By Jessica Cohen, Lucy Milde, and Melissa Stok
The U.S. Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette weighed in on the debate over keeping coal mines open during the national emergency with a June opinion piece on PennLive, a news website headquartered near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His article covers much more than defining essential businesses during a lockdown, and presents an extremely optimistic view of the future of coal. After thorough research, including interviewing two experts in the field affiliated with MIT, we came to a different conclusion.
Secretary Brouillette is correctly concerned with making our electricity grid emissions-free while maintaining reliability, but overstates coal’s potential. Natural gas plants can be turned on and off more quickly than coal plants, making them more suitable to the needs of grid reliability and providing superior operational flexibility. This is only one of the reasons coal plants are less profitable. Coal has been on the decline since 2011; employment decreased 14% from 2017 to 2019, and plant owners announced the closure of 17 gigawatts by 2025. We are already moving towards more economic and sustainable choices like natural gas and renewables.
Trends in renewable energy are positive: from 2013 to 2018, solar employment grew by 11% annually and in 2018, wind turbine service technician was the second fastest growing occupation in our entire economy. Our government needs to take advantage of these trends instead of investing $100M in Coal FIRST. This program hopes to create “coal plants of the future,” but requires years of development to, at best, reach the air quality and low carbon standards of existing energy sources. In a country that needs economic stimulus, revitalizing former coal communities with renewable energy creates well paying jobs. Secretary Brouilette cites the importance of reliability of coal, but natural gas is more dispatchable than coal, and therefore more profitable as well.
Coal to product, such as producing carbon nanomaterials from coal, could provide jobs through additional manufacturing, but due to the sparse amount of coal actually required to make these products it is extremely unlikely that 47,500 new mining jobs, as Secretary Brouillette suggests, will be created. The value comes from the cutting edge manufacturing- not the coal consumed. Money spent on clean coal, despite the ongoing economic challenges in keeping coal plants open, could be better spent helping communities transition from coal to industries with better prospects.
Image credit: Filip Urban, Unsplash
