What happens after Utah’s coal-fired power plants close? – High Country News

Several years ago, Jade Powell uttered the word “transition” to a county commissioner at a local government meeting in the heart of Utah’s coalfields. The commissioner jumped out of his chair, grabbed Powell and shook him. 

“He was jokeful,” Powell said. “But you could tell he did not like that word.”

Fast forward to last summer, in another meeting, and that same commissioner, now out of office, offhandedly used the phrase himself. Powell stopped him mid-sentence and asked, “Did you just say what I think you said?” The commissioner laughed. “I count that as one of our biggest wins,” Powell told High Country News. 

Powell, deputy director of Utah’s Southeastern Regional Development Agency (SERDA), said that the moment was only possible thanks to years of trust building. The energy transition is a fraught subject in Carbon and Emery counties, where coal has been the economic backbone since the late 1800s. Halfway between Salt Lake City and Moab, Utah’s Coal Country is hemmed by the cream-hued Book Cliffs and mountainous Wasatch Plateau, both of them rich with coal. The Price River weaves past abandoned mines, and trains chug through historic mining towns where 27 languages were once spoken and every year featured a Labor Day parade. 

“We have invested in coal for the last 100 years, and that is our only resource,” Powell said. “It’s the majority of the jobs.” 

Carbon County, named for the rock that once made it prosperous, hasn’t produced coal since 2020. Due to technological innovation and the proliferation of natural gas and, more recently, renewables, mining jobs have diminished since the ’80s, while production has declined since the 2000s. In 2015, the Carbon Power Plant shuttered. A few years later, the county raised the municipal services tax by 700% to compensate for the loss of tax revenue and mineral lease royalties. Four mines and two coal-fired power plants, Hunter and Huntington, remain in Emery County, immediately to the south. Electricity generation is critical to the area economy. The plants and other utility infrastructure constitute nearly 60% of Emery County’s property tax revenue. And the plants alone employ more than 400 people and support thousands of indirect jobs in mining, trucking, rail and equipment manufacturing.

“The coal industry doesn’t look anywhere near like what it did back in the ’80s, and so everything has changed,” Lynn Sitterud, recently retired county commissioner, said. 

Eventually, these plants will no longer burn coal, but the phase out date is a moving target. In 2023, PacifiCorp, the plants’ majority owner, set the decommissioning date for 2032. Then last spring, it extended Huntington’s retirement to 2036 and Hunter’s to 2042 after the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals halted EPA’s rejection of Utah’s ozone transport plan, effectively reducing restrictions on the state’s coal-fired plants. Now, PacifiCorp’s draft 2025 Integrated Resource Plan, which will be finalized on March 31, lists no retirement dates for the plants. The document states that without “an enforceable environmental compliance requirement,” the coal-fired units can continue to operate for the entirety of the plan’s two-decade study horizon. 

“The coal industry doesn’t look anywhere near like what it did back in the ’80s, and so everything has changed.”

David Eskelsen, PacifiCorp spokesperson, wrote in an email that PacifiCorp responds to changes in technologies and regulatory policies when updating its plan every two years.  

Plant workers still worry about their job security, said Mike Kourianos, a shift supervisor at the Huntington Power Plant and the mayor of Price City, Carbon County’s seat and the largest city in southeastern Utah with just over 8,000 residents. Kourianos has a crew of 12, the youngest just 26 years old. 

“They’re very worried about their future,” he said, “and, you know, they love their communities.” 

Kourianos, who has worked at the plants for 47 years and witnessed the coal industry’s decline firsthand, campaigned on planning for the shifting economy. He believes his constituents are open to the energy transition. “We have to figure out what is the next sustainable industry for our area,” he said. 

“Coal mining and power plants, you take them out of the mix, what is the next thing?”

SERDA, WHICH PROVIDES community services and economic planning, is working with local officials to answer that question. There’s hope that the area’s industrial past can be the foundation for a vibrant future. Southeastern Utah is full of existing energy assets: Transmission lines and railways crisscross the desert, while existing water rights, highways and an airport make new development easier. And the local workforce takes pride in keeping people’s lights on — a legacy passed down through generations.

Powell’s family has chased economic opportunity in Coal Country for four generations. His dad hauls coal with the railroad; his uncles worked for the mines. But he knows those jobs may not last. His 2-year-old son has given him an extra reason to figure out the region’s next chapter. 

“Our area still wants to be an energy giant of the Intermountain West,” Powell said.

In sunny Utah, solar seems an obvious choice; projects have proliferated in Carbon and Emery. But local and state leaders want to remain a baseload power producer, and solar panels generate electricity only when the sun is shining. As storage capacity improves, though, solar is increasingly meeting power demand. In 2023, coal accounted for 47% of Utah’s electricity, while renewables, largely solar, accounted for 17%. This marks a dramatic shift from 2000, when 94% of electricity Utah generated came from coal and only 3% was powered by renewables.  

“We could go renewables for 80% of what we needed, almost without fault, almost everywhere in the country without a worry,” Dennis Wamsted, analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said. “And then we can worry about the next 20%. The problem, from my perspective, is that the people who don’t want to transition talk about the 20% first.”

Today, industries like artificial intelligence are demanding more energy, and Utah’s status as an electricity exporter is slipping away: In 2023, it used 98.6% of the electricity it generated. The state says it’s in an “energy crisis,” owing to the upcoming retirement of power plants, and leaders in Carbon and Emery worry about generating enough energy to attract new industry. Whether solar can fill the gap will depend on how fast solar-plus-storage projects are deployed, as well as continued technological evolution. 

“We could go renewables for 80% of what we needed, almost without fault, almost everywhere in the country without a worry.”

Solar doesn’t create enough long-term jobs, though, to replace those lost from shuttering power plants and mines. Recently, rPlus Energies broke ground on the Green River Energy Center, a 400-megawatt solar project with a 400-megawatt, four-hour battery storage system in Emery County. The company estimates it will create approximately 500 construction jobs but only 10-15 full-time positions once in operation. (Huntington Power Plant has a 1,000-megawatt capacity and employs 187 people.)

Over the past year, SERDA was awarded two federal grants to figure out its next step: Capacity Building for Repurposing Energy Assets and Communities Local Energy Action Program. Together, these grants included $150,000, as well as help from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and other national labs for the next year and a half. While the initial monetary awards were small, these grants serve as entryways for more technical assistance and billions of dollars set aside for energy-reliant communities in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That funding’s future is now uncertain, though; President Donald Trump has said he will “rescind all unspent funds” in the IRA, even though congressional districts that supported him in 2020 have received three times as much IRA investments as districts that favored Biden, according to the Washington Post. 

Carbon and Emery are already seeing some benefits. Over the past year, SERDA created something the region needed: a plan. After mapping the area’s existing energy assets and infrastructure, it sketched out four possible — and likely overlapping — paths forward: nuclear energy, carbon capture and storage, microgrids and redevelopment of existing coal infrastructure for new forms of electricity generation and other industries. 

IN SEPTEMBER, POWELL unveiled the details at Utah State University Eastern’s Economic Summit in Price, playing a video that highlighted local leaders like John Houston, founder and chairman of Intermountain Electronics, a company that has supplied electrical equipment to the coal industry since 1985. In recent years, it has expanded its work to renewables, data centers and oil and gas and now offers paid internships for young people in partnership with USU Eastern. 

“As our community faces the challenges of closing coal mines and power plants, we need to be ready to support the next generation,” Houston said.

USU Eastern has a long list of trade and technical courses for young people and workers in need of new skills, from construction to welding. It also has a power plant technician program that trains across energy sectors, and it’s currently rolling out a new energy engineering program.

SERDA and local leaders are also exploring nuclear power. The Department of Energy found that hundreds of the nation’s coal plants could be converted to nuclear and employ even more people. It also found that while numerous coal workers will need additional education, there’s a “significant overlap” in job types. 

Currently, local leaders are watching the TerraPower Natrium demonstration project next to a shuttering coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming. If successful, that model may be replicated at the Hunter Power Plant. 

Eskelsen, the PacifiCorp spokesperson, wrote in an email that if nuclear development is an option at Hunter, the utility “will seek to make such opportunities available” for current workers. 

“As our community faces the challenges of closing coal mines and power plants, we need to be ready to support the next generation.”

But nuclear reactors require billions of dollars to develop; just getting a license can cost over $50 million, and it can take over a decade to get a plant up and running.

If the costs can be figured out, Kourianos thinks nuclear power could be a “good, sustainable baseload energy” for the region. “Our communities are saying, ‘Bring those nuclear facilities here,’” he said. 

As part of the Communities Local Energy Action Program, NREL is providing technical assistance on a preliminary siting review for a nuclear plant and exploring the possibility of carbon capture and storage. Local leaders see carbon capture as a way to keep coal-fired power plants running while meeting emissions standards. “We can’t just abandon it (coal) now, because nuclear is still going to take 15 to 20 years to come along,” Powell said.  

BOTH CARBON CAPTURE and nuclear power are controversial, though. 

While the few existing carbon capture projects claim they can capture 95% of emissions, Wamsted and his colleagues at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that no project has consistently captured more than 80%, with many catching significantly less. Carbon capture can also increase the cost of operating coal plants. 

“It hasn’t been proven at scale, and it allows utilities to continue operating and building fossil fuel plants, which runs counter to what we need, which is a transition to renewable and clean resources,” said Sophie Hayes, the Utah clean energy manager and senior attorney at Western Resource Advocates. 

Hayes said that nuclear energy could be a valuable non-emitting baseload power source, but added, “I think it’s really important that we not replicate the harms of the past.”

Southeast Utah has a dark history from the uranium mining boom in the 1940s and ’50s. The Navajo Nation has roughly 500 abandoned uranium mines with elevated radiation levels, and the tribe has banned uranium mining since 2005. Every year, the White Mesa Ute Mountain Ute community, three and a half hours south of the Hunter Power Plant, holds an annual walk to protest the White Mesa Mill, one of the nation’s only active uranium mills. 

“I think it’s really important that we not replicate the harms of the past.”

 “The nuclear industry has hurt Indigenous Peoples, and that hurt will continue,” Malcolm Lehi, Ute Mountain Ute tribal council member, wrote in The Salt Lake Tribune last fall. 

There’s also the issue of waste. Nuclear power generation results in spent uranium fuel that remains toxic. Nuclear power plants currently store spent fuel rods on site but there’s currently no permanent waste storage site in the U.S.

Geri Gamber, SERDA’s director, said that uranium’s pollution potential is a concern for her, but that for communities reliant on a declining coal industry, there are no easy answers. “I would hope it would always be safe,” she said.” I don’t know if I could work passionately on something that wasn’t safe. But it is about keeping our heads above water here.”

This time last year, as Powell told the Emery County Commission about the DOE grants, Commission Chair Keven Jensen berated Powell for using the phrase “transitioning away from coal.”

“If we’re going to send support letters (for grants) that are pushing an agenda, the Green New Deal agenda, that has me very concerned,” Jensen said. 

Powell then clarified that he said, “shifting economies,” noting that part of the federal grants were for research on carbon capture to keep the plants running. For Powell and Gamber, changing minds in Utah’s coalfields is as challenging as any of the technical aspects of the energy transition. 

“I think culture is one of the hardest things to change,” Gamber said.   

Reporting for this project was supported by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative Journalism Fellowship.