This story was produced as part of Climate Solutions, a collaboration focused on community engagement and solutions-based reporting to help Central Pennsylvania move toward climate literacy, resilience and adaptation. StateImpact Pennsylvania convened the collaboration; WITF is a Climate Solutions partner. Other Climate Solutions partners are Franklin & Marshall Center for Public Opinion, La Voz Latina, Sankofa African American Theatre Company, Shippensburg University, Q’Hubo News, and the York Daily Record.
Edna Fund remembers what Centralia, Washington was like in the 1960s, before the coal mine and power plant opened.
She and a friend drove to the site a few miles from the city, where they were going to college.
It was all farmland. Owners were selling their land to make way for industry.
Years later, she would visit the site again as an elected official.
“And I remember looking out at the area, like, this was farming land. And now we’re having all this coal being mined, and there’s a train coming in and out,” Fund said. “Pretty amazing to see the transformation.”
The land ultimately became a nearly 10,000-acre open pit mine with a 1,340-megawatt power plant.
It became Lewis County’s highest-paying employer, she said, and “people drove from long ways to get here to work there.”
A half-century later, climate change brought focus on polluting power plants. Environmental groups and some state lawmakers started pushing to shut down the plant. Fund was on Centralia city council at the time.
“It was packed, packed in the halls of the legislature. And you would see pipefitters and union folks up there in their uniforms. And then you’d see the environmentalists there–and they’re on two sides,” Fund said.
After a few years of lawsuits, proposals and protests, then-Gov. Christine Gregoire gathered members of each group – government, environmental, labor, and the coal company – and asked them to figure out a deal.
It took the task force only a few days to reach an agreement. The plant would close by 2025. To soften the blow, the company, TransAlta, would set up a $55 million community transition fund.
Centralia – about the size of Johnstown, Pennsylvania – has now been cited as a model for how to successfully transition away from coal.
The fund didn’t change the city overnight. But it did mark Centralia as open to new ideas and opportunities.
“It’s not a soft landing, but it’s a better landing than it could have been,” Fund said.
The Deal
Bob Guenther is a member of the ‘71 club – the group of people who started working at the Centralia coal plant in 1971, when it opened. He was the second mechanic hired, and he stayed for 34 years.
As a foreman in the mid-90s, he and other employees worked with environmental groups, state government, the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service to decide how to lower pollution at the plant. The Associated Press reported they settled on a scrubber system to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions from 65,000 to 10,000 tons per year.
TransAlta bought the plant from Pacific Power and Light in 2000, and took on the then-estimated $200 million in costs for the upgrades.
About a decade later, environmentalists concerned with climate change were ramping up pressure to close the plant. It was the state’s largest polluter, and they blamed it for haze in and around Mount Rainier National Park, about 50 miles away.
The Chronicle, Centralia’s newspaper, reported that the coal plant emitted an annual average of 9,850,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from 2001 to 2009, according to statistics provided by TransAlta. Those emissions equal 2.3 million gas-powered cars driven for one year.
The plant generated about 10% of the state’s power in 2011.
Environmentalists wanted it closed as soon as possible – 2015 at the latest.
Guenther had retired from the plant by then, but was lobbying for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represented the roughly 300 workers at the time.
Guenther made it a point to take green groups and politicians to see “the enormity” of the plant.
“I think they left…
Read More: A Washington State Coal Plant Has to Close Next Year. Can Pennsylvania