Last month, one of the nation’s top Republican donors became a flashpoint in a debate over the outsized power coal has in the state of Kentucky. 

A few weeks before Kentucky’s legislative session ended, GOP members were pushing to pass Senate Bill 349. The law would make it even harder to retire coal plants long past their fiscal prime. The bill’s cosponsor, Senator Robby Mills, said the new bill would make sure a utility couldn’t decommission a fossil generator “until a replacement unit is fully constructed, permitted, and in operation.” Last year, Mills pushed through a painfully similar bill that copied legislation in other coal states like West Virginia and Wyoming to keep zombie plants alive as long as possible. 

At one point during the debate over the bill, Representative Josie Raymond, a Democrat from Louisville, asked: “Who is Joe Craft?”

Tittering overtook those in attendance. “Irrelevant,” Representative David Osborne, the House Speaker, eventually said. 

Joe Craft is the CEO and president of a coal company that is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma: Alliance Resource Partners. But he is from Kentucky and meddles in the Commonwealth’s politics. Last year, his wife, Kelly Craft, ran for governor and set a record for the most money spent on a primary race, $10 million, financed overwhelmingly through her personal loans. She used the money to blanket the airwaves with pro-coal and anti-DEI education messages but ultimately failed to secure the Republican nomination.

Together, the Craft family has donated more than $24 million to Republicans over the last two decades, both individually and through PACs. According to Raymond, in the last election, Craft donated $2,000 to 24 members of the House and $1,000 to eight members. This includes both sponsors of the bill—Mills and GOP senator Robert Stivers—and the leaders and members of the Standing Committee for Natural Resources and Energy, including chairs Representative Jim Gooch and Senator Brandon Smith, who have each received thousands of dollars from the Craft family since at least 2016. Smith is also owner of a coal mining company called Mohawk Energy. 

During the debate over SB 349, Representative Tom Smith, a Republican from Corbin who called himself a close friend of the Crafts for over 20 years, said that comments about Craft during the debate were “disrespectful to the family that has worked their life and has given back to the Commonwealth.… You better be thankful that our grid is being supplied by coal as we speak and the lights are on.”

Because Kentucky has failed to take any meaningful steps to transition its power grid, the state remains largely under the fist of influential coal magnates like Craft, even while the utilities providing the coal and the customers consuming it remind state lawmakers over and over that this marriage is no longer in their best interest. And now, more Republican lawmakers are starting to take notice. 

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Kentucky is powered by coal. The state at various times has been first in the nation for toxic air pollution from power plants. In 2022, coal made up about 68 percent of Kentucky’s net generation, the third-highest use in the nation behind West Virginia and Wyoming. More than 10 billion tons of coal have been mined in the state since the 18th century. Today it’s the fifth-largest producer with more mines than any US state besides Pennsylvania and West Virginia. 

Over the last decade, more than 5,600 megawatts of coal generation have been shut down. While Republicans say renewables and stricter regulations are to blame, solar only makes up 0.2 percent of Kentucky’s electricity grid; collectively, renewables, not including hydropower, make up less than one percent. Kentucky has no requirement mandating that a certain amount of its grid be made up of renewables. Cheap fracked gas is the main reason why coal is being displaced in the state, taking up a quarter of Kentucky’s grid.

While coal industry groups like Dependable Power First Kentucky, an arm of the pro-coal group America’s Power, have advocated for SB 349, the largest investor-owned generators in Kentucky oppose the bill, including Kentucky Power, Louisville Gas & Electric, and Duke Energy. Amy B. Spiller, president of Duke Energy Ohio and Kentucky, wrote a letter to House Speaker Osborne and House members, telling them, “SB 349 will change how business is done in the Commonwealth; it will call into question whether new or existing businesses will want to grow in a state that has shown an annual willingness to jeopardize access to affordable, reliable power.” Spiller added that SB 349 imposed undue costs on customers, taxing Kentuckians “in order to keep uneconomic coal plants online, overlooking the operational reality that uneconomic plants do not reliably dispatch power.” Under the law, more customers would pay to operate and maintain power plants that didn’t serve them.

Last year, the same committee pushed through Senate Bill 4, a copycat bill that sought to make it more difficult to retire fossil fuel power plants by requiring the state’s regulatory body, the Public Service Commission, to add more time-consuming and costly restrictions onto retirements that overwhelmingly impacted coal generators. Spiller wrote that SB 4 was “rushed into law” and had already led to the outcome her utility feared. Spiller wrote that SB 4 was “rushed into law” and had already raised hurdles to affordable energy planning. When Duke Energy tried to recover costs associated with decommissioning their 600-megawatt East Bend plant in Rabbit Hash, the Public Service Commission denied that request as premature under SB 4. Further, Spiller wrote, SB 349 risks making "building new, reliable generation"—like the generation Duke needs to replace East Bend—"less efficient and more costly for future Kentucky customers."

SB 349 creates an entirely new level of bureaucracy through a regulatory body called the Energy Planning and Inventory Commission, or EPIC. The 18-member board has more than a quarter of its positions filled by the fossil fuel industry. Only one representative would be from the renewable industry, and only one member would represent residential electricity consumers. 

John Crockett, president of Louisville Gas & Electric and Kentucky Utilities, who also opposed SB 4, told the Lexington Herald-Leader that the commission “is neither configured nor intended to be an unbiased group formed with the purpose of considering Kentucky’s energy future.”

Major consumer groups oppose the bill, including the Kentucky Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce. Even economic revitalization groups located in Eastern Kentucky, the center of the state’s coal production, came out against the bill. One East Kentucky, a nonprofit working to attract businesses to relocate to the region, wrote that the bill would “create a significant hurdle to Eastern Kentucky’s economic development.” And in a joint letter, the Hazard-Perry County Economic Development Alliance and Chamber of Commerce wrote that the bill would create inefficiencies that would “rest on the pockets of the residents and business community” in Eastern Kentucky. 

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle tried to amend the bill. Democratic representative Lindsey Burke tried to amend the bill by changing the language to be friendlier to clean energy alternatives like solar, wind, and battery storage, along with eliminating the EPIC board. “Setting up an EPIC commission and stacking it that deep with people who are heavily invested in coal and the coal industry sets us on a course that’s very hard to change in the future,” Burke said. “It undermines other work the General Assembly has been doing looking at different energy sources like nuclear and renewables.” 

Her colleague, Representative Al Gentry, a Democrat from the southern edge of Louisville where two coal plants have long dominated the landscape and polluted the air, supported her amendment. He said he wished there was more dialogue across the aisle in their committee that could take advantage of clean energy funding newly provided by the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. “There’s a bunch of grants and funding programs we can access, and we need to become more aware and take advantage of them,” Gentry said.

Burke’s amendment was voted down in the floor debate. 

GOP representative Kim Banta, from Northern Kentucky, voted in support of Burke’s amendment. Banta, who also voted against SB 4 last year, added her own pair of amendments, which would remove the EPIC board’s authority to review the retirement of fossil fuel power plants and remove its ability to intervene in state regulatory cases. She even tried to get rid of the commission altogether. “It feels like we’re putting our electric companies in the position of coal is your choice and that’s it,” said Banta, adding she would never diminish the resource’s historic importance to her state. Her district is dominated by Duke Energy, but she said she spoke for her constituents who told her they did not support the bill. “They felt like it was propping up something that is dying,” she said.

Burke said Banta’s amendments “drew out the split among Republicans on this type of policy.” She said she doesn’t understand why her committee spent another year passing a second bill on “pretty much the exact same topic.”

Banta, like 16 of her Republican colleagues, voted against the final bill passage. They were overruled by the GOP supermajority. 

Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat who has long stayed quiet on issues of climate, vetoed SB 349, noting the new legislation was “inconsistent with Kentucky’s all-of-the-above energy policy” and would create delays for utilities to bring new generation online “which will jeopardize economic development.” 

His veto was easily overridden, and SB 349 is now law. 

Kentucky’s Public Service Commission told Sierra they had no comment on the bill. Chris Whelan, LG&E/KU vice president of communications and corporate responsibility, said that while the utility appreciated the governor’s veto and were disappointed it was overridden, “We will comply with the law and continue to make decisions that are in the best interest of our customers.”

After approving SB 349, the Natural Resources and Energy Committee followed it up with the passage of House Joint Resolution 121, which seeks to make Kentucky a “sanctuary state” from the EPA’s “overreaching regulatory actions on fossil-fueled power plants.”

During a press conference, Governor Beshear called the resolution “playing politics,” and essentially saying to their constituents, “I don’t like this big, bad group in the federal government, so I’m going to do something that gives them control of our regulations in the state. It’s silly. If the joint resolution is about overreach by the EPA, why would you do something that puts the EPA in charge?”

In the end, Kentucky residents are the ones that lose out. 

“Our constituents want clean, inexpensive energy,” Banta told Sierra. “We shouldn’t have the taxpayers propping it up if it’s doomed to fail.” 

This article has been updated since publication.