Alabama’s oldest coal plant will be closing in April after a surprising mid-February announcement by Alabama Power. Plant Gorgas, which has operated for over a century on the shores of the Black Warrior River, was a steady source of jobs, electricity – and dirty coal pollution.
The announcement came as Alabama Power’s parent company, Southern Company, released its 2019 annual report, and marks the first official effort of Alabama to keep pace with the company’s three-state decarbonization plan, in which the utility aspires to eliminate its coal fleet by 2050.
Although Plant Gorgas was a major employer in the rural area between Birmingham and Jasper, its coal boilers were inefficient and badly out of date compared to modern techniques for making electricity. The oldest boilers still functioning on site were first operational in the 1950s, and mounting maintenance costs – as well as the falling costs of clean, renewable energy – made the coal plant obsolete. The Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River and Rattlesnake Lake bore the direct consequences of this dirty method of making electricity. Alabama Power chose to shutter the plant instead of comply with rules designed to manage the toxic coal ash produced and stored at the site.
Unfortunately, much of the commentary surrounding the plant’s closure has been wreathed in bitterness and blame. Although federal coal ash regulations may have been part of the story behind the plant’s failing economics, Alabama Power couldn’t possibly expect to charge its customers for upkeep on a technology that has been fully eclipsed by alternative fuel sources.
Instead of celebrating the inevitable advance of clean wind and solar technology – along with battery storage and energy efficiency programs – industrial and political leaders have chosen to frame the steady march of progress as the enemy of economic growth. That’s a shame, given that Alabama Power’s other three coal facilities – at Plant Gaston near Wilsonville, Plant Barry near Mobile, and Plant Miller near Birmingham – are also running on borrowed time.
Much work remains to be done in ensuring that the workers at Plant Gorgas find suitable employment, and major efforts are needed to deal with the coal ash pollution that has been detected in the area’s drinking water. Simply covering up the ash isn’t going to make it go away, nor will it protect it from the water table. But with one less coal plant on the banks of Alabama’s beautiful Black Warrior River, which flows into the Tombigbee River towards Mobile Bay, folks in the Alabama Sierra Club can focus on the momentum we need to build in order to accelerate the transition from dirty coal to clean, renewable energy.
Stephen Stetson