One coal town seeks to transition after its power plant closes

Jeremiah Baltzer liked his job as a union carpenter at the Homer City Generating Station, about an hour east of Pittsburgh. The job wasn’t always easy, he said.  

“You’re on call pretty much 24 hours a day,” he said. “You may not be told that, but that’s kind of how you have to do it in order to stick around.”

Over the years, Baltzer saw the once-mighty coal industry start to decline. There was competition from cheap natural gas and new regulations on toxic air and water pollution. 

The Homer City plant filed for bankruptcy in 2017. In the last few years, the plant operated at only around 20% capacity and its workforce dwindled.

“You were seeing 1,500 people a day on a job during an outage, and then all of a sudden, boom, you don’t see anybody all day,” he said. 

The plant closed for good last year. Its owners cited cheaper fuels like natural gas as well as warmer winters and heightened regulations as reasons for closing. 

There’s been lots of attention in Washington, D.C. on how to help places left behind by the hundreds of coal plant closures around the country. The case of Homer City provides an example of what this kind of disruption can mean to a community. 

“We never really thought it would completely shut down,” said Connie Chimino, a hairdresser who has owned a salon in Homer City for 29 years. “I had friends that worked there — I had clients that worked there. A lot of my friends are retired from there now.”

Now, whenever she drives into town, Chimino passes by the plant’s iconic smokestacks sitting idle. 

“You go by and you don’t see the stacks working at all. And that’s sad,” she said. 

Those stacks meant jobs, but also pollution. 

Coal is still the country’s biggest source of climate warming greenhouse gasses from the power sector, even though it only provides 16% of electricity nationwide. 

Now the area around Homer City — once home to dozens of coal mines — has to plot a new future. That’s what Homer City’s borough manager Rob Nymick is doing.

“My thought process is: Okay, what do we need to do to move forward?” Nymick said. “Because it’s gone.”

He sees one potential answer running through the middle of town. 

Nymick parks his work truck at a spot near a stream where the water color is unusual. 

“Just look at the orange,” Nymick said. “There isn’t a thing alive in that stream.”

The orange is drainage from mines that were abandoned decades ago before modern regulations. The acidity in the water kills aquatic life. 

Nymick wants to clean it up. He envisions tourists one day flocking to the stream to fish, hunt and bike. 

“Wouldn’t this be a wonderful place someday if this stream is clean?” he said. “We (could) have the largest kids’ fishing tournament, and we have all the room in the world to do this here.”

But in the meantime, Nymick and others are eager to see something replace the plant. 

The Biden Administration is working to connect local officials with federal incentives for former coal communities. Those include tax incentives for clean energy. 

As for former coal plant worker Jeremiah Baltzer, he and his wife thought about moving even before the plant closed.

“Because I saw the writing on the wall, even well before some of the people there did,” Baltzer said. 

But Baltzer didn’t move his family. Since the closure, he’s been working other union carpentry jobs, and he and his family started going to a local church and have found a stronger sense of community. 

“We found a good core group of people that are really caring,” Baltzer said. “So, we’re probably going to stick around.”