By Mike Tony
Charleston Gazette-Mail
West Virginia is the country’s fifth-largest energy producer, but federal funding critical to ensuring a productive energy future for the state has flatlined even amid critical infra-structure needs that threat-en its place as a power provider.
That’s the combined takeaway from two new reports that warn failures to diversify West Virginia’s anachronistically coal-heavy resource portfoliocould sap the state of energy it needs to make long-sought economic and manufacturing progress.
One report, released Thursday by ReImagine Appalachia, a regional coalition of community and environmentalist groups, tracks what it concludes has been a dangerous flatline under the Trump administration of federal funding for West Virginia, along with Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania, aimed at modernizing the region’s energy infrastructure while transforming the region into a hub for clean technology manufacturing.
“We fought for and we won transformative investments,” ReImagine Appalachia program director Dana Kuhnline, one of the report’s coauthors, said on a press call highlighting the report Thursday. “And as many on this call can attest to, the region got to work creating community-led, ground-up projects with a really exciting new vision and new opportunity for Appalachia, for our workers and for our lands. And what we’ve seen in the last year since [President Donald] Trump took office is a wholesale attack on all of that.”
See the rest of the story at the Charleston Gazette-Mail