President Biden Wants to Turn Coal Towns into Green Energy Hubs

April 6, 2023

President Biden and his administration have made it clear they have a goal to shut down coal plants across America. Unfortunately, the cost of doing so has lost America’s energy independence, and many coal miners across the United States have lost their job. This week the White House announced they want to turn coal mining communities into green energy hubs.

Fox News reports,

“The White House announced plans Tuesday designed to drive green energy investment in communities that have struggled to rebound from coal plant and other fossil fuel shutdowns. The Biden administration will provide billions of dollars in tax incentives for clean energy developers and facilities to build projects in applicable communities, according to a joint announcement from the White House, Treasury Department and Department of Energy (DOE). The bonuses are in addition to the generous tax credits for the green energy industry earmarked in the Inflation Reduction Act.”

We understand that coal keeps the lights on. Federal data shows that around 58% of all U.S. electricity generation capacity expected to end this year will be from coal plants. And nearly 25% of the current coal-fired fleet — a staggering 46.1 gigawatts of power — is slated to retire by 2029.

“It’s absolutely horrible,” Brandon Richardson, a West Virginia coal miner, told FOX Business last year. “I think this administration is trying to destroy the country with these thoughts of Green New Deal being the wave of the future when, as a country, we are definitely not set up for strictly wind, solar, water power, whatever you want to go to that’s green. We just do not have the infrastructure in place to handle that,” he said. “And with the abundance of coal in this country and the way we’ve changed the regulations and the companies have changed to burn coal cleaner than pretty much any country out there, there’s really no reason to do away with something that can keep us energy independent.”

Power The Future has reported on Biden’s promised clean energy jobs in the past. The fact is that these jobs will not materialize until at least 2023. Once jobs become available, workers will be making far less than they were with oil and gas industry jobs. 

Biden’s other solution for coal miners who are out of a job “learn to program.” When out on the campaign trail in 2019 Joe Biden said “Anybody who can go down 300-3,000 feet in a mine sure as hell can learn how to program as well. But we don’t think of it that way. Anybody who can throw coal into furnace can learn how to program for God’s sake.”

President Biden clearly has a skewed view of how hard energy workers across the United States work. This week’s announcement is another way for Biden to try and satisfy his eco-left supporters before 2024.