Chris Hamilton, President, West Virginia Coal Association

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Nobody who has read this newspaper's editorial page over the last quarter-century needs a weatherman to tell them which way its wind blows. The Gazette-Mail has spent a generation editorializing against the men and women who mine West Virginia coal, against the companies that employ them, against the communities those paychecks keep alive. The hostility is the house style. So when the editorial board rushed into print with a gleeful little eulogy headlined "Coal takes another blow as solar surges," the only surprise was how badly the board fumbled its own case. It refuted itself inside its own column and apparently hoped nobody would read that far.

Look at what the board actually wrote. Solar beat coal in a single month, May, by six-tenths of a percentage point — 12.8 to 12.2. Then, in the same breath, the editorial concedes the gap "isn't huge." It concedes solar naturally surges in late spring "because of longer exposure to sunlight." It concedes that when the full year is tallied, "solar likely won't be higher than coal." It won't. And it won't even be close. Every one of those admissions guts the headline sitting on top of them. A newspaper interested in informing its readers would have led with those facts. This one buried them beneath a tombstone, because the facts were inconvenient to the verdict the board reached years ago. That is advocacy in the costume of analysis, and West Virginians have learned to recognize the outfit.

There is a measurement the editorial never once mentions, and the omission is the whole game. It is called capacity factor — the share of the time a power plant actually delivers electricity to the grid. The same federal EIA data the Associated Press relied on shows coal and nuclear holding capacity factors far above solar, even as solar accumulates nameplate megawatts that look impressive on a press release. A coal unit runs at 6 a.m. on a January morning. It runs in the dark. It runs through an ice storm, through a windless week, through the coldest hours of the coldest nights, when a field of solar panels under snow produces exactly nothing. Ranking the two sources by raw output during the sunniest stretch of the calendar tells you as much about reliability as ranking snow tires in July. The board understands this and chose the headline regardless.

West Virginians don't have to theorize about what keeps the lights on when the weather turns lethal, because we have the receipts. During Winter Storm Elliott over Christmas weekend in 2022, the PJM grid that powers this state was pushed to the brink. Temperatures plunged 29 degrees in twelve hours, demand spiked, and tens of thousands of megawatts of generation failed when they were needed most. According to the analysis of that storm, coal supplied 47 percent of the additional electricity PJM scrambled to find at the peak of the crisis. Natural gas, hobbled by frozen equipment and fuel it couldn't get to the plant, managed just 2 percent of that emergency supply. Solar contributed 3 percent and, in the report's own dry phrasing, "was not available during critical times" — meaning between sunset and sunrise, which is precisely when families were freezing in the dark. Coal kept the heat on because coal keeps its fuel in a pile on the ground, on site, ready to burn, immune to a pipeline that freezes or a sun that sets. That is the unglamorous, decisive advantage the Gazette-Mail editorial board has spent two decades pretending away.

Then comes the cost claim, where the editorial accuses West Virginia leaders of forcing higher bills onto ratepayers by keeping coal plants running. The board swallowed a rigged number whole. The "coal is the most expensive electricity" line traces back to levelized cost of energy figures — the Lazard-style comparisons — that measure the all-in cost of building a brand-new coal plant against new wind and solar. Nobody in West Virginia is proposing to build a new coal plant. The plants serving this state are already built, already paid down, their capital costs sunk decades ago. The only number that matters for an existing, paid-for unit is what it costs to dispatch the next megawatt-hour, and for the Appalachian coal fleet that figure runs somewhere around $20 to $40 a megawatt-hour. Set that against the honest, all-in cost of new construction — gas or renewables, including the backup generation, the storage, and the transmission that intermittent power requires to be made dependable — and the supposed savings the board is selling evaporate. Comparing a new-build sticker price to the operating cost of a plant already standing is the oldest trick in the deck, and the editorial board either doesn't understand the difference or is counting on you not to.

Here is the part that should worry every reader, regardless of where they stand on coal. We are entering the steepest surge in electricity demand in two generations — data centers for artificial intelligence, reshored manufacturing, an economy electrifying on every front, much of it landing inside PJM's footprint. In its 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment, released this past January, NERC flagged PJM as a high-risk region and warned that dispatchable plants are leaving the system faster than dispatchable replacements can be built. The danger was real enough that the Department of Energy issued a string of emergency orders this winter compelling generators to keep running. PJM itself has testified that retirements are outpacing new construction and has begged plant owners to reconsider shutting down. The serious question facing this state has nothing to do with whether solar enjoyed a pleasant May. It is whether anyone at this newspaper seriously proposes to power an AI data center at three o'clock on a windless winter morning with sunshine. The board has no answer, so it changes the subject to a single month and counts on its readers not to notice the trick.

The timing of the editorial deserves special mention, because the board managed to write coal's obituary in the very weeks the federal government started signing the checks for its future. On June 4, President Trump and the Department of Energy committed up to $850 million to coal — money to modernize more than a dozen existing plants and to build two brand-new ones, a 1.25-gigawatt plant near Anchorage and a 1.6-gigawatt plant at the West Virginia Energy Campus at Mount Storm, here in Grant County. They will be the first new coal-fired plants to come online in this country since 2013. And the reason this is being done tells you everything the editorial left out. They are intended to meet the rapidly growing demand for electricity that intermittent power cannot serve on its own. The market the board keeps invoking just placed a multibillion-dollar bet against the board's conclusion, with private investors matching the federal dollars several times over. A newspaper paying attention would have mentioned it. This one wrote around it.

Let me be fair about the genuine ground here, because the industry has nothing to fear from an honest accounting. The generation mix is changing, and the editorial's own column admits "no one reason is behind this shift." That much is true. Reasonable people can debate what our energy mix looks like in the future, and when they do, and the industry shows up for those debates. What separates that kind of argument from this editorial is candor. The Gazette, long ago, chose its side. Now it has chosen its month, and chosen the handful of facts that flatter its conclusion while leaving every inconvenient number for the readers who make it to the bottom.

The Gazette-Mail is entitled to its opinions. It has been publishing them against this industry for as long as most of our miners have been alive. What it has not earned is the standing to call coal-state leaders blind while editing reality down to whatever fits a verdict the board settled on decades ago. A grid runs on the plants that deliver when the temperature drops and the demand peaks and the lives of real people depend on the power showing up. Measured against that standard — the only one that matters at 3 a.m. in January — the loudest thing that surged in May was the Gazette’s appetite for writing coal's obituary years ahead of the facts, the way it always has.

The miners of this state will keep West Virginia's lights burning long after the ink dries on this latest sermon. They were doing it during Elliott while the panels sat dark. They will be doing it through the next storm, too, whether or not this newspaper ever finds the honesty to say so.