A massive solar farm is in the works at the site of one of the largest coal mines in southern Appalachia.
BrightNight, the developer behind the planned farm at the decades-old Starfire coal mine near Hazard, Kentucky, says the project could help reinvigorate a region where thousands of mining jobs have been lost. Construction on the first phases could begin as soon as 2026.
At 800 megawatts, the completed project would have almost double the electricity generating capacity of the 412-megawatt coal-fired unit at the E. W. Brown generating station a couple of hours down the road from the mine.
Yale Climate Connections spoke with Joseph Albrecht and Maribeth Sawchuck of BrightNight about why they think placing a solar farm on a coal mine is a no-lose solution. Sawchuck is vice president of communications and Albrecht is the lead developer on the Starfire project.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Yale Climate Connections: Can you tell us a little bit about the Starfire mine’s history and importance to the region?
Joseph Albrecht: Starfire has been an active coal mine since the early 1970s. It’s one of the largest, if not the largest, coal mines in southern Appalachia. Many different companies have mined up there and there are still active holes with coal coming out of the ground every day — thousands of tons at a time.
Starfire has an extremely rich history. It was one of the first sites to implement [the mountaintop removal] style of mining and was an extremely innovative mine for years, all the way up until recent history in terms of creating new mining strategies or methodologies. That mine’s quite substantially responsible for a lot of the coal production in the area and ultimately was able to help provide a lot of the fuel for the region’s energy over the last several decades.
It is a pretty sole-source, singular economy in that coal mining provides pretty much all the jobs in the area other than service jobs that help house, take care of health care, and provide recreation for miners. Since coal mining has fallen off pretty precipitously over the last few decades, the economy has likewise suffered. A lot of very knowledgeable workers are left stranded in that region at the moment.
Maribeth Sawchuck: Over the last 12 years, there have been around 15,000 mining jobs lost in the region. The project itself straddles three counties, plus a fourth county that would cover the right-of-way where the transmission line would go. All four of these counties are ranked at some of the highest levels of poverty in the United States, the lowest level of life expectancy, a low level of education. And so when you think about equitable access to renewable energy, this is a prime region. When you think about retraining for future-proof energy jobs, this is an ideal location.
One project certainly won’t bridge the gap. But I think what’s really interesting about [the Starfire project] is the way that it can help reinvigorate the region. This was a local economy that was really propped up by mining, and now that that is waning, how do we keep people at work and try to change some of those statistics for the better?
YCC: How was this location chosen for the solar energy project?
Albrecht: There are a couple of different things that go into siting renewable sites. One that’s critical is access to a very robust grid — so high voltage transmission lines that are well-networked around the region. That’s been a very critical element in selecting sites, and in particular, with Starfire, it’s fairly close in proximity to a really key point on the grid where you have eight or more circuits — or different wires — coming together in one location and then emanating back out from there. And that’s really what we’re looking at for such a large project.
One of the unique things about Starfire is that it’s remained an active coal mine all the way up until the present time, and the way the reclamation is done is quite modern. Reclamation — literally putting back material on top of the exposed coal seams to return it to some version of its natural aesthetic or topography — that’s changed quite a bit over time. At Starfire, a lot of the topography is left relatively flat after the mining is complete. So you end up with hundreds of acres at a time that are almost pancake-flat. People would describe it as kind of like a wedding cake — with these tiers of very flat plateaus stacked on top of each other.
And that unique topography makes it an extremely beneficial place to site solar. Otherwise, you have this very natural, rugged, mountainous terrain, but you almost have these islands of extremely flat land, numbering for Starfire in the thousands of acres altogether. So that was a very key driver. It’s definitely the largest surface mine, but also the largest mine with the most flat and contiguous acreage — those flat areas are very much adjacent to each other, and they’re not spread out over multiple different ridge lines or across valleys from one another. We really do have this great pocket of 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 acres, all neighboring one another, where we can site a lot of this solar development.
Sawchuck: We need a lot more power in this country, and we can’t make more land. So getting creative about where we place these projects is critical. The Starfire mine represents a really great example of low-impact, very valuable infrastructure. We can put [about] 800 megawatts on this mountain site and have it disturb literally no one. It’s an ideal use of land.
YCC: Are there challenges in the construction, when you’re moving up mountains to that flat region?
Albrecht: One of the benefits of being in such a dense coal region, where this industry has been around for decades, is there’s a lot of infrastructure built out, not just electrical, but physical, transportation-type infrastructure, so you’re heading into a highly engineered space. You have four-lane highways just about everywhere you need to go — equipment that can move hundreds of tons of coal at a time travels up and down these thoroughfares. So you really have a lot of built infrastructure to span off of, and even more so because Starfire is an active mine. There are haul roads that are 50 feet wide going up the mountain on several sides, so we don’t have the typical access problems that you would from going into an area where the land has not been used for other industrial or commercial purposes. We very much have an environment that’s already been built up for uses like this. So it’s an extremely natural transition to continue to build infrastructure that will then continue to produce energy in the area. And in this case, it’s going to be directly on these coal mines.
YCC: What is your timeline as far as breaking ground?
Albrecht: The Starfire project is ideally going to be a four-phase project: four phases of 200 megawatts. The first phases could begin construction as early as 2026 and be completed as early as 2027 or 2028. Ideally, we tried to build as many of the phases at once as possible just to achieve some economies of scale. We think that’s very important to the area and also to the region. More specifically, Hazard, Hindman, and Jackson, the three county seats around the project, very much have the opportunity to become a hub for renewable energy development construction companies and other associated contractors and consultants that will work in our industry. So one of the things we’re trying to do is make sure we bring a substantial amount of scale to the region as quickly as we can to ensure that those cities, those counties can have longer-term jobs and benefits from these projects.
YCC: Can this situation be replicated in other places?
Sawchuck: One thing that’s really important for our industry in this project is its replicability. Not all mines are remediated equally, and mines are closing across the United States. And so the way in which they’re closed really matters. And as mines close, they should remediate in ways that make that development ideal.
Albrecht: We’re trying to innovate with Starfire — and working with the active coal mining company — by actually starting to optimize parts of the property for solar development. [We want] to figure out the best way to reclaim the land so that it’s most suitable for its potential future use as a solar farm.
So we’ve seen a lot of great synergies there with the coal mining industry and really strived to create that partnership, which I think creates a very innovative business model and gives me a lot of hope that this is a replicable situation that we can do this on multiple other mines and on other mines that are yet to even be reclaimed.
So there are several spots where there are coal reserves still accessible, where we’re in lockstep trying to plan with the active mining companies so that if they open up a new hole, mine coal, and start the reclamation process, we can work right with them to then reclaim that land for solar development basically the moment they finish mining. Within a year or two of them finishing extracting the coal from the ground, there could be solar panels on that site. And so that’s one of the innovative things we’re doing, especially from the permitting side, is to figure out a way to have the mining company reclaim the site, which basically just means place the land more or less back the way it was. They plant grass, and then normally, they’d have to wait something like five years for the site to be totally released of any mining or permitting obligations with the state or the federal government. And what we’re doing by working directly with them is actually giving them a chance to finish the reclamation process just a year or two after they’re done mining.
[Permitting] gets pretty complex, but at least in Kentucky, we’re seeing that that’s a possible avenue for coal companies and renewable energy companies to work together and have mutual benefits [for] switching over to solar development or any other renewable development. The mining engineers are collaborating with us to make our project possible, and they’re really proud of the engineering and planning that went into the mines historically and how well it can continue to be used for value in their region — that [there is] a commercial or industrial-use case after mining.
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