70-year-old Carl Shoupe knows Kentucky coal mining country, seeing he’s a fourth-generation miner, himself, and spent the 1970s fighting for those good-paying jobs we’ve heart so much about in the news lately. After he retired, though, he sought to forge a new path forward for he and his fellow Kentuckians: renewables.
As Huffington Post reported:
By 2006, years after he’d retired, the industry had changed dramatically. Hardhat-clad men toiling underground had given way to a new method of mining. Unable to cheaply mine Harlan County’s exhausted seams, coal companies took to blowing the tops off mountains with explosives, leaving patches of barren, craggy wasteland amid a once idyllic hilly, green canopy of sugar maples, oaks and hemlocks. Worse yet, the coal firms brought in non-union workers to do the job.
“It was all scab miners,” Shoupe, 70, told The Huffington Post in a recent phone interview. “My generation of coal miners in Eastern Kentucky is the last generation of union coal miners. There’s not a block of coal being mined today in the commonwealth of Kentucky by union miners.”
He and a friend ran for city council in 2010, and began their uphill battle by showing the local community what cheaper renewables could do for them. By partnering with organizations such as the Sierra Club, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth installed solar panels on the homes of poverty-stricken residents. The project that grabbed national headlines, though, was the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum’s installation of panels, which could save the university that runs the museum between $8,000 and $10,000 in energy costs.
“If we can help just an average homeowner save $100 a month, for instance, they can spend that $100 at a food store and they can help generate more economic development for our area,” said Blake Enlow, executive director of COAP Inc., a nonprofit that builds energy-efficient homes in the Harlan County area. “Regardless of what’s going on with the coal industry, if we can save people money that’s the important thing. Heck, it may just allow them to go out and eat dinner somewhere that they couldn’t before.”
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