To look towards renewable energy, it’s important to look at where our energy has come from in the past. For those in Appalachia, coal has been a major resource for a long while.

Coal + Appalachia

While our relationship with coal was once a worthwhile endeavor, things are a bit tumultuous now. This primarily is because coal doesn’t offer the same job or community opportunities that it has done for us in the past. Just for scope, the active and abandoned mines and sites in Appalachia make up 10% of the region according to Duke researchers.

In order to extract coal, it needs to be mined. Prior to the 1960s, coal was extracted through digging. Coal miners would work their way underground in order to access the coal. Once we reached the 1960s, we began to utilize a form of mining called contour mining. Contour mining required no digging. Instead, coal miners would bulldoze and literally explode hillsides with dynamite in order to access the coal. This sort of mining left a lot of visible damage. The mountains that were exploded were left permanently gaping and farmland could get destroyed by association.

In the 1990s, we switched extraction methods yet again. This time to something called mountain top removal. If you tried to guess what mountain top removal is just by the name, you’d probably get pretty close. This form of mining requires that mining companies blast out parts of mountaintops. These companies will go sometimes several hundred feet into the hilltop in order to expose the coal. Once the first bit of coal has been stripped, it’s time to move onto the next layer. As one can probably imagine, this method of coal extraction leaves behind a lot of rubble. This rubble, called overburden, cannot be formed back into mountains. Instead, the miners drop it into surroundings valleys, creating a leveling of topography both upward and downward.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), these valley fills are responsible for burying about 2,000 headwater streams. Headwater streams are basically just tiny flows of water that worm their way through all sorts of leafy forest floors. Although they’re tiny flows, these streams pick up valuable nutrients and organic matter that help to support life downstream. The EPA had estimated that by 2012, mountaintop removal had destroyed 1.4 million acres of Appalachian forests. This is because mountaintop removal strips away the upper portions of a mountain’s rocks. Once these rocks have been stripped away, the remaining soil isn’t able to provide the same nutrients for native hardwood forests.

Losing out on these forests is problematic for a few different reasons. Appalachian forests are home to an array of wildlife and plants, many of which can only be found in this region. As a result of mountaintop removal and the following valley fills, these animals and plants lose out on valuable habitat. We also lose out. Forests naturally capture carbon. One study argues that the deforestation occurring in Southern Appalachia could take us from a carbon sink to a net carbon source by as early as 2025.

Coal Specifics

It can be hard to imagine why we would still use coal if there can be so many downsides. In the EPA emissions breakdown, coal was included in the electricity sector. While electricity accounts for 27% of the overall emissions, coal made up 65.8% of the electricity emissions. The power plants that run off of coal help to provide half the United States with its electricity.

In Tennessee, coal supplied most of the electricity produced between 2001 and 2016. However, this has started to decline. Coal powered generation sunk below nuclear power generation for the first time in about 20 years. It should also be noted that Tennessee requires more energy than we produce. When that happens, we make up for any lacking energy generation through nearby states!

Why do we use coal?

It’s partly because it’s here. From the Appalachian region to the Illinois Basin, and all the way to the Rocky Mountains, we have more than a quarter trillion tons of coal just hanging out underground. At today’s consumption rate, we would have enough coal to last 250 years. As of right now, there are about 40 coal-burning power plants under construction or with plans to be built. In China, there could be several hundred by 2025.

As humans, we consume a lot of energy. Our population is growing, we need A/C – especially in the south where the summers only seem to be getting hotter and hotter. According to the Department of Energy, the US appetite for energy is expected to rise by a third over the next twenty years. In the past 15 years, we’ve tried to refocus our energy into natural gas, which, compared to coal, is a relatively clean fuel. However, there was almost a tripling of natural gas prices in the past several years that dampened the construction of new natural gas power plants.

Can coal be clean?

The short answer is not really. Coal-burning power plants, in response to government initiatives and standards, can cut emissions for things like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide but carbon dioxide? It just escapes up the power plant’s stacks. In the United States, coal power plants are responsible for nearly 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year. Over the next 20 years, due to increased demands, these emissions could potentially rise by a third! What makes matters more concerning is that there’s really no way to capture the carbon dioxide efficiently. According to a carbon dioxide manager at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, if you applied a carbon dioxide capturing device to the coal power plant, you’d lose out on 25% of the energy produced.

Renewable Energy Options

Coal is troublesome but it has a long history in Appalachia and many have a desire to return to the days of deep mining as it provided a massive influx of jobs in a region where jobs were harder to come by. Clean energy can provide those same resources while also working to create a more resilient electric grid and expanding energy access in developing countries. All while lowering our energy bills!

But renewable energy is not without downfalls. Below are some highlighted forms of renewable energy.

Hydropower

We’ve been utilizing water as an energy source for centuries. Hydropower officially came around in the 19th century, just a handful of years after James Francis, British-American engineer, created the first water turbine. It was in just 1882 that we saw the first fully functional hydroelectric dam in the US, residing all the way in Wisconsin. Currently, hydropower accounts for right around 16% of the world’s electricity. Hydropower is the world’s largest renewable energy source. The leaders for hydropower include the US, China, Brazil, and Russia. In the United States, hydropower helps to generate electricity in all but two states!

While it might look intense, there are only three main components that help to make hydroelectric dams functional: a power plant, a dam that can be opened and closed to assist with water flow, and a reservoir to store the water! The water makes its way through the dam’s intakes and pushes to turn the blades of the turbine. The rolling turbines spins a generator which is what produces the electricity.

Hydropower is an exceptional tool that we’re still implementing in our modern world. The largest benefit rests solely on the fact that, once you have a dam built, the power source (flowing water) is free. The source is constantly being renewed by snow or rainfall! It’s also relatively easy to control based on the needs of the community.

Image of Three Gorges Dam from Britannica

But these dams have some downsides. The first comes from the massive size. When we introduce dams to an area, we can potentially be displacing both surrounding residents as well as wildlife. When the Three Gorges dam was being built, an estimated 1.2 million people were displaced from their homes. Droughts also create some trouble. When we don’t have enough rain, some communities (especially out West) are forced to turn to coal or gas to make up the difference. This creates an influx of carbon dioxide emissions.

Wind

According to the US Geological Survey, there are 57,000 wind turbines both onshore and offshore in the US. We began to harness the wind as an energy source more than 7,000 years ago! The leading energy producers globally are the US, China, and Germany but the industry as a whole continues to grow. We’ve seen a 25% increase in the use of wind turbines each year during the past decade. In the timespan of 15 years (2000 to 2015), the cumulative wind capacity globally increased from just 17,000 megawatts to more than 430,000 megawatts. In fact, experts in the industry believe that if we continue at our current growth rate, we’ll be able to power 1/3 of the world’s electricity needs through wind power alone!

Wind as an energy source works in much the same way as water – it’s always going to be there. As long as the sun is shining, we’re going to be able to utilize the wind that is produced as a result of uneven surface heating. Wind is able to produce energy largely through the massive wind turbines. These turbines can be as large as 20-stories high with blades as long as 200-feet.

The main downfalls for wind energy are in aesthetics. Some people find wind turbines to be downright ugly. They can also be a bit noisy. Another problem is that these giant turbines are quite dangerous for flying wildlife. Birds and bats are killed by the hundreds of thousands annually. While this pales in comparison to the destruction caused by habitat loss and invasive species, it’s worth mentioning to create the fullest understanding. Scientists are even working on solutions to address wildlife concerns!

Solar

You’re probably already sort of familiar with solar technology. We see some solar capabilities across rooftops and in things like handheld calculators. On this smaller scale, solar energy works by employing semiconductor materials that comprise cells. These cells, when hit with adequate amounts of sunlight, knock electrons loose from their atoms. These electrons flow through the cell and generate energy.

On a larger scale, solar energy can employ various technologies. Often, heat is used to create steam which generates electricity in a similar fashion to that of coal and nuclear power plants. The world’s total installed energy capacity from photovoltaic panels (solar panels) increased by over 4,000% from 2007 to 2017. There are two different types of panels that work to create electricity from sunlight: solar panels, which convert the sun’s light to electricity, and concentrating solar power (CSP) which uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s heat. For world leaders in solar energy, we can look to the US, China, and Japan. However, even solar power leaders aren’t utilizing as much as they could. In the US, solar power only accounted for 2% of our total electricity generated in 2017.

Solar power technology can be really expensive to employ. It also often requires a ton of land as you have to have somewhere to put the solar panels. Thanks to tax incentives and coordination with other energy supplies, though, it can be expected that solar energy will pay itself off in just 5 – 10 years!

Renewable Energy at Home

It is possible to mitigate how much electricity we take from the grid! If you’re interested in creating an area of Appalachia where coal is less and less relied on, here are some resources to learn about potentially adding clean energy options to your home.

The Sruce’s 5 Home Renewable Options You’ve Never Heard Of

Energy.Gov’s Planning for Home Renewable Energy Systems

If you’re interested in learning more about what our East TN energy companies are doing, you can check out KUB’s and TVA’s websites!

Appalachian Coal + Renewable Energy