Renewable energy offers opportunities
An Associated Press article in Wednesday’s edition describing the decline of the coal industry in Appalachia contained a startling statistic: Fewer than 80,000 Americans are now employed in the coal industry, and a quarter of them are in West Virginia.
In the middle of the last century, 130,000 men toiled in West Virginia’s mines. Now, the United States produces twice the amount of coal it produced then, and with a tenth the number of employees.
Although it’s likely we will be mining coal for many years to come, the number of jobs will continue to decline along with the market for a fuel rapidly becoming obsolete. Natural gas is plentiful, cheaper and cleaner to burn, and renewable energy is undeniably in our future. Just as music can still be listened to on vinyl and magnetic tape, that industry long ago moved along with advances in technology.
In 2013, the National Mining Association reported 80,396 jobs in mining, 7,912 of them in Pennsylvania, and those numbers dipped since then. According to the Solar Foundation, 173,000 people are employed in the solar power industry nationwide, 2,800 in Pennsylvania.
It’s true coal still produces 39 percent of the electric energy in this country, and solar power produces less than 1 percent. But those figures are changing and will continue to move closer. Meanwhile, natural gas accounts for 27 percent of the total and may soon overtake coal. All renewable energy sources accounted for 7 percent of electrical production in 2014.
Coal is a huge part of the history and culture of West Virginia and Southwestern Pennsylvania, but that’s not a good enough reason to fight against its competition.
If West Virginia hopes to lift itself from the bottom of the state-by-state lists for health, employment and education, it will need to embrace the future of energy production rather than its past, and attract the industry and jobs that will produce that energy.