plans for a controversial water bottling plant in the tiny Jefferson County community of Middleway have been delayed after local officials deemed them incomplete.
During a tense meeting of the Jefferson County Planning Commission Tuesday evening, dozens of residents packed into a meeting room in the basement of the Charles Town Library.
More than 50 signed up to speak against the Mountain Pure Water Bottling Facility, and tens more had to observe the meeting from a hallway due to a lack of space. No community members spoke in favor of the project.
Tuesday marked the first public forum for discussing a concept plan submitted to the commission by California-based Sidewinder Enterprises.
The company’s proposed 1-million-square-foot facility would be built atop a site formerly owned by industrial conglomerate 3M. The site is also located about a half-mile from a historic district containing 60 major buildings constructed in the late 18th or early 19th centuries.
The meeting lasted more than five hours, stretching past midnight. Outside the comment period, residents repeatedly called aloud concerns over the project’s impact on local development, traffic, historic preservation, water supply and ecology — and urged commissioners to reject it outright.
Representing the company were Vice President Mark Dyck and Principal Jason Gehart of civil engineering firm Integrity Federal Services. They argued the concept plan complies with state law.
The plan “meets all the requirements of the Jefferson County ordinances,” Dyck said. “So we believe that this is qualified and acceptable to move forward.”
From left, Middleway residents Mary Mullins and Kathy McCormack display hand-painted signs denouncing plans for a local water bottle plant. “I’m unhappy, to say it mildly,” McCormack said.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Dyck said the company has also made some assurances to support the needs of the local community.
Namely, he said the company would pay to replace water wells for residents within 1,000 feet of the facility in its first two years of operation, should they have concerns about the quality of their groundwater. Plus, he said the company would place a traffic light at a nearby intersection.
Residents argued this was insufficient. Dyck said 22 households would fall within the 1,000 feet threshold, but members of the public said its impact would be felt throughout the 400-person community and beyond.
“When water levels drop critically low in Jefferson County, residents and farmers, not this California company will suffer water restrictions,” said Jefferson County resident Mary Gee.
Members of the commission expressed confusion over whether extracting water for commercial purposes was permitted under state law.
They also said the outpouring of community pushback showed Sidewinder did not provide the local community sufficient outreach or information — a sentiment affirmed by residents’ groans after Dyck erroneously referred to their community as “Middleburg.”
“If you want to be successful in Jefferson County, you have to get the people behind you,” said Commissioner J Ware. “Not the developer.”
Dyck argued the project would create jobs for the local community. He also said there is value in increasing water bottle production, referencing resident comments that the unexpected devastation of Hurricane Helene belies the importance of protecting the environment.
“It’s a little bit emotional for me, because my son was in Asheville,” Dyck said. “He would have so appreciated a bottle of water from Jefferson County.”
Integrity Federal Services employees Mark Dyck, seated on the left, and Jason Gerhart, on the right, address members of the Jefferson County Planning Commission Tuesday evening.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Residents were not notified ahead of the meeting where water for the bottling process would be sourced from. During the meeting, Dyck said it would be sourced from the local water supply, which elevated concerns from community members.
Jefferson County resident Benjamin Buckley said allowing a company to extract and profit from local groundwater was especially concerning in light of recent lawsuits against the site’s former owner, 3M.
Last year, the company was ordered to pay more than $10 billion in lawsuits tied to its role in spreading “forever chemicals” across waterways nationwide.
3M “came in here. Looks like they peed in the punch bowl,” Buckley said. “Looks like another outfit is going to come in and bottle it and sell it.”
Buckley was one of numerous residents who expressed concern over the toll of new factories and business developments on West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, the fastest growing region of the state.
The politics and geography of Jefferson County are key to Middleway’s selection for the water bottling plant, according to the project’s webpage.
Reasons for selecting Middleway include “West Virginia’s regulatory environment” and the area’s proximity to population centers in the northeast and southern United States, the website reads.
Other commenters likened the Sidewinder project to Rockwool, a Danish steel wool manufacturer that received overwhelming local pushback over environmental worries. The facility was placed under investigation in 2020, in part due to air and water quality concerns.
“This is Rockwool all over again, where government officials know what’s happening, and they don’t tell the public until it’s too late,” said Shepherdstown resident Billie Garde. “We’re tired of being run over.”
Despite the extent of community concern, commissioners said they were limited in their authority to reject the project. They said their role is to interpret whether the project is complete and adheres to state and county policies, not whether it is suitable for the local community.
Residents lined the hallway outside the Jefferson County Planning Commission meeting Tuesday evening due to a lack of space inside the meeting room.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
But the submitted concept plan only included reference to the factory site, whereas Dyck said the project would pull water from a separate parcel of land. Two test wells for the project have already been drilled on a separate property near Lake Louise.
Commissioner Cara Keys said omitting additional parcels from the concept plan was inadequate, because it was an integral component of the factory.
“You can’t have a bathtub without a waterline,” she said.
Legal counsel argued that rejecting the project due to local concerns fell outside the purview of the commission, and could require court intervention. But the commissioners felt Sidewinder’s omission of additional parcels was still relevant.
They voted unanimously that the concept plan was incomplete, sending it back to the company for modification and resubmission.
Meanwhile, the concept plan marks just an early stage of the planning process. The company could be required to make additional modifications to adhere to state and local standards if its project progresses.
After the meeting, Dyck told West Virginia Public Broadcasting that the team plans to resubmit the plan with additional properties listed.
“We met all the other requirements,” he said. “I think the Planning Commission is obligated to follow the rules and regulations.”
Sidewinder’s ability to resubmit means that, for now, the commission’s decision only delayed its planning process.
But community members who spent hours waiting to hear the commission’s decision viewed it as a win, made clear by their cheers after the commission voted to send Sidewinder back to the drawing board.
The Jefferson County Planning Commission ruled a water bottling plant concept plan from Sidewinder Enterprises is incomplete, requiring resubmission to move forward.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Director of the State Resiliency Office (SRO) Robert Martin presented to the Joint Legislative Committee on Flooding Sunday about efforts the SRO is making to prepare for flooding disasters and propose preventative plans — although funding for those plans has remained stalled for decades.
The state created the SRO in 2021, in response to 2016 flooding disasters. The office was tasked with reviewing a 2004 statewide preventative plan for flooding, with an initial annual review in 2022.
“[S]trengthening floodplain management in the State will not be accomplished tomorrow, next week or next year,” the 2004 statewide flooding plan wrote. “Successful deployment of the strategies recommended in this Plan will take many years of sustained effort and require significant amounts of Federal, State and local funds.”
However, significant state funding for SRO has yet to arrive.
In the meantime, Martin said the three-person office has collaborated with other government agencies and local groups. Those efforts include studies on flooding risks with organizations like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, dependent on SRO grant funding.
During the interim meeting, lawmakers focused on community organizing, developing plans with stakeholder input and preparing for the potential of land buyout programs in flood-prone areas.
As of October 2023, the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service offered 30 McDowell County floodplain homeowners voluntary buyouts and 27 accepted.
“We didn’t realize completely how NRCS was involved in buyouts,” Martin said of the SRO’s efforts to coordinate between federal and state agencies in the last year. “We’ve been working with them recently because they’re doing some more buyouts down in the southern part of the state, in McDowell County.”
“We want to move you out, but we want to be able to move you within that community, if all possible,” Martin said.
Sen. Eric Nelson, R-Kanawha, asked Martin about the potential uses of eminent domain in future state property acquisition. After the meeting, Nelson said he would like the legislature to acquire data on the process and bring community members affected to speak to the particulars of a potential buyout plan.
Sen. Eric Nelson, R-Kanawha, at the Nov. 10 Joint Committee on Flooding interim meeting. Credit: Perry Bennett/WV Legislative Photography
“I know we have other members that really are completely against the use of eminent domain, period,” Nelson said. “I’m in the middle. Just give me the data, and let’s discuss it and see where we go.”
“We do not want this to be detrimental to people,” Martin told the committee. “We have more people wanting to move and get out of the property that they’re in that faster than we thought we would be able to take the property.”
Martin also said new grant funding will support starting and maintaining local long-term recovery groups, which have dwindled in recent years even as disasters, including those not federally recognized, have continued.
“We’ll be going out to the counties and creating long term recovery groups there, working for both communities, providing training and disaster case management,” Martin said.
Martin said the SRO will host an event on the second floor of the Capitol rotunda on March 11, with involved agency and community group representatives presenting.
A national data hub in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle will soon transition away from fossil fuels and toward net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Located in the Berkeley County community of Kearneysville, the Enterprise Computing Center (ECC) is one of the largest Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data centers, processing data for taxpayers across the United States.
Running the 1,800-kilowatt facility requires major energy usage. New federal funding at the site aims to help it become more energy efficient.
On Oct. 29, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) announced that the facility received a $2.2 million grant to begin its transition away from fossil fuels. It marks an early step toward a larger $23 million project that will take place at the site in the coming years.
The federal investment will allow the facility to electrify its heating and hot water systems, and later implement heat pump cooling technologies, according to a DOE project description. The department estimates these changes will “reduce utility energy consumption by 34 percent, saving $1.3 million annually.”
Groundwork for the project was laid in 2020, when the DOE issued the facility a $500,000 grant for a study on the project’s implementation and effects, according to Tyler Harris with the DOE Federal Energy Management Program.
Harris serves as director of the Assisting Federal Facilities with Energy Conservation Technologies (AFFECT) Program, which selects grant recipients like the ECC and distributes their funding. Since its founding in 2014, Harris said the AFFECT program has led a national effort to help federal facilities pursue cheaper and more efficient energy resources.
“If a building needs fuel oil, natural gas and electricity to keep it running, suddenly you need to back up three different fuel sources,” Harris said. “But if you can turn the whole building so it’s 100 percent electricity, then you only need to back up one source of fuel.”
By streamlining energy consumption, protecting a facility’s energy reserves could be as simple as using batteries or on-site solar panels, Harris said.
Other projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Assisting Federal Facilities with Energy Conservation Technologies program include solar panel installations.
Photo Credit: United States Department of Energy
“Changing buildings to all electric is something that the federal government is really pushing, because it really allows agencies to meet their mission long term, and provides resiliency that they need,” he said.
Harris said the $2.2 million grant is “the base project” for a facility-wide energy transition at the ECC. The wider project is privately funded, but receives millions in additional funds for the energy costs it saves by transitioning to a cheaper energy source, he said.
The ECC was one of 67 federal facilities that received AFFECT funding this year around the country. Other projects ranged from wind energy installations to geothermal heat pumps, with the goal of turning sites into “all-electric buildings,” Harris said.
The AFFECT program awarded a total of $149.87 million to projects in 28 states and six international sites this year. It was funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2021.
Federal administrators hope it can promote energy security in light of emerging environmental concerns.
“It is imperative that federal facilities are able to operate in the face of increasingly intense extreme weather events,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in the Oct. 29 DOE press release.
While no other projects in West Virginia received funding this year, the DOE Legacy Management Business Center in Morgantown previously received funding for its own study on how to transition the building toward electric energy.
Harris said positive impacts from the ECC project can extend beyond the facility itself.
“Allowing this project to happen in this particular facility will not only improve air quality in the direct area, but it also provides jobs,” he said. “Not only for construction, but long-term maintenance of these new and emerging technologies.”
A timeline for the project’s implementation has not yet been announced. Harris said processing funding can take up to 18 months, and that completing the project could take up to an additional two years.
With colder days around the corner, West Virginians can apply for assistance to help cover home heating costs.
The Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIEAP) assists eligible, low-income households with the cost of home heating through direct cash payments or payments to utility companies on their behalf. Applications are being accepted through Wednesday, November 27.
To apply for LIEAP, residents can pick up applications at their local office of the West Virginia Department of Human Services (DoHS), participating community action agencies, or senior centers operated by an Area Agency on Aging. For convenience, applications are also available online at wvpath.wv.gov.
Kent Nowviskie, deputy commissioner for programs and policy at the West Virginia Bureau for Family Assistance, said the program receives applicants from all across the state.
“A lot of people in our state struggle with the cost of heating their homes, particularly vulnerable populations; the elderly, disabled may struggle to stay warm during these colder winter months,” he said.
Nowviskie said the program helps 45,000 to 50,000 households in an average year, a number that has held relatively steady save for an uptick in 2022.
“Federal fiscal year 2022 was a bit of an outlier. We served 59,000 households,” Nowviskie said. “That was a bit more than usual, although we also had additional funding, with pandemic funding at that time to keep the program open a little longer, so that may have contributed as well.”
LIEAP is federally funded and administered in West Virginia by the Bureau for Family Assistance, a division of DoHS. Nowviskie said the federal allocation is determined using a formula that takes into account state populations, as well as climatic conditions in each state.
“So a state like Maine may get a higher proportionate share of the funding than a state like Florida, where heating costs are obviously going to be lower,” he said.
At the state level, Nowviskie said the amount awarded by the federal government is considered against other factors to determine benefit amounts based at 60% of the state median income and household size.
“We consider the amount that we are awarded, the number of households we anticipate being able to serve with that funding, as well as looking at the average cost of utility bills across the state to try to come up with a household benefit amount that will allow us to serve the greatest number of people in still a meaningful way to truly assist them with their household heating costs,” Nowviskie said.
Automakers are investing in new electric vehicle factories and production lines in factories around the Southeast, even as the United Auto Workers, under the leadership of its president, Shawn Fain, is pushing to unionize those southern factories.
Inside Appalachia host Mason Adams reached out to learn more.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Adams: So, we’re talking because of this buildout of electric vehicle factories across the southeast. A number of companies are leveraging federal funding to invest in new plants in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. It’s even been called the “battery belt.” What’s going on here?
Myers: The Inflation Reduction Act made nearly $100 billion available for the domestic electric vehicle supply chain. $15 billion of that is to help existing factories transition. It’s a huge pot of money that private companies are obviously really excited about. Meanwhile, the auto industry has been trending towards the Southeast, away from its traditional home in the Midwest. A lot of this has to do with the generally lower wages, labor protections and environmental regulations that can be found in many states in the Southeast, due to political forces there. Particularly, foreign automakers have been moving towards the U.S. Southeast, which is kind of funny. It’s almost like countries like Germany with strong unions [are] outsourcing cheaper labor to us, and a lot of those are electric vehicle manufacturers.
Adams: All these new factories and investment in manufacturing comes at a time when the United Auto Workers is making a big push. First, last year, the UAW launched a strike against the big three, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. And now there’s been a push to unionize factories in Appalachia and the South, in states that haven’t traditionally been friendly to organized labor. How is that labor push going?
Myers: First off, I think it’s important to say the UAW strike was a mark of a change in strategy and direction. If you talk to people who were higher up in the union, or who were longtime workers, there was sort of a frustration for a long time around a perceived stagnancy in the union strategy — knowing that the auto industry was trickling out of the Midwest towards the Southeast, and struggles with democracy within the union, decisions that weren’t being made with the consent consultation of workers that belong to the union.
Shawn Fain, for a lot of folks, represented a change in strategy — real attentiveness towards trying to think about the electric vehicle transition, thinking about where geographically the union needed to grow. This win is a huge morale boost, and that does a lot for organizing. Workers see you’re winning, and they’re like, ‘Oh, my personal risk that I’m taking in joining this union or in going on strike is less now because more people are with me. This union has won and can win.’ That’s all to say that the UAW really struggled to organize in the South for a long time. Starting with a big loss at a Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, which was the big first foothold of the auto industry in the South. Now that Volkswagen has been located in Chattanooga for a while, they tried to organize Volkswagen a couple of times, [and] lost every time up until this year because there were strong anti-union campaigns. There was a strong collaborative effort by legislators in Tennessee to trash talk the campaigns [and] crush them. Workers were scared. Many of them didn’t have union families, people that the union paid for their dad’s pension or whatever. In the South, there’s not that same kind of legacy unionism [that there is in the Midwest]. So, it can be hard to convince workers it’s worth it. But this time, after two tries, the UAW won their campaign in Chattanooga, and that was a huge deal. It’s the first foreign automaker, certainly the first foreign automaker in the Southeast, and it’s an EV parts manufacturer. So, it hits a lot of points that are really big in the future of the UAW and the future of electric vehicles. It’s a long game that Shawn Fain is playing here, because it’s not easy to organize in the South, and they lost an election after that. They lost the Mercedes-Benz election in Vance, Alabama, because those same tactics were employed. That hasn’t really slowed the UAW down. Shawn Fain said, “We know this takes a few tries, we’re going to come back.” And they actually won another. They won in Spring Hill, Tennessee, which is once again EVs. Organizing the South and organizing the EV [plants] are the future of the United Auto Workers. The Biden administration is pushing EVs to be two-thirds of U.S. car sales by 2050. Knowing that industry is moving to the South in this way, if UAW wants to survive and continue to have bargaining power in the auto industry, this is where they have to be.
Adams: I understand the Spring Hill unionization was done with the assent of General Motors and LG, the battery company there. Are companies starting to come around on that? Or is that wishful thinking?
Myers: I think it’s never about companies suddenly opening their hearts. I think that once they understand that the union is a powerful enough force that they have to reckon with it, they can’t just ignore it and do a few anti-union videos for their workers and expect things to be easy. Then, then they know that they have to deal with the reality of that.
Adams: Even after the vote at the Alabama plant failed, UAW has continued to try to organize and has success in Spring Hill. What’s the outlook on the broader future for this push?
Myers: It seems like UAW is not going to stop. Every time Shawn Fain gets in front of the mic, he’s like, “We’re organizing the South. We’re going back to Alabama. We’re going back to Tennessee. We’re going to Georgia.” That is clearly their strategy. They’re going to keep pushing and putting energy and resources into organizers in the South, which historically, not all unions have been great at. They sort of give up the South and say, “Well, you can’t win there, it’s not worth putting your resources into.” And so this is a big turn that I wonder if other unions will see and emulate. I think that they’re just recognizing that this is a fight for what’s called “just transition” that we in Appalachia know a lot about, but under a different industry. It’s this recognition that energy transition is happening legislatively and politically. It’s happening all over the world. It might be happening more slowly than climate scientists would want. Without workers involved in it, it just becomes more of the same extractive relationships to land and people, more dangerous jobs. It also becomes a PR problem for climate advocates, because when workers in fossil fuel industries have high-paying jobs that were hard won with — in some cases — the literal blood of workers. and then all of a sudden, they’re asked to go transition into renewable energy, EVs, whatever: “Sorry, the jobs are kind of contract-y and not very well protected, and like a lithium battery might blow up on you.” You can see why workers wouldn’t be enthused about that. I think UAW and other building trades unions are setting precedents that [are] a really important part of the energy transition question. Obviously it will not happen without people doing the work to make it happen. The unions themselves are setting precedents that they’ll benefit from in the future, because they will continue to have membership. There’s also a philosophical question of, “What are we really doing here? What kind of world are we building?” Climate solutions where decarbonization is reinforcing existing inequalities, causing new pollution problems with less of a safety net for workers. [You ask,] “What is it for? What is it all for?”
Katie Myers covers climate stories for Blue Ridge Public Radio and the online magazine Grist.
