Kentucky Senate president hopeful Trump executive orders will launch ‘coal comeback’

FRANKFORT, Ky. (FOX 56) — New moves by the Trump Administration to energize a “coal comeback” have some Kentucky leaders feeling hopeful.

Kentucky uses coal to power the state’s energy needs at the third-highest rate in the nation, supplying 68% of the state’s energy needs, behind only West Virginia and Wyoming, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers was in attendance on his first-ever trip to the White House when President Trump signed the orders last week.

“We’re slashing unnecessary regulations that targeted the beautiful clean coal,” Trump said.

The series of orders will incentivize and reduce regulations around permitting and leasing to mine federal land and redirect pots of money the Biden administration spent on renewable energy to upgrade carbon-based coal-fired power stations.

“To help upgrade them, make them more efficient, more environmentally friendly,” Sen. Stivers said Tuesday morning, speaking to reporters. “To basically invest in them instead of shutting them down when they still have five, 10, 15 years of useful life,” Stivers said.

As demand for energy grows thanks to needs from the tech industry, Stivers, a native of eastern Kentucky coal country, is hopeful the move could not only prime the state to be an attractive place for locating high-energy-demanding data centers but also revitalize the region.

“When things went down in the coal industry, we saw an outmigration of almost 40,000 people, and when that happened, that hurts the school system. It hurts your property taxes, it hurts your businesses, and it’s hard to come back,” Stivers said.

The US Energy Information Administration reports one out of five US-operating coal mines is located in Kentucky and is second only to West Virginia in the number of mines located in the state.

Environmental group The Sierra Club argued that extending the life of some plants could impact public health and raise energy costs.

“Again and again, politicians fly through coal country with false promises about revitalizing industry, when what they mean is milking the last bit of profits out of Appalachia for the benefit of executives and shareholders. Standards that keep our air, water, and working conditions safe: gutted. Cheaper alternatives to producing electricity: boxed out of the market. Unions to defend good-paying jobs: undermined at every turn. ‘Reviving coal’ has always been about coal executives, not coal country,” Kentucky Senior Beyond Coal Campaign Organizer Elisa Owen said in a statement after the orders were issued.

Stivers believes the state needs an ‘all of the above’ approach.

“You know, there’s no doubt that we’re going to have to change in this nation some of our thought processes about energy production and dispatchability and reliability. But for now, this is the cheapest, most reliable, affordable, dispatchable energy source we have. Along with developing more resources and assets in the nuclear realm,” he said.