By Mike Tony
For HDMedia
West Virginia consumes far more coal for its electricity than any other state.
And West Virginia lawmakers are consumed by coal.
The state Senate on Friday passed legislation that it turned into a bill propping up a coal industry whose struggles have been deepened by President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff policy, attempting to tilt in the industry’s favor a free market that has favored cheaper, more sustainable energy sources for years.
That bill, House Bill 4026, as passed by the House of Delegates 86-6 on Feb. 6, had been narrowly focused on promoting advanced transmission technologies that can enhance reliability and deliver more capacity from grid infrastructure. Then the Senate Energy, Industry and Mining Committee transformed it into a measure setting a minimum operational use standard for coal-fired plants that energy experts and Appalachian Power have said is uneconomic.
HB 4026 as approved by the Senate in a 32-2 vote on Friday also would place new restrictions on solar and wind resource investment for utilities and prohibit monies in a state grid stabilization fund from being used to decommission operating units.
It would build on Senate Bill 609 of 2023, which required state Public Energy Authority approval for coal, oil or gas-fired plant decommissioning or deconstruction, by also requiring PEA and Public Service Commission approval for not only any coal or gas-fired plant retirement or deactivation but any reduction in capacity.
HB 4026’s transformation was led by Energy, Industry and Mining Committee Chair Chris Rose, R-Monongalia, a Mon Power controls technician who ignored the role of free market forces in prompting coal’s long decline, which he attributed to regional grid operator PJM Transmission LLC despite PJM promoting existing fossil fuel-fired power and overseeing a massive backlog of clean energy projects in recent years.
“We all like to say that we’re a coal-friendly Legislature. That war on coal is the decades and decades of regulatory burden that has put coal at a disadvantage in what is an illusion of an energy free market that does not exist,” Rose claimed. “[I]f you want to know what that war on coal looks like, I’ll tell you — real simple — in three letters: PJM.”
The House in a 92-3 vote on Monday passed legislation in House Bill 5381 that would provide legal framework for a long-term state energy plan pushed by Gov. Patrick Morrisey that favors coal over energy resources.
HB 5381 requires that a comprehensive energy policy developed by the Office of Energy and submitted to the governor and Joint Government and Finance Committee provide recommendations that include prioritizing baseload generation — the minimum level of continuous power supply needed to meet grid demand linked to constant-supply sources like coal — over intermittent, more cost-efficient generation sources like solar and wind.
HB 5381 also would require a state energy policy recommendation to allow West Virginia’s coal-fired plants to “remain fully operational” through at least 2050 — 10 to 15 years past what American Electric Power and FirstEnergy subsidiaries have identified as end-of-lifespan dates for their combined five in-state plants.
The House Finance Committee on Friday suspended a House rule requiring a deliberative process across several days for bills to fast-track what it calculated would be a nine-figure tax break for the state’s metallurgical coal industry. The committee took up legislation as an originating bill ahead of what was a March 1 legislative session deadline for advancing bills out of their committees of origin, meaning it wasn’t assigned a number and wasn’t available for online public view.
The bill was announced as House Bill 5687 on the House floor Monday.
The committee advanced the bill to the full House after hearing from West Virginia Coal Association president Chris Hamilton reported the state’s metallurgical coal industry has been facing “tremendous headwinds,” although Hamilton was effusive in praise for Trump and did not criticize him for his policy triggering retaliatory tariffs targeting United States metallurgical coal exports driven by West Virginia.
The House Finance Committee’s bill would lower the state severance tax on the gross value of metallurgical coal produced from 5% via annual 0.5% decreases until 2028, when it would hit 3.5%.
The bill as initially proposed would have returned the rate to 5% after fiscal year 2031, but the committee approved an amendment from Majority Whip Marty Gearheart, R-Mercer, that would leave the rate at 3.5% unless state lawmakers change it in the future.
Hamilton acknowledged the severance tax cut measure could amount to an approximately $15 million tax cut in its first year for metallurgical coal producers based on current severance tax revenue totaling some $150 million annually, while adding up to $180 million over the step-down period.
The Legislature in 2019 approved a steam coal production severance tax rate reduction the Department of Revenue estimated would cost $64.1 million annually.
W.Va. Coal Association head reports heavy furloughs
Hamilton told the House Finance Committee Friday he had asked Morrisey “to call an immediate cessation of all severance taxes,” both for metallurgical coal (commonly used for steelmaking) and steam coal (commonly used for electricity) two weeks ago “because of the headwinds and the hardship and all the damage that’s been done to this industry” over past decades.
But mass layoff notices have picked up under Trump in recent months.
More than 2,300 employees were affected by WARN notices reported by WorkForce West Virginia in 2025, according to agency records — nearly double the roughly 1,200 affected in each of the two previous years and more than quintuple the roughly 400 affected in 2022 under former President Joe Biden. All of last year’s employee layoffs and terminations under the WARN notices were expected to be permanent at the time they were issued, per the notices.
Named for the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988, WARN notices are designed to provide advance notice of qualified plant closings and mass layoffs to workers to allow them adequate time to seek other employment or retraining opportunities.
Mining layoffs played a significant role in last year’s rise of WARN notice-impacted employees.
West Virginia’s number of WARN notice-impacted employees is on pace to rise further in 2026 after two notices in the past four weeks covering 530 workers at seven Greenbrier Minerals LLC mines and facilities in Logan and Wyoming counties controlled by Coronado Global Resources, Inc. and 199 workers at Mettiki Coal LLC in Tucker County.
Hamilton indicated to the committee a downturn in West Virginia’s multicontinental metallurgical coal export market territory of production and consumption of metallurgical coal as countries buy steel instead of making it has resulted in roughly 1,000 miners across 10 mines being furloughed in the last three months.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration said in October announced that U.S. coal exports declined 11% from the first half of 2025 to the first half of 2024 because of reduced exports to China. U.S. exports to China dropped after China imposed a 15% additional tariff on imports of U.S. coal in February and a 34% reciprocal tariff on imports from the U.S. in April, the EIA said.
Those tariffs were retaliation against broad tariffs set by Trump.
China was the world’s top exporter in 2024 of metallurgical coal, which is coal used for steel production.
West Virginia is the top metallurgical coal-producing state in the U.S., exporting 67% of the metallurgical coal produced in the state in 2023, according to EIA data.
The Congressional Research Service reported in August that the volume of global metallurgical coal exports in February 2025 declined by approximately 18.8% year on year, citing an analysis by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Although Minority Leader Sean Hornbuckle, D-Cabell, cast the lone vote against the Gearheart amendment to lift the House Finance Committee bill’s proposed severance tax reduction increase back to 5% in 2031, Hornbuckle expressed support for the bill itself.
“I’m 1,000% for it,” Hornbuckle said. “I want to help my buddies in the industry. But we all know … the federal administration … with their tariffs and the retaliatory tariffs have caused us a lot of issues. And they’ve cost a lot of West Virginia jobs.”
Bill: Failure to maintain plant use level ‘noncompliance’
The Senate’s nearly unanimous passage of HB 4026 Friday came after a nearly hour-long, occasionally heated floor debate in which senators voiced frustration with PJM’s grid oversight and with each other. Minority Leader Mike Woelfel, D-Cabell, and former Senate Finance Committee Chair Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, cast the lone votes against the bill, which now goes before the House for it to consider concurring with the Senate’s significant changes.
Rose claimed his committee’s changes to the bill would stabilize electric rates and even decrease them long-term. He acknowledged that West Virginia coal-fired plants’ capacity factors have commonly run around 30% — far below the 69% goal set by the PSC and HB 4026.
Capacity factor is a measure of how often a plant runs at full capacity. Coal-fired plant capacity factors in West Virginia and throughout the country have dropped significantly below 69% amid the industry’s long-term decline, reflecting what energy experts say has been an uneconomic outlook for coal power.
Appalachian Power, Wheeling Power, energy experts and Virginia utility regulator staff overseeing Appalachian Power operations in Virginia have deemed the 69% directive as uneconomic, forcing an overreliance on coal upon Appalachian Power’s and Wheeling Power’s 460,000 captive ratepayers.
RMI, a Colorado-based clean energy consulting firm, submitted a filing to the PSC in 2023 in a case soliciting electric supply recommendations arguing that the PSC risks decreasing electric reliability by calling for coal plants to operate at a use rate of at least 69%.
RMI contended that forcing older steam units to run at a higher frequency could cause additional wear and tear on the plants, possibly resulting in forced outages and increasing the risk of unexpected reliability events.
HB 4026 would require the PSC, in consultation with the Public Energy Authority, to issue rules within 100 days to establish a rate recovery program based on a utility’s “good-faith effort” to maintain a 69% capacity factor. The program would assign a percentage of cost recovery to each range of compliance comprised of increments of 10 percentage points.
The bill would require each coal-fired facility in West Virginia that supplies regulated utilities to “strive to achieve“ at least a 69% use rate measured on a 12-month rolling average.
But although that language frames a 69% capacity factor as a goal, HB 4026 also states that a a “coal-fired facility’s failure to maintain the minimum utilization level constitutes noncompliance with this article.”
Rose accused PJM of meeting demand using “very heavily subsidized forms of energy” and stated a goal of “even[ing] that playing field for West Virginia’s coal-fired generation.”
PJM manages a day-ahead energy market in which prices are calculated for the next day based on the amount of energy that electricity suppliers offer to produce and the amount needed by consumers.
The grid operator’s members include traditional electric utilities, transmission and generator owners, organizations that sell electricity to end-users, marketing firms and end-use customers.
PJM reform advocates want to see not only the grid’s interconnection queue adjusted to allow faster deployable energy construction but a change in its membership structure, viewing it as skewed toward incumbent, fossil fuel-reliant utilities.
HB 4026 opponents argue bill would cost ratepayers
Tarr predicted HB 4026 would cost ratepayers rather than saving them money and attracting investment, suggesting it attempted in vain to “artificially create a market,” creating more power at ratepayers’ expense without an increase in population that could help drive rates down.
“I think we’ll go in and we’re going to see those rates spike,” Tarr said. “Everyone’ll say, ‘Well, why’d it go up, why’d it go up? Well, it’s PJM.’ We’re sitting here making a vote that significantly could increase the rates beyond what the rate of increase is now.”
Woelfel called Rose’s argument that West Virginia would see lower electric rates with a higher coal use rate “a myth” and criticized Trump for a tariff policy he said has “devastated our communities.”
“This is the old trickle-down economics argument: Hey, if you do this for coal, guess what? Lots of people are going to move here, therefore there’s more people using power, therefore everybody’s bill goes down. It’s a fallacy,” Woelfel said. “Talk about subsidizing. This is a bad bill for the citizens and residents of our state. They will bear the brunt and coal producers will reap the benefit.”
House rejects three-year electric rate freeze
The House rejected efforts by Delegate Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, Friday and Monday to address rising electric rates.
On Friday, the House rejected a Hansen amendment proposal to impose a three-year moratorium on increases in base rates, riders, surcharges or other charges for electric utilities, subject only to a finding by the PSC of “a clear and convincing showing of necessity to address reliability threats, federal mandates, or catastrophic infrastructure failure.”
House Energy and Public Works Committee Chair Bill Anderson, R-Wood, argued against the amendment, claiming it would lead to less reliable electric service.
The House then on Monday rejected a motion by Hansen to advance directly to the floor legislation aimed at a more consumer-friendly approach to PSC rate-setting in part by allowing the PSC to extend the availability of special reduced rates to additional billing months upon a finding that such extension is necessary to protect customer health or safety.
The House tabled Hansen’s motion to advance House Bill 5648 by discharging it from the Energy and Public Works Committee without discussion after a motion from Majority Leader Pat McGeehan, R-Hancock, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
Read more from HDMedia, here.