Glen Lyn may die tonight.
We’ll know sometime after 7 p.m.
Glen Lyn isn’t a person, but through the years it’s been many people. Glen Lyn is a small (population about 100) town in Giles County. Tonight it’s holding a special election on whether to disband as a town and become just another unincorporated community with the county.
The circumstances that have led to this are sad and complicated, and are fully described by Michael Hemphill in his story last week. It’s one of our most-read stories, and if you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend doing so. For now, the short version goes like this: Glen Lyn was once a town built around a power plant. The construction of that plant in 1919 made Glen Lyn a minor boom town: The population surged from 50 to 400. That power plant closed in 2015, and when it did so, a quarter of the town’s revenue went away, too.
From there, it’s taken less than a decade for Glen Lyn to wind down to the point of calling it quits as a municipality.
There’s one important detail I haven’t mentioned: The plant in question was a coal plant, which wasn’t a big deal in 1919 but is now.
I’m not here to defend coal. I fully understand why we don’t want to be pumping carbon and mercury and who knows what kind of bad stuff into the atmosphere. I am, though, here to defend Glen Lyn and its right to be prosperous, whether it chooses to be an incorporated town or not.
The transition from fossil fuels to renewable fuels may be good for the planet, but it hasn’t been good for some parts of the planet — and Glen Lyn is a prime example.
Why must Glen Lyn pay the price for saving the planet?
Overall, the transition to renewables is creating a lot of jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that, over the next decade, the demand for solar photovoltaic installers will increase by 48%. The agency projects the demand for wind turbine technicians will grow by 60% — and that their median pay is higher than the median household income for Giles County. The Green New Deal is a real thing; it really is both good for the environment and good for the economy. Here’s the problem, though: The jobs being eliminated are concentrated in specific places, while the jobs being created are all over. Adding renewables to take up the slack from the Glen Lyn plant created jobs somewhere — but they sure weren’t in Glen Lyn. That’s the problem.
I hate to make this political, but those on the left are late — very late — to understanding this. They are also paying a political price, although it’s modest compared to the economic price that coal-dependent communities have paid.
Voters in those communities have understood this for decades, though. Giles County, like much of Appalachia, once was considered a Democratic stronghold. As late as 1996, Giles voted for a Democratic candidate for president. Giles didn’t just vote Democratic that year; every precinct except one voted Democratic, and that one only went Republican by a single vote. More to the point, that year Glen Lyn voted Democratic. It hasn’t since. This year, the town cast almost 83% of its votes for Donald Trump. There are lots of reasons Appalachia has realigned politically, but the Democratic distaste for coal is certainly one of them. It’s noticeable that Glen Lyn made that switch in 2000, the year Democrats nominated Al Gore. Can you blame these voters for thinking he wasn’t likely to look out for them?
Some on the left have now belatedly embraced the concept of a “just transition” from fossil fuels. Colorado now has an actual Office of Just Transition and a Colorado Just Transition Action Plan.
That’s great. But where is the justice for Glen Lyn?
It’s easy for me to rail in general about the unfairness of what’s happened to Glen Lyn but harder to pinpoint a specific culprit.
The power plant in Glen Lyn closed five years before Virginia passed its Clean Economy Act, so that’s not to blame. When Appalachian announced it was closing the power plant in Glen Lyn, the company cited new regulations on emissions promulgated by the Environmental Protection Administration under then-President Barack Obama. However, that’s not a clear-cut case of cause and effect because at the time Glen Lyn was already the oldest and smallest coal plant in American Electric Power’s entire fleet (Appalachian Power being part of AEP).
“That reality discouraged AEP from investing millions of dollars in Glen Lyn’s environmental overhaul to comply with the EPA’s mercury and air toxics standards or to cover the costs of conversion to burn natural gas instead of coal,” The Roanoke Times reported in 2015.
However, even if EPA hadn’t issued those new regulations, there’s no guarantee the plant would still be in operation today. At the time, a utility spokesman pointed out: “The plant and its two units were reaching the end of their projected lives.”
Sometimes things just get old and don’t get replaced.
Absent those EPA regulations, Appalachian might well have shut down Glen Lyn anyway, and today I could be complaining about a greedy utility that didn’t care about a small town. The fact is, though, that the government did take some action that made it uneconomical for Appalachian to even consider the option of keeping Glen Lyn open — but there wasn’t any government action as part of that to create or even encourage replacement jobs in Glen Lyn.
In recent years, we’ve seen more attention to that sort of thing. It’s welcome but often too late for places like Glen Lyn.
The Inflation Reduction Act that Congress passed, and President Joe Biden signed, in 2022 was once described as “industrial policy masquerading as energy and climate policy.” Whether the act really reduced inflation is debatable, but inflation comes and goes. The act also did something more long-term (assuming the next Congress doesn’t undo it). The legislation declared that clean energy companies could qualify for tax breaks if they located in so-called “energy communities” — basically places that have lost or are losing fossil fuel-related jobs.
To my knowledge, this may be the most robust attempt to encourage clean energy jobs to directly succeed fossil fuel jobs — and not pop up somewhere else. The Energy Department claimed in August that in the two years it’s been in force, the act has encouraged more than $215 billion in private sector investment by clean energy companies, although it’s unclear how much of that was in these “energy communities.”
The department’s interactive map shows 15 projects in Virginia, the biggest of which is the announcement that the battery company Microporous will locate in Pittsylvania County and create 2,105 jobs. That project, if it pans out as envisioned, is truly transformational for Southside. The Microporous site in the Southern Virginia Megasite qualifies as an “energy community” because it’s adjacent to a North Carolina county that once had a coal plant. How much that played a role in the siting decision is difficult to say.
However, none of those 15 projects are in what we’d recognize to be “coal country” — the westernmost one listed is 99 jobs at the Volvo truck plant in Pulaski County — and certainly none are in Glen Lyn.
None are in southern West Virginia, that state’s main coal territory. Only one is in eastern Kentucky — 113 at a battery plant.
Two years may not be a long time over the course of a business cycle, but so far we’re not seeing a “green rush” into coal counties or even “energy communities” in general, at least not ours. There are lots of factors that companies take into account when locating a new operation, and it could be that there just hasn’t been a good match yet. Or maybe there never will be. Cardinal’s Matt Busse has written about efforts to find a new purpose for the building, but nothing has materialized.
That’s not much consolation to Glen Lyn or any of the Glen Lyn-like places out there. I realize I’m asking for something that, in many ways, is unachievable. Over the course of history, sometimes communities rise up, and, as the economy changes, some of them fall down. Things change; we can’t keep everything the way it was. I understand that in the abstract, but it’s still hard to see up close in a place like Glen Lyn.
Where is the justice for Glen Lyn? I have no idea. All I can think of is what Tyrion Lannister said in “Game of Thrones” when he was being held prisoner for a crime he did not commit: “If you want justice, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
The politics of rural mail delivery
In September, I wrote a column about the Postal Service’s plans to slow rural mail delivery. I’ll have an update in this week’s West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out Friday afternoons.
I’ll also have an update on ranked-choice voting, which I also wrote about recently.
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