It was just a little more than 10 years ago when the last electricity was generated at the Jennison electrical power generating plant in Bainbridge. The 1945 plant along state Route 7 stopped generating Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2000, and then closed Saturday, Nov. 4, 2000.
"There might be some tears and jokes," said Joe Nowhitney, a boiler operator, about the final crew and upcoming closure.
The mood was markedly different Thursday, Dec. 13, 1945. Nearly 250 guests of the New York State Electric & Gas Corp. gathered in the still-clean track hopperhouse of the plant, the coal unloading area next to the D&H Railroad tracks. Here, a buffet luncheon was served and a program followed.
By the 1990s, things were looking grim at the Jennison station. "NYSEG: Bainbridge plant survival at stake" was a headline in The Daily Star on Wednesday, Dec. 8, 1993. It wasn't just coal being used to generate electricity at the plant. That year, the burning of soil contaminated with coal tar became "necessary for the survival" of the plant.
Only two years earlier the state Department of Environmental Conservation had given permission for NYSEG to burn tires at the Bainbridge facility. Tires were removed from area landfills, chipped and sent to the station to be burned for energy.
Also in 1993, it was proposed that the plant burn polyethylene plastic extracted from disposable diapers in its fuel mixture. In 1994, permission was given to burn marijuana and other illicit drugs seized by police. Smokestack emissions from all of these fuel sources often drew concerns from Bainbridge area residents.
The Virginia-based AES Corporation bought the plant from NYSEG in 1999, and by 2000 AES had cited the age of the facility and the cost of the plant had become too great. The plant was closed and placed on what was termed "long-term cold-standby."
Emissions ticked up 1.3 percent even as renewable energy surpassed coal power nationwide for the first time in over six decades, with wind, solar and hydropower generating 22 percent of the country’s electricity compared with 20 percent from coal. Growth in natural gas power generation also compensated for coal’s decline.
There are 215,430 acres or 337 square miles of abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania.
92,231 acres are dry strip mine, 6,710 acres are strip mine filled with water. 86,317 acres are coal mining refuse, 722 acres of it is currently burning. Underground coal fires burn on an additional 2,609 acres.
Miles Hatfield was walking into his dining room when he felt the wooden floor give way. His legs dropped hip-deep into water that had pooled under the brick house in the green hills of eastern Kentucky where he had lived for the past 40 years, trapping him in his own floor.
Hatfield, a retired coal miner, raised two boys in the house a few miles from the West Virginia border and added on five rooms as his family grew. But the red water running off from the nearby Love Branch coal mine had turned his backyard into a marsh, ruined his septic system, and finally sucked him through his floor three years ago.
Love Branch used to be owned by one of the biggest coal companies in the U.S. Federal law requires companies to clean up the land when they finish mining — and Love Branch hasn't produced any coal in more than a decade. But the former owner, now named Alpha Metallurgical Resources Inc., transferred the mine and its cleanup obligations to a smaller company in 2018, the year before Hatfield fell through his floor.
Driving through the Wyoming sagebrush west of Cheyenne, the clouds of dust rising from the road give way to giant plumes of steam shooting into the warming sky.
This is the Jim Bridger power plant, one of the largest coal-fired power sources in the nation and an enormous emitter of carbon dioxide pollution. At the plant's edge there's a reservoir, lined with rocks and clumps of drying grass. The plant sucks up about 16 million barrels of water each day, using it to power more than million homes across six western states, all the way to Oregon.
But there's a problem that looms for the coal plant operator and the customers that rely on it for electricity. This water is piped here from the Green River, a tributary of the rapidly shrinking Colorado River. Now, amidst a decades-long drought and a shortage of water downstream across the Southwest, future conservation in the basin could mean industrial users like Jim Bridger see their water shut off, says Wyoming State Engineer Brandon Gebhart.
