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Loretta Lynn, coal miner’s daughter and country queen, dies

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NASHVILLE, TENN. — Loretta Lynn, the Kentucky coal miner’s daughter whose frank songs about life and love as a woman in Appalachia pulled her out of poverty and made her a pillar of country music, has died. She was 90.

In a statement provided to The Associated Press, Lynn’s family said she died Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.

“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4th, in her sleep at home in her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” the family said in a statement. They asked for privacy as they grieve and said a memorial will be announced later.

Lynn already had four children before launching her career in the early 1960s, and her songs reflected her pride in her rural Kentucky background.

As a songwriter, she crafted a persona of a defiantly tough woman, a contrast to the stereotypical image of most female country singers. The Country Music Hall of Famer wrote fearlessly about sex and love, cheating husbands, divorce and birth control and sometimes got in trouble with radio programmers for material from which even rock performers once shied away.

Her biggest hits came in the 1960s and ’70s, including “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” “The Pill,” “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” “Rated X” and “You’re Looking at Country.” She was known for appearing in floor-length, wide gowns with elaborate embroidery or rhinestones, many created by her longtime personal assistant and designer Tim Cobb.

Her honesty and unique place in country music was rewarded. She was the first woman ever named entertainer of the year at the genre’s two major awards shows, first by the Country Music Association in 1972 and then by the Academy of Country Music three years later.

“It was what I wanted to hear and what I knew other women wanted to hear, too,” Lynn told the AP in 2016. “I didn’t write for the men; I wrote for us women. And the men loved it, too.”

In 1969, she released her autobiographical “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” which helped her reach her widest audience yet.

“We were poor but we had love/That’s the one thing Daddy made sure of/He shoveled coal to make a poor man’s dollar,” she sang.

“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” also the title of her 1976 book, was made into a 1980 movie of the same name. Sissy Spacek’s portrayal of Lynn won her an Academy Award and the film was also nominated for best picture.

Long after her commercial peak, Lynn won two Grammys in 2005 for her album “Van Lear Rose,” which featured 13 songs she wrote, including “Portland, Oregon” about a drunken one-night stand. “Van Lear Rose” was a collaboration with rocker Jack White, who produced the album and played the guitar parts.

Reba McEntire was among the stars who reacted to Lynn’s death, posting online about how the singer reminded her of her late mother. “Strong women, who loved their children and were fiercely loyal. Now they’re both in Heaven getting to visit and talk about how they were raised, how different country music is now from what it was when they were young. Sure makes me feel good that Mama went first so she could welcome Loretta into the hollers of heaven!”

Born Loretta Webb, the second of eight children, she wrote that her birthplace was Butcher Holler, near the coal mining company town of Van Lear in the mountains of east Kentucky. She literally put the place on the map, according to Peter Cooper, senior director, producer and writer at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. He wrote in his 2017 book “Johnny’s Cash and Charley’s Pride: Lasting Legends and Untold Adventures in Country Music” that she made up the name for the purposes of the song based on the names of the families that lived there.

Her daddy played the banjo, her mama played the guitar and she grew up on the songs of the Carter Family. Her younger sister, Crystal Gayle, is also a Grammy-winning country singer, scoring crossover hits with songs like “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” and “Half the Way.” Lynn’s daughter Patsy Lynn Russell also was a songwriter and producer of some of her albums.

“I was singing when I was born, I think,” she told the AP in 2016. “Daddy used to come out on the porch where I would be singing and rocking the babies to sleep. He’d say, ‘Loretta, shut that big mouth. People all over this holler can hear you.’ And I said, ‘Daddy, what difference does it make? They are all my cousins.’”

She wrote in her autobiography that she was 13 when she got married to Oliver “Mooney” Lynn, but the AP later discovered state records that showed she was 15. Tommy Lee Jones played Mooney Lynn in the biopic.

Her husband, whom she called “Doo” or “Doolittle,” urged her to sing professionally and helped promote her early career. With his help, she earned a recording contract with Decca Records, later MCA, and performed on the Grand Ole Opry stage. Lynn wrote her first hit single, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” released in 1960.

She also teamed up with singer Conway Twitty to form one of the most popular duos in country music with hits such as “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” and “After the Fire is Gone,” which earned them a Grammy Award. Their duets, and her single records, were always mainstream country and not crossover or pop-tinged.

And when she first started singing at the Grand Ole Opry, country star Patsy Cline took Lynn under her wing and mentored her during her early career.

The Academy of Country Music chose her as the artist of the decade for the 1970s, and she was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988. She won four Grammy Awards, was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2008, was honored at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.

In “Fist City,” Lynn threatens a hair-pulling fistfight if another woman won’t stay away from her man: “I’m here to tell you, gal, to lay off of my man/If you don’t want to go to Fist City.” That strong-willed but traditional country woman reappears in other Lynn songs. In “The Pill,” a song about sex and birth control, Lynn sings about how she’s sick of being trapped at home to take care of babies: “The feelin’ good comes easy now/Since I’ve got the pill,” she sang.

She moved to Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, outside of Nashville, in the 1990s, where she set up a ranch complete with a replica of her childhood home and a museum that is a popular roadside tourist stop. The dresses she was known for wearing are there, too.

Lynn knew that her songs were trailblazing, especially for country music, but she was just writing the truth that so many rural women like her experienced.

“I could see that other women was goin’ through the same thing, ‘cause I worked the clubs. I wasn’t the only one that was livin’ that life and I’m not the only one that’s gonna be livin’ today what I’m writin’,” she told The AP in 1995.

Even into her later years, Lynn never seemed to stop writing, scoring a multi-album deal in 2014 with Legacy Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment. In 2017, she suffered a stroke that forced her to stop touring, but she released her 50th solo studio album, “Still Woman Enough” in 2021.

She and her husband were married nearly 50 years before he died in 1996. They had six children: Betty, Jack, Ernest and Clara, and then twins Patsy and Peggy. She had 17 grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.

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Online: https://lorettalynn.com/

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Follow Kristin M. Hall at https://twitter.com/kmhall



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Entertainment

Loretta Lynn, ever a ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ dies at 90

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Loretta Lynn, a singer and songwriter whose rise from dire poverty in Kentucky coal country to the pinnacle of country music was chronicled in the best-selling memoir and movie “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and whose candid songs gave voice to the daily struggles of working-class women, died Oct. 4 at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tenn. She was 90.

Her family confirmed the death in a statement but did not cite a cause.

Ms. Lynn’s career was remarkable for its storybook ascent from hardscrabble origins. She was a teenage bride and mother, a country star and a grandmother by her early 30s. A trailblazer for other female country performers, she was the first woman to win the Country Music Association’s entertainer of the year award, in 1972. She also helped redefine and broaden the appeal of country music.

“She was the groundbreaking female singer-songwriter in country music,” Robert Oermann, co-author of “Finding Her Voice,” a study of women in country music, told The Washington Post in 2003. “Her songs were delivered from a distinctly female point of view, and that had not been done before, not the way she did it. Writing about women as they really lived — that was a breakthrough.”

In 2013, when Ms. Lynn received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, President Barack Obama called her the “rule-breaking, record-setting queen of country music” who “gave voice to a generation, singing what no one wanted to talk about and saying what no one wanted to think about.”

Her career was propelled by an indisputable musical talent, a strikingly photogenic presence and a formidable grit. “Having to grow up as fast as I did when I got married took something away from me,” she noted in her second memoir, “Still Woman Enough” (2002). “But it also gave me something: a hard-won strength.”

Many of Ms. Lynn’s most memorable songs celebrated her Kentucky roots and were rendered in an unmistakable Appalachian twang. Her first album, “Loretta Lynn Sings” (1963), reached No. 2 on the Billboard country album chart, but her greatest success came later, often with tunes packed with personal meaning or topical social themes.

The first of more than a dozen No. 1 country hits came in 1967, with “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” written with her sister Peggy Sue about a marriage to an alcoholic.

Several of her songs were tough-minded warnings to romantic rivals for her husband’s affections, including “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” (1966) and the No. 1 country hit “Fist City” (1968):

I’m not a-sayin’ my baby is a saint cause he ain’t

And that he won’t cat around with a kitty

I’m here to tell you, gal, to lay off of my man

If you don’t wanna go to Fist City

Some of her other well-known songs included “Dear Uncle Sam” (released in 1966), about a woman saying goodbye to her soldier husband; “You’re Lookin’ at Country” (1971); “Love Is the Foundation” (1973); and “One’s on the Way” (1971), written by humorist Shel Silverstein about a beleaguered housewife expecting a child — “I hope it ain’t twins again.”

There was also “The Pill,” about the liberating effect of contraceptives on a woman’s life. Ms. Lynn recorded the song, by Lorene Allen, Don McHan and T.D. Bayless, in 1972. Her record company withheld it from release for three years, and many radio stations refused to play it, but it eventually became a Top 5 country hit.

Ms. Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” spent only one week at No. 1 after its release in 1970, but it soon became the singer’s signature tune:

Well, I was born a coal miner’s daughter

In a cabin, on a hill in Butcher Holler

We were poor but we had love,

That’s the one thing that daddy made sure of

He’d shovel coal to make a poor man’s dollar

After a 1976 memoir, co-written with New York Times journalist George Vecsey, Ms. Lynn’s popularity reached its zenith with the 1980 film “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

While producers were still casting the movie, Ms. Lynn casually announced on “The Tonight Show” that “little Sissy Spacek” would play her on the screen. Spacek, who shadowed Ms. Lynn for months and sang all the movie’s songs, won an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal.

Critics praised English director Michael Apted’s earthy depiction of Appalachian life and Ms. Lynn’s tempestuous marriage to Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn. She once told Rolling Stone magazine that every time Doolittle hit her, she gave it back in kind — twice.

For all the turbulence in their relationship, Ms. Lynn credited her husband with pushing her to become a performer.

“I married Doo when I wasn’t but a child, and he was my life from that day on,” she said in “Still Woman Enough,” written with Patsi Bale Cox. “He thought I was something special, more special than anyone else in the world, and never let me forget it. That belief would be hard to shove out the door. Doo was my security, my safety net.”

Loretta Webb was born in Butcher Hollow, Ky., on April 14, 1932. The hollow, without electricity and indoor plumbing, sat at the bottom of a hill outside of Van Lear, Ky., named for the local coal company. Her father, who eventually died of black lung disease, worked in the Van Lear mines.

The second of eight children, Loretta attended a one-room schoolhouse before dropping out in elementary school. She cared for her younger siblings while her mother worked in a nursing home. She didn’t ride in a car until she was 12, and the family’s sole connection to the outside world was a battery-powered radio, which broadcast “The Grand Ole Opry.”

She married at 15 (not 13, as she claimed in “Coal Miner’s Daughter”). Her husband, then 21, was a moonshiner who owned the only car in the hollow, an Army Jeep.

A year into their marriage, Ms. Lynn — then pregnant with their first child — followed her husband to Custer, Wash. She had four children by the time she was 19 and ultimately was the mother of six.

After hearing her serenade the children around the house, Doolittle bought his wife a $17 guitar and encouraged her to sit in with a local country group. She soon started her own band, Loretta’s Trail Blazers, and won a talent contest hosted by singer Buck Owens in Tacoma, Wash.

Ms. Lynn wrote and recorded “Honky Tonk Girl” in 1960, then traveled around the country with her husband, pitching the record to disc jockeys and endearing herself to listeners with her unvarnished charm.

During one interview, Dallas disc jockey Bill Mack complimented her on a dress she was wearing.

“Thank you,” Ms. Lynn said. “I just washed it.”

“Oh, really, where did you find a laundry around here?” Mack asked.

“I didn’t find no laundry, I washed it in the back of the car,” Ms. Lynn replied, referring to a basin of water in the car. Mack pressed her further on how she got the dress dried.

“I blowed it dry out the window,” Ms. Lynn said.

Settling in Nashville in 1961, she landed a slot on a television show of the Wilburn Brothers, who brought her to the attention of Decca Records and renowned country music producer Owen Bradley.

In the early 1960s, Ms. Lynn toured as Patsy Cline’s opening act and performed with country star Ernest Tubb.

She formed her most enduring musical partnership with singer Conway Twitty in the 1970s and 1980s. The pair had five No. 1 country singles together and won the Country Music Association’s vocal duo of the year from 1972 through 1975. Their records ranged from the doleful “After the Fire Is Gone” to the upbeat “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” and the melodramatic “As Soon as I Hang Up the Phone.” Twitty died in 1993.

Beginning in the 1960s, Ms. Lynn became a television fixture, with appearances spanning such programs as “The Tonight Show,” “The Muppet Show” and “The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts.” She discussed her teenage marriage and other intimate subjects with a plain-spoken manner that captivated audiences who had never followed country music.

Ms. Lynn later established a theme park, including a campground and a replica of her childhood home, near her home in Hurricane Mills, Tenn.

For years, she suffered from migraine headaches that sometimes forced her to miss performances. She was treated for an addiction to sleeping pills in the 1980s.

Ms. Lynn won Grammy Awards for “After the Fire Is Gone,” her 1971 duet with Twitty, for a 2004 duet, “Portland, Oregon,” with Jack White of the White Stripes, and for her 2004 album “Van Lear Rose.” She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988 and received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2010.

Three of Ms. Lynn’s siblings had careers in music. A brother, Jay Lee Webb, who was a singer and played guitar in Ms. Lynn’s band, died in 1996. Her sister Peggy Sue toured with her band in the 1960s and ’70s. Ms. Lynn’s youngest sister, Brenda Gail Lynn, who had a successful country and pop career under the stage name Crystal Gayle, won a Grammy for her 1977 hit “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”

Her eldest son, Jack Benny Lynn — named for two of the singer’s uncles, not the radio and film comedian — died in 1984 after being thrown from a horse into a river on the family property; Ms. Lynn stopped performing for more than a year. She also temporarily retired to nurse her husband before his death in 1996, after 48 years of marriage. A daughter, Betty Sue Lynn, died of emphysema in 2013.

Ms. Lynn’s twin daughters, Peggy and Patsy, performed together as the Lynns; a son, Ernest Ray Lynn, played guitar and bass in his mother’s band. They survive her, in addition to another daughter, Clara Marie Lynn; 21 grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren.

Well into her 80s, Ms. Lynn made new recordings and continued to perform. She returned to her Appalachian roots on the largely acoustic album “Full Circle” (2016), which was nominated for a Grammy for best country album and featured “Lay Me Down,” an autumnal duet with fellow octogenarian Willie Nelson.

“I can probably outwork anyone in Nashville. I ain’t ready to lay down and die,” she told People magazine in 2016. “I don’t see no reason to quit right now.”

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Entertainment

Loretta Lynn, coal miner’s daughter turned country queen, dies at 90

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CNN
 — 

Loretta Lynn, the “Coal Miner’s Daughter” whose gutsy lyrics and twangy, down-home vocals made her a queen of country music for seven decades, has died. She was 90.

Lynn’s family said in a statement to CNN that she died Tuesday at her home in Tennessee.

“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4th, in her sleep at home in her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” the statement read.

They asked for privacy as they grieve and said a memorial will be announced later.

Lynn, who had no formal music training but spent hours every day singing her babies to sleep, was known to churn out fully textured songs in a matter of minutes. She just wrote what she knew.

She lived in poverty for much of her early life, began having kids by age 17 and spent years married to a man prone to drinking and philandering – all of which became material for her plainspoken songs. Lynn’s life was rich with experiences most country stars of the time hadn’t had for themselves – but her female fans knew them intimately.

“So when I sing those country songs about women struggling to keep things going, you could say I’ve been there,” she wrote in her first memoir, “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” “Like I say, I know what it’s like to be pregnant and nervous and poor.”

Lynn scored hits with fiery songs like “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)” and “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” which topped the country charts in 1966 and made her the first female country singer to write a No. 1 hit.

Her songs recounted family history, skewered lousy husbands and commiserated with women, wives and mothers everywhere. Her tell-it-like-it-is style saw tracks such as “Rated X” and “The Pill” banned from radio, even as they became beloved classics.

 “I wasn’t the first woman in country music,” Lynn told Esquire in 2007. “I was just the first one to stand up there and say what I thought, what life was about.”

 She was born Loretta Webb in 1932, one of eight Webb children raised in Butcher Hollow in the Appalachian mining town of Van Lear, Kentucky. Growing up, Lynn sang in church and at home, even as her father protested that everyone in Butcher Hollow could hear.

Her family had little money. But those early years were some of her fondest memories, as she recounts in her 1971 hit, “Coal Miner’s Daughter”: “We were poor but we had love; That’s the one thing that daddy made sure of.”

As a young teenager, Loretta met the love of her life in Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, whom she affectionately called “Doo.” The pair married when Lynn was 15 – a fact cleared up in 2012, after the Associated Press discovered Lynn was a few years older than she had said she was in her memoir – and Lynn gave birth to their first of six children the same year.

“When I got married, I didn’t even know what pregnant meant,” said Lynn, who bore four children in the first four years of marriage and a set of twins years later.

“I was five months pregnant when I went to the doctor, and he said, ‘You’re gonna have a baby.’ I said, ‘No way. I can’t have no baby.’ He said, ‘Ain’t you married?’ Yep. He said, ‘You sleep with your husband?’ Yep. ‘You’re gonna have a baby, Loretta. Believe me.’ And I did.”

The couple soon headed to Washington state in search of jobs. Music wasn’t a priority for the young mother at first. She’d spend her days working, mostly, picking strawberries in Washington state while her babies sat on a blanket nearby.

But when her husband heard her humming tunes and soothing their babies to sleep, he said she sounded better than the girl singers on the radio. He bought her a $17 Harmony guitar and got her a gig at a local tavern.

It wasn’t until 1960 that she’d record what would become her debut single, “Honky Tonk Girl.” She then took the song on the road, playing country music stations across the United States.

After years of hard work and raising kids, telling stories with her guitar seemed like a break.

 “Singing was easy,” Lynn told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2010. “I thought ‘Gee whiz, this is an easy job.’ ”

The success of her first single landed Lynn on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and, soon, a contract with Decca Records. She quickly befriended country star Patsy Cline, who guided her through the fame and fashion of country stardom until her shocking death in a plane crash in 1963.

 Cline “was my only girlfriend at the time. She took me under her wing, and when I lost her, it was something else. I still miss her to this day,” Lynn told The Denver Post in 2009. “I wrote ‘You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man,’ and she said, ‘Loretta, that’s a damn hit.’ It shocked me, because you don’t expect somebody like Patsy Cline to tell you that you have a hit. Right after she passed, I put the record out, and it was a hit.”

Lynn’s struggle and success became the stuff of legend, an oft-repeated story of youth, naivete and poverty.

From “Fist City” to “You’re Lookin’ at Country,” Lynn always sang from the heart, whether she was telling off a woman interested in Doo or honoring her Appalachian roots. But her music was far from conventional.

She rankled the conservative country establishment with songs like “Rated X,” about the stigma fun-loving women face after divorce, and “The Pill,” in which a woman toasts her newfound freedom thanks to birth control – “They didn’t have none of them pills when I was younger, or I’d have been swallowing them like popcorn,” Lynn wrote in her memoir.

She documented her upbringing in the bestselling 1976 memoir “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” co-written with George Vecsey. A 1980 biographical film by the same name won an Academy Award for actress Sissy Spacek and brought Lynn wider fame. Lynn’s success also helped launch the music careers of her sisters, Peggy Sue Wright and Crystal Gayle.

Lynn’s legend faced questions in 2012 when The Associated Press reported that in census records, a birth certificate and marriage license, Lynn was three years older than what most biographies stated. It didn’t mar Lynn’s success, but did make the oft-repeated tales of her teen marriage and motherhood less extreme.

“I never, never thought about being a role model,” Lynn told the San Antonio Express-News in 2010. “I wrote from life, how things were in my life. I never could understand why others didn’t write down what they knew.”

Lynn always credited her husband with giving her the confidence to first step on stage as a young performer. She also spoke in interviews, and in her music, about the pain he caused over their nearly 50 years of marriage. Doolittle Lynn died in 1996 after years of complications from heart problems and diabetes.

In her 2002 memoir, “Still Woman Enough,” Lynn wrote that he was an alcoholic who cheated on her and beat her, even as she hit him back. But she stayed with him until his death and told NPR in 2010 that “he’s in there somewhere” in every song she wrote.

“We fought one day and we’d love the next, so I mean … to me, that’s a good relationship,” she told NPR. “If you can’t fight, if you can’t tell each other what you think – why, your relationship ain’t much anyway.”

Lynn won numerous awards throughout her career, including three Grammys and many honors from the Academy of Country Music. She earned Grammys for her 1971 duet with Conway Twitty, “After the Fire is Gone,” and for the 2004 album “Van Lear Rose,” a collaboration with Jack White of the White Stripes that introduced her to a new generation of fans.

 She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988, and her song “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. She received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and in 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 President Barack Obama said Lynn “gave voice to a generation, singing what no one wanted to talk about and saying what no one wanted to think about.”

Her career and legend only continued to grow in her later years as she recorded new songs, toured steadily and drew loyal audiences well into her 80s. A museum and dude ranch are dedicated to Lynn at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.

“Working keeps you young,” she told Esquire in 2007. “I ain’t ever gonna stop. And when I do, it’s gonna be right on stage. That’ll be it.”

Lynn was hospitalized in 2017 after suffering a stroke at her home. The following year she broke a hip. Her health forced her to quit touring.

In early 2021, at the age of 89, she recorded her 50th album, “Still Woman Enough.”

The title song, which she sang alongside successors Carrie Underwood and Reba McEntire, sounded like a mission statement that captures the ethos of her career:

“I’m still woman enough, still got what it takes inside;

I know how to love, lose, and survive;

Ain’t much I ain’t seen, I ain’t tried;

I’ve been knocked down, but never out of the fight;

I’m strong, but I’m tender;

Wise, but I’m tough;

And let me tell you when it comes to love;

I’m still woman enough.”

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Health

Gay men are the “canary in the coal mine” of future pandemics, warns doc seeking HIV cure

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Posed by models (Photo: Shutterstock)

The trial of a potential HIV cure is underway. The scientists involved hope for initial results by November. One of them also has stark warnings about the threat to humanity of future pandemics. He believes that, as seen with HIV and monkeypox, gay men could be the “canary in the coal mine.”

Dr. Marcus A. Conant is a consultant dermatologist whose career pre-dates the first cases of AIDS in the US. He’s now Chief Medical Officer for the biotech company, American Gene Technologies (AGT). It’s been working for the past few years on a groundbreaking HIV cure.

Rather than medication, AGT uses gene technology to boost the capacity of the body’s own immune cells to fight HIV.

A tiny number of individuals are genetically resistant to the effects of HIV. There are cases where people with HIV have undergone a bone marrow transplant and inherited the gene-resistant immune cells from such individuals. This has cured them of HIV.

However, a bone marrow transplant is a risky procedure. Doctors only consider it when someone is fighting a terminal, blood-related cancer like leukemia. It is not a practical, widespread treatment for HIV when medication for the disease already exists.

Instead, AGT wants to use gene technology to produce the same effect. Its process involves removing some white blood cells from an HIV-positive patient and then inserting a gene that modifies them. This enables the cells to stop HIV replication.

Using gene therapy as a potential HIV cure

Hundreds of thousands of the HIV-resistant CD4 T-cells are then infused back into the patient, where they can duplicate and—hopefully—fight HIV.

In 2020, the FDA gave approval for AGT to start a trial involving seven patients. Those patients have had their own genetically-modified T-cells (AGT103-T) infused back into them.

None experienced any negative side effects from the infusion, meaning the trial has now proceeded to its next stage. Each patient has had their antiretroviral treatment stopped. They are being closely monitored to see if their viral loads remain undetectable.

Related: New study says HIV has a “significant” impact on aging process

Dr. Conant is not able to give Queerty any advance insight into the trial’s results when we catch up with him via the phone. It’s been kept under wraps until later this year. However, he does say that he and his team are already planning a larger trial.

Dr. Marcus Conant is working to find a HIV cure (Photo: AGT)

“It’s what science has always done,” he explains. “You ask, ‘Well which part of it is working? Why do we think that’s working? And how do we make that work better?’

“When AZT came out in 1987, it only worked just minimally. We were able to demonstrate that it was barely prolonging the lives of patients.

“Now here we are 30 years later, with drugs that can suppress the virus essentially to levels so low that patients can have unprotected sex and they don’t transmit the virus. That’s an amazing advance. But it was achieved by asking, ‘What can we do to make it work better?’”

“So there will now be another study, probably in 30-50 patients. My staff and I are designing that study as we speak, to take what we learn from this and treat more patients. We will tweak it to make it even better.”

HIV cure eludes science for more than four decades

Gene therapy has been used to treat several conditions over the past 20 years. This includes severe combined immune deficiency syndrome (SCID) and the eye condition, retinitis pygmantosa.

However, this is the first time it’s been used as a potential treatment for HIV. If it works, it would be groundbreaking.

HIV (in green) on an immune cell (Photo: CDC/Public Domain)

HIV has proved stubbornly resistant to a cure. It’s something Conant is only too well aware of. He has been working in the field since the early 1980s. As a dermatologist, he saw some of the first cases of men with Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS) – one of the rare cancers that became the hallmark of AIDS before treatment became available.

Conant was a junior professor at UC San Francisco in 1981. He still vividely remembers seeing his first KS case in April that that year. It was a couple of months before the CDC issued its first public warning of an illness affecting gay men.

Related: Makers of once-every-six-months HIV treatment file for FDA approval

HIV, monkeypox and the threat of more pandemics

Because of his experience with HIV, Conant said he felt a sense of déjà vu when he heard of this year’s monkeypox outbreak. Cases in the US have now exceeded 23,00 and the majority are gay men.

Conant says the world must be better prepared for such outbreaks.

“The first thing you see in any epidemic is denial: ‘It can’t happen to us.’

“The second thing you always see is: Someone to blame. And that’s exactly what we saw with HIV/AIDS. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing now with monkeypox: ‘Oh, those gay guys, if they weren’t so promiscuous then the disease would never have happened.’

“No,” he affirms. “The disease was going to happen. It just happened in a special group first. Instead of people blaming the gay community, they should realize this is an opportunity to realize that we’re going to have more and more of these zoonotic diseases, which jump from animals to humans.

“The gay community may well be the first group in which we see this, or in whom we frequently first see this.

“Why is that? Because gay men have opportunities to travel far more frequently than their straight brothers who are raising children and staying at home and don’t have the luxury of being able to pick up any time they want to and go to a party in Spain.

“So all of that is very much like the canary in the coal mine. What’s happening in the gay community is a warning to society: ‘We’ve got a problem here.’

“In the last 40 years we’ve had HIV, you had Ebola, you had Zika, you had Covid, and now monkeypox. That’s five off the top, just in my lifetime, and this is going to continue because people are traveling more.”

Conant agrees with other scientists who say global warming will increase the likelihood of pandemics. Rising temperatures are causing viruses to spread out of their previous habitats.

International solutions to global outbreaks

Conant wants to see a far more international solution to outbreaks, rather than countries just doing their own thing. After all, viruses have no respect for borders.

He also thinks governments must take more steps to allow individuals to isolate themselves when necessary.

“They tell gay men who have the disease, ‘Well go home and isolate.’ In America, a gay man can’t go home and isolate,” he says.

“Sure, you can order in all your food, but if he doesn’t have an income, he can maybe order the food in for a week, and then he’s running out of money. We don’t have an infrastructure set up that makes ‘go home and isolate’ a practical solution.

“If we don’t come up with some way to handle these diseases, we are facing a potential disaster,” he continues. Both Covid and monkeypox have a relatively low mortality rate. He warns that if a disease came along that killed—say—40% of the people who acquired it, “we are going to see societies collapse.”

“We should have learned from AIDS,” says Conant. “Forty years ago, AIDS was the first real clear warning that ‘hey, we need better policies for handling problems like this,’ and we learned nothing. And here we are, after one disease after another, and we respond to each one as if it’s a one-off and it will never happen again.”

David Hudson is a contributing editor at Queerty. Follow him on Twitter at @davidhudson_uk



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In Poland, where coal is king, homeowners queue for days to buy fuel

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WARSAW/BOGDANKA, Aug 27 (Reuters) – In Poland’s late summer heat, dozens of cars and trucks line up at the Lubelski Wegiel Bogdanka coal mine, as householders fearful of winter shortages wait for days and nights to stock up on heating fuel in queues reminiscent of communist times.

Artur, 57, a pensioner, drove up from Swidnik, some 30 km (18 miles) from the mine in eastern Poland on Tuesday, hoping to buy several tonnes of coal for himself and his family.

“Toilets were put up today, but there’s no running water,” he said, after three nights of sleeping in his small red hatchback in a crawling queue of trucks, tractors towing trailers and private cars.

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“This is beyond imagination, people are sleeping in their cars. I remember the communist times but it didn’t cross my mind that we could return to something even worse.”

Artur’s household is one of the 3.8 million in Poland that rely on coal for heating and now face shortages and price hikes, after Poland and the European Union imposed an embargo on Russian coal following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

Poland banned purchases with an immediate effect in April, while the bloc mandated fading them out by August.

While Poland produces over 50 million tonnes from its own mines every year, imported coal, much of it from Russia, is a household staple because of competitive prices and the fact that Russian coal is sold in lumps more suitable for home use.

Soaring demand has forced Bogdanka and other state-controlled mines to ration sales or offer the fuel to individual buyers via online platforms, in limited amounts. Artur, who did not want to give his full name, said he had collected paperwork from his extended family in the hope of picking up all their fuel allocations at once.

The mine planned to sell fuel for some 250 households on Friday and would continue sales over the weekend to cut waiting times, Dorota Choma, a spokeswoman for the Bogdanka mine told Reuters.

The limits are in place to prevent hoarding and profiteering, or even selling spots in the queue, Choma said.

Aerial view of a coal mine in Bogdanka, Poland August 26, 2022. REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki

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Like all Polish coal mines, Bogdanka typically sells most of the coal it produces to power plants. Last year, it sold less than 1% of its output to individual clients so lacks the logistics to sell fuel directly to retail buyers.

Lukasz Horbacz, head of the Polish Coal Merchant Chamber of Commerce, said the decline in Russian imports began in January when Moscow started using rail tracks for military transport.

“But the main reason for the shortages is the embargo that went into immediate effect. It turned the market upside down,” he told Reuters.

A spokesman for the Weglokoks, a state-owned coal trader tasked by the government to boost imports from other countries declined to comment, while the climate ministry was not available for comment. Government officials have repeatedly said Poland would have enough fuel to meet demand.

In recent years, Poland has been the most vocal critic of EU climate policy and a staunch defender of coal that generates as much as 80% of its electricity. But coal output has steadily declined as the cost of mining at deeper levels increases.

Coal consumption has held mostly steady, prompting a gradual rise in imports. In 2021, Poland imported 12 million tonnes of coal, of which 8 million tonnes came from Russia and used by households and small heating plants.

In July, Poland ordered two state-controlled companies to import several million tons of the fuel from other sources including Indonesia, Colombia and Africa, and introduced subsidies for homeowners facing a doubling or tripling of coal prices from last winter.

“As much as 60% of those that use coal for heating may be affected by energy poverty,” Horbacz said.

Back at Bogdanka, Piotr Maciejewski, 61, a local farmer who joined the queue on Tuesday, said he was prepared for a long wait.

“My tractor stays in line, I’m going home to get some sleep,” he said.

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Reporting by Marek Strzelecki and Kuba Stezycki, Editing by Ros Russell

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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China’s July Russian coal imports hit 5-year high as West shuns Moscow

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China brought in 7.42 million metric tons of coal from Russia last month, data from the General Administration of Customs showed on Saturday. That was the highest monthly figure since comparable statistics began in 2017, up from 6.12 million metric tons in June and 6.49 million metric tons in July 2021.

Western countries were avoiding cargoes from Russia ahead of a European Union ban on Russian coal that came into force on August 11, aimed at reducing the Kremlin’s energy revenue over its February invasion.

The ban has forced Russia to target buyers such as China and India and sell at a steep discount.

Russian thermal coal with a heating value of 5,500 kilocalories (kcal) traded around $150 per metric ton on a cost-and-freight basis in late July, while coal of the same quality at Australia’s Newcastle port was assessed at more than $210 per metric ton on a free-on-board (FOB) basis.

Some Chinese traders expect more Russian coal to flow into China in the fourth quarter when utilities in northern China build stocks for the winter heating season.

July shipments of Indonesian coal, mostly cheap, low-quality thermal coal with a heating value below 3,800 kcal, were 11.7 million metric tons. That was up 22% from June but down 40% from a year earlier. China has reduced its overall coal imports in recent months amid surging domestic output.

Power plants in southern China have increased tenders to buy Indonesian coal in August as it is cheaper than domestic coal, while demand for coal-fired power generation has been boosted by a record heat wave.

Indonesian thermal coal with a heating value at 3,800 kcal changed hand at about $78 per metric ton on a FOB basis last week, which would still below about 690 yuan (about $100) for local coal when considering shipping costs.

China’s customs data showed zero coal shipment from Australia in July.

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Germany’s coal revival may threaten its climate goals

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Updated August 1, 2022 at 10:24 a.m. EDT|Published August 1, 2022 at 9:34 a.m. EDT

The power plant in Bexbach, Germany, is stocking up its coal depot in preparation for returning to full-time energy production. (Daniel Etter for The Washington Post)

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BEXBACH, Germany — The last coal pits around Bexbach closed a decade ago, leaving the power plant puffing plumes of pollutants as a relic of a dying regional industry.

But now plant equipment is being repaired, contractors have come out of retirement, and manager Michael Lux is faced with a novel prospect: expanding the head count.

“It’s a good feeling to be hiring,” he said, as he sat down to discuss plans to transition Bexbach, in the southwestern German state of Saarland, from “reserve” status back to full capacity. By winter, Lux expects to be burning a minimum of 100,000 metric tons of coal a month, in what some in the industry have dubbed a “spring” for Germany’s coal-fired power plants.

It’s part of a pan-European dash to ditch Russian natural gas and escape President Vladimir Putin’s energy chokehold. While the war in Ukraine has simultaneously turbocharged the European Union’s race to renewables, fossil fuels still provide the quickest fix.

Amid summer heat wave, Germany worries about having enough gas for winter

France, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands have all announced plans to reactivate old coal power plants. But nowhere are the plans as extensive as in Germany, which is allowing 21 coal plants to restart or work past planned closing dates for the next two winters.

That means a scramble for an industry that has been in its death throes in Germany. The country will have to import more coal from producers such as Australia and South Africa, even as those countries face pressure to cut back on coal-burning at home. And some experts warn the coal revival may make it harder for Germany to meet its climate goals.

Horst Haefner gestured toward the stacks of coal in Bexbach’s storage yard: “Everyone wants to get rid of it, but they can’t do without it.”

Haefner, 70, agreed to come out of retirement to work at Bexbach, checking plant machinery he last inspected back in 2004. It beats pottering around in the garden, he said, as other workers took a break in the shade.

With temperatures hitting 91 degrees Fahrenheit, the day was so unusually hot for the region that the local beer garden had closed early for a “heat day.” It was a reminder of why countries have pledged to cut their carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels such as coal — and what’s at stake if they don’t.

More coal, more emissions

As Putin puts a squeeze on natural gas flows to Europe — in what E.U. officials claim is retaliation for their support of Ukraine — Germany is trying to conserve energy. It is also urgently seeking replacement sources of power. And it has few options.

Russia’s Gazprom to slash gas to Germany, as Putin fosters uncertainty in Europe

Ramping up renewables takes time. New liquid natural gas terminals are not yet finished. The government is considering keeping the last three nuclear power plants online beyond their planned end-of-year close date, but those account for a relatively small portion of the county’s power generation.

The German government, which includes Greens as part of its coalition, has described the coal revival as a painful but necessary move — and assures it will be temporary.

Germany has simultaneously committed to a new target of 80 percent of power from renewable sources by 2030 — double the current contribution. It has begun to ease the permitting process for windmills and to invigorate a renewables rollout that many analysts say stagnated under former chancellor Angela Merkel.

This push, the government maintains, will help the country stick to its climate goals and end the use of coal by 2030.

“If it was happening in a vacuum and we didn’t have all this other legislation paired, then I’d be worried,” said Ysanne Choksey, a policy adviser for fossil fuel transition at E3G, a climate think tank.

But some experts voice concern about the short-term increase in emissions for Germany — and about whether it will be harder for the country to meet that 2030 target: cutting emissions by at least 65 percent of 1990 levels.

To get there, emissions in the power sector need to be reduced “substantially and as soon as possible,” said Simon Müller, Germany director of Agora Energiewende, a climate-focused nonprofit.

Yet Agora estimates that the fossil fuel plants that have been revived or allowed to stay open will add between 20 million and 30 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, equivalent to about 4 percent of Germany’s total emissions.

Whether Germany will overshoot its budget of 257 million tons of carbon emissions for the power sector this year remains uncertain, Müller said.

“What is certain,” he said, “is that only a massive rollout of renewable energies and grid expansion will break our dependence on fossil energy imports and put us on track to meet Germany’s climate target for 2030.”

Is nuclear energy green? France and Germany lead opposing camps.

In Germany last year, in part because of low winds and the already rising price of natural gas, hard coal and lignite accounted for 28 percent of electricity production — contributing to a rise of a 4.5 percent in overall emissions over the previous year.

To be sure, it’s not just Germany that is off track. Despite global commitments to reduced emissions, last year was a record year for coal globally. As the world emerged from the pandemic and demand for power surged, more coal was burned for electricity generation than at any other time in history. This year is poised to break records again.

Claudia Kemfert, head of the energy and environment department at the German Institute for Economic Research, said even with a government that has put climate policy at the forefront, red tape that has held back the country’s renewables industry has not been sufficiently stripped away.

“We will not meet climate goals in the short term,” Kemfert said.

Leaning more on coal is now a “necessary step,” she said. “We are paying the price of 10 years of failed energy policy.”

What it takes to resurrect a coal plant

It remains unclear how many of the coal plants that are now allowed to fire up fully will elect to do so this winter. Energy companies will be weighing the cost of necessary investments against potential profits. On Monday, the Mehrum plant in Lower Saxony was the first to move out of reserve status, according to the Federal Network Agency.

Managers at Bexbach say their 40-year-old plant is aiming to return to full-time service, along with its sister unit, Weiher, about 14 miles west.

“The responsibility is fully understood,” Lux said.

Just five years ago, power company Steag tried to shut these plants down, deeming them unprofitable as cheap gas flowed from Russia. The German government mandated they be put into “grid reserve” — so they could be called on when needed to supplement imbalances in the energy grid, with running costs paid by the government.

Bexbach burned for only 319 hours last year.

Ramping up again brings challenges. In addition to getting the plants up to full working order, managers must find qualified staff and get in supplies.

Bexbach was built to burn local coal, but the area’s last hard coal mine closed in 2012. Before the war in Ukraine, Russia had been supplying much of the coal imports used at German plants. Yet with an E.U. embargo on Russian coal coming into force in August, energy companies have had to look elsewhere: to South Africa, Australia and Colombia’s Cerrejón mine, also known as “the Monster” and notorious for its poor environmental and safety record.

To get to an inland plant like Bexbach, that coal has to be hauled hundreds of miles by land or by train from the ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp. And contraction in the industry has resulted in bottlenecks, with coal stocks at European ports piled up to a three-year high.

“The whole market has expected the downturn of coal consumption: the ports, the rail operators, the barging operators,” said Stephan Riezler, head of trading at Steag.

For other plants that receive coal by barge, there’s an additional problem of low water levels on the Rhine River, a logistics artery for German industry, with boats unable to fully load.

The government has now given priority to coal cargo on its railway lines, in an attempt to expedite deliveries — which one transport alliance has warned could have a knock-on effect for public transportation.

As it ramps up, the industry is pushing for longer-term guarantees, which the country’s Green Economy Ministry is unlikely to offer.

Alex Bethe, chairman of Germany’s Association of Coal Importers, said there’s a need for a “signal” from the government that “we have a five-year perspective in order to justify the hiring of personnel, doing investments and improvements.”

Under the new coal law, plants like Bexbach that plan to get back in the market have been asked to fill their stocks to 180,000 tons of coal, which energy firms argue is a financial risk.

“So we are saying to the government: This is a wonderful idea, we want to save the country in the winter, but what we need is a credit line,” said Riezler, as he sat down with plant managers to discuss what was needed to reenter the market.

Still, even with rising coal prices, there’s money to be made, and managers say it’s just a matter of ironing out the details.

“We’ll do everything in our power to bring all of those millions of tons to the power plants,” Bethe said.

Florian Neuhof in Berlin contributed to this report.

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Climate crisis: This nation is scorching in a heat wave and wildfires, yet it’s returning to planet-baking coal

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Mitsaris, whose father also worked in coal mining, bought 44 acres of vineyard. But he’s now wondering if he made the right choice — coal here is refusing to quit.

“I’m afraid about the future,” he said. “I have two young daughters to bring up.”

Just a year ago, Greece was confident it could close all existing coal-burning plants by 2023. It planned to build one last coal plant this year in the wider region where Mitsaris lives, Western Macedonia, which generates more than half the nation’s electricity. The new plant, Ptolemaida 5, would in 2025 then run on natural gas, another polluting fossil fuel, but one that is generally less carbon-intensive than the lignite, or brown coal, found in this part of Greece.

That whole timeline is now up in smoke.

The deadline to end the use of coal in all existing plants has been delayed from 2023 to 2025, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis recently suggested the new Ptolemaida plant will realistically need to burn coal until at least 2028. And Greece is planning to hike its coal mining output by 50% over the next two years to make up for the dearth of natural gas, as Vladimir Putin tightens the taps flowing to the EU.

Already the changes are glaring. In June 2021, coal generated 253.9 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity. This June, coal was responsible for 468.1 GWh, nearly twice as much.

And this is while the country has been battling wildfires on the mainland and its islands, fueled by a scorching heat wave supercharged by climate change — which comes mostly from humans’ burning of fossil fuels like coal. The fires have left homes in ashes, people have been rescued from beaches and business owners on islands like Lesbos are facing an economically painful holiday season.

Major life choices, like where to live and work, are difficult to make when the government’s plans keep changing. For Mitsaris, leaving his village where he was born and raised isn’t an option right now.

“My wife used to work in a dairy factory, which also closed few years ago. They offered her a job in Athens but back then my salary was enough to support the whole family, so we decided to stay,” he said. “If I knew that we would end up in the situation we are now, I would have gone to Athens back then.”

The Greek government is trying to convince people that its return to coal is only temporary. But coal’s resurgence is tempting people in Western Macedonia back into the industry.

The PPC energy company has offered steady employment to thousands of people in Western Macedonia, where almost 1 in 5 are jobless.

Here — where everyone refers to coal as a “blessing and a curse” — a return to the fossil fuel can make all the difference between staying and leaving.

Already, so many have left for bigger cities, or even moved abroad, to find new lives.

A village in decay

In terms of the transition away from coal, Greece had been something of a success story. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Greece only relied on coal for around 9% of its energy supply, down from 25% just six years ago. It was the first country in the coal-dependent Balkans to announce a near-term target to end use of the fossil fuel.

But the transition has always had its challenges — mainly, what opportunities can the country offer to former workers in coal towns?

In Western Macedonia — which provides 80% of Greece’s coal — the PPC has expropriated dozens of villages so that it can mine the coal beneath them, moving entire communities to the peripheries. And they were the lucky ones.

During this awkward in-between phase — when coal is still being mined but its years are numbered — residents in the village of Akrini find themselves unable to move, even as everything around them crumbles.

Residents here have been in a dispute for more than a decade with the PPC, saying they are entitled to compensation that will help them relocate from the village, which has for years been exposed to high levels of ash from the coal operations that surround them. They successfully lobbied for the right to be relocated, which is now enshrined in a 2011 law.

The PPC told CNN in an email that it was not responsible for the people in the village, and did not answer follow up questions when presented with the law that states they are entitled to relocation assistance by 2021.

Charalambos Mouratidis, 26, doesn’t really know what to do next.

Like Mitsaris, he has sought to make a new life after leaving a job with the PPC at a coal mine, where his father also worked. But Mouratidis never had the same kind of job security as his dad. He worked shifts for eight months on a short-term contract cleaning the ash from the machinery inside the mine. The instability, low pay and the heavy impact of the toxic ash on his health pushed him out of the industry.

He now runs a cattle farm, which sits on a hill overlooking Akrini as plumes of smoke and steam rise from the chimneys and cooling towers of the coal plants all around it in the background.

On top of his cattle farming, he works a second job for a solar panel company, typically putting in 13 hours a day between them to make ends meet.

Working for the solar panel company is a green job that provides Mouratidis with some extra income. But solar expansion is also taking up more and more land, leaving less for cultivation or grazing, so getting permission to expand farmland in Akrini is near impossible, he said.

Besides the solar farms, all other infrastructure projects in Akrini have been canceled. The village is being left to slowly die.

“I started farming, hoping to have some kind of a more stable future, and now even that effort is at stake,” Mouratidis said. “Everyone has reached a dead end in this village.”

What’s comes next

The Greek government has devised a 7.5 billion euro ($7.9 billion) plan to help the country transform from a fossil fuel-based economy to a green innovative nation. Its Just Transition Development Plan, as these are known across the European Union, has received 1.63 billon euros in EU funding.

Western Macedonia is a focus in the plan and should receive plenty of the money, partly to become a center for renewables in the country. And while the plan is welcomed by a lot of people here, many doubt it can all be achieved in the six years before the last coal plant is to go offline.

Mouratidis is skeptical the money will help him at all.

“I’m not sure that much of it will reach people like me, who run small businesses. Some money will end up with the ones who openly support the current government and the majority of it will stay with those who manage these funds,” he said. “This is what history has shown us. Even during Covid-19, the support given to big companies and businesses was much higher than the support we got.”

But not all hope is lost. As many workers turn from coal to agriculture, some EU support is trickling through. Just a few kilometers from Akrini, Nikos Koltsidas and Stathis Paschalidis are trying to create sustainable solutions for those who have lost their jobs in the green transition, and who are willing to get involved with sheep and goat farming.

Through their “Proud Farm” initiative, they act as incubators for Greeks who want to farm in sustainable ways, offering them access to training and knowledge around the newest technologies available to them.

“We want to create a network of self-sustainable farms, with respect to the environment and the animals, which will demand very low capital from new farmers,” Paschalidis said, his sheep bleating in the background.

Koltsidas said he wanted to spread the word to the local population that farming isn’t what it used to be, and can provide a stable future. “It doesn’t require the effort it did in the past, where the farmer had to be on the farm the whole day, grazing the animals or milking them with their hands,” he said.

“To those thinking about going back to working in coal, they should look at all the regions that are thriving without it,” he said. “There’s no need to stay stuck in these outdated models of the PPC.”

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In a Twist, Old Coal Plants Help Deliver Renewable Power. Here’s How.

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Across the country, aging and defunct coal-burning power plants are getting new lives as solar, battery and other renewable energy projects, partly because they have a decades-old feature that has become increasingly valuable: They are already wired into the power grid.

The miles of high-tension wires and towers often needed to connect power plants to customers far and wide can be costly, time consuming and controversial to build from scratch. So solar and other projects are avoiding regulatory hassles, and potentially speeding up the transition to renewable energy, by plugging into the unused connections left behind as coal becomes uneconomical to keep burning.

In Illinois alone, at least nine coal-burning plants are on track to become solar farms and battery storage facilities in the next three years. Similar projects are taking shape in Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Maryland. In Massachusetts and New Jersey, two retired coal plants along the coast are being repurposed to connect offshore wind turbines to the regional electrical grids.

“A silver lining of having had all of these dirty power plants is that now, we have fairly robust transmission lines in those places” said Jack Darin, director of the Illinois chapter of the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group. “That’s a huge asset.”

Over the past two decades, more than 600 coal-burning generators totaling about 85 gigawatts of generating capacity have retired, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. (Individual power plants can have more than one generator.) A majority of the 266 remaining coal-burning power plants in the country were built in the 1970s and 1980s, and are nearing the end of their approximately 50-year operational lifetime.

Most of that retired capacity will not be replaced with coal, as the industry gets squeezed out by cheaper renewable energy and tougher emissions regulations. At the same time, renewable energy producers are facing obstacles getting their projects connected to the grid. Building new power lines is costly and controversial as neighbors often oppose transmission lines that can disturb scenic vistas or potentially reduce property values nearby. In addition, getting power-line projects approved by regulators can be time consuming.

Building and operating renewable energy projects has long been cheaper than fossil fuel plants. The barrier “is not economics anymore,” said Joseph Rand, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which conducts research on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy. “The hardest part is securing the interconnection and transmission access.”

This makes old coal plants an attractive option as sites for renewable energy projects. Not only are the old plants already wired into the transmission system, they also have substations, which help convert electricity to a supply that’s suitable for use in homes and businesses.

That was a key factor in choosing Brayton Point Power Station as a grid connection point for a 1,200-megawatt wind farm 37 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, said Michael Brown, chief executive officer of the offshore wind developer Mayflower Wind.

At 1,600 megawatts, the coal-fired plant was the largest one in New England when it retired in 2017. The facility itself, located in the waterfront town of Somerset, will be replaced by an undersea-cable factory owned by the Italian company Prysmian Group. And the offshore wind project will connect to the grid at the Brayton Point interconnection point, making use of the existing substation there.

In one of the most ambitious efforts, Vistra Corp., a Texas-based power generation company that also owns a variety of power plants in California and Illinois, said it would spend $550 million to turn at least nine of its coal-burning facilities in Illinois into sites for solar panels and battery storage.

The largest, a plant in Baldwin, Ill., that’s set to retire by 2025, will get 190,000 solar panels on 500 acres of land. Together, the panels will generate 68 megawatts of power, enough to supply somewhere between 13,600 and 34,000 homes, depending on the time of year. It will also get a 9-megawatt battery, which will help distribute electricity when demand peaks or the sun isn’t shining.

Vistra chief executive, Curtis Morgan, said it became clear that the power company would need to “leave coal behind” and it was eager to build new zero-emissions projects to replace some of the power from those plants. However, he said, the slow process of getting approval from grid operators, which coordinate and monitor electricity supplies, has been a roadblock for a number of Vistra’s proposed projects.

A surge in proposals for wind, solar and battery storage projects has overwhelmed regulators in recent years, according to an analysis from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which overlooks the University of California’s Berkeley campus. In 2021, wait times had almost doubled from a decade before, to nearly four years, and that does not include the increasing number of projects that are withdrawing from the process entirely.

If every project currently waiting for approval gets built, “we could hit 80 percent clean energy by 2030,” said Mr. Rand, the lead author of the report. “But we’d be lucky if even a quarter of what’s proposed actually gets completed.”

Three of Vistra’s battery storage projects in Illinois — at the Havana, Joppa and Edwards coal plants — also benefited from an infusion of grants from a state law, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, aimed at supporting a “just transition” for coal-dependent communities toward renewable energy. It was signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker last fall, and also required all fossil-fuel-burning plants to cut their emissions to zero by 2045, which could lead to their closure, though most of the coal plants in Illinois were already poised to shut down within a decade.

The Coal-to-Solar Energy Storage Grant Program that emerged from the legislation also supports two other battery projects, owned by NRG Energy, which will be built at the Waukegan and Will County coal-burning power stations.

The advantage of building renewable energy projects on old coal plants is twofold, said Sylvia Garcia, the director of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, which oversees the coal-to-solar program. First, projects benefit from the ease of reusing an existing connection to the grid. Second, it’s an effort toward “trying to reinvest in the communities that have lost those coal plants” in the first place, she said.

While the new projects will temporarily create construction jobs, operating a solar plant or battery facility usually does not require as many employees. The Baldwin plant previously employed around 105 full-time workers. And while Vistra has not yet finalized numbers on a site-by-site basis, the nine Illinois projects combined will create 29 full-time jobs annually, the company’s communications director, Meranda Cohn, said in an email.

Coal plants also typically sit on a sizable parcel of land, and redeveloping those sites into renewable energy projects is a way to put something productive on a piece of property that might otherwise go unused.

“It’s really shifting a very negative resource into one that is more positive for the community,” said Jeff Bishop, chief executive of Key Capture Energy, which plans to locate a 20-megawatt battery storage project at a retired coal plant near Baltimore, Md.

Elsewhere in Holyoke, Mass., the retirement of Mount Tom Station, a coal plant that had operated for more than five decades, presented a number of possibilities, said Julie Vitek, vice president of government and regulatory affairs for the power producer ENGIE North America. After meetings with government officials, environmental groups and residents, a solar farm emerged as the best way to “give new life to the industrial land at Mount Tom,” she said.

Today, the property is home to some 17,000 solar panels and a small battery installation that form a community solar project managed by Holyoke Gas & Electric, a city-owned utility that gives customers the choice to opt in to receiving solar power from the project. The panels produce about 6 megawatts of power, enough to power about 1,800 homes.

It’s not only solar, battery and wind developers that are eyeing old coal plants for their infrastructure. TerraPower, a nuclear power venture founded by Bill Gates, is locating a 345-megawatt advanced nuclear reactor adjacent to a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyo. The location will not only allow the reactor to take advantage of the existing grid connection, but also to make use of the coal plant’s cooling system, said Chris Levesque, the TerraPower president and chief executive.

“In a way, it’d be a real shame not to make use of those coal plants,” Mr. Levesque said.

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World

Russia declares gas war on EU – POLITICO

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Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing hardball with the European Union — cutting off gas deliveries to some of Russia’s best customers in a howl of rage at the sanctions imposed after invading Ukraine.

It’s putting enormous political pressure on governments, threatens to leave Europeans freezing if this winter is a cold one, and potentially undermines the bloc’s climate goals as countries replace gas-fired power with coal. It could even tip the Continent into recession.

Simone Tagliapietra, an analyst with the Bruegel think tank, calls Russia’s policies “energy blackmail.”

Only 40 percent of the normal amount of gas is flowing along the undersea Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream pipeline, which is affecting deliveries to France, Italy and Austria as well as Germany. Russia’s gas export monopoly Gazprom has already halted all deliveries to Poland, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark after energy companies in those countries refused to kowtow to Kremlin demands to pay for deliveries in rubles.

In response, some countries are planning to fire up coal-fired power stations.

“It must be acknowledged that Putin is reducing the gas supply to Europe bit by bit, also to drive up the price, and we must respond with our measures,” German Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck said in a television interview late Sunday, adding that “it’s a tense, serious situation.”

Austria plans to covert a shuttered power plant to again burn coal.

Poland aims to subsidize coal used for home heating.

The Netherlands on Monday decided to scrap earlier plans to limit production from its four coal-fired power stations.

“If these were not special times, we would never do this,” said Climate Minister Rob Jetten.

Italy’s government is planning a crisis meeting on Tuesday and Prime Minister Mario Draghi has ordered two regasification units for liquefied natural gas and has been talking to countries including Qatar, Angola and Algeria to sign gas supply deals in a desperate bid to secure supplies in case of a Russian shut-off.

Brussels is keen to project confidence but the worry is clear.

“We take the situation we’re in very serious. But we are prepared,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a meeting with reporters on Monday. “We are in difficult times. Times are not getting easier,” she added.

Dirty deals

The rush to burn coal to secure energy supply is symbolically awkward for climate conscious Europeans. But few expect it to blow the EU or its member states far off course in their efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

In Germany, officials are adamant that the return of coal will be short-lived and does not jeopardize the country’s track to zero out coal power by 2030. Coal will act as a reserve supply for the power sector, allowing the country to build up its stores of gas ahead of winter. Meanwhile, the government is planning to rapidly increase clean power.   

The Neurath coal-fired power plant in Germany | Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

Russia’s invasion has hardened political support for renewables in Germany, said Simon Müller, director of the Agora Energiewende think tank.

“This additional layer of urgency that we now have in the face of this situation helps to provide the political momentum that we need for some very important accelerations in the renewable build out,” said Müller. The German parliament is considering 10 energy efficiency and renewable energy measures and Müller said the three-party coalition was broadly aligned on the importance of removing barriers to green power.

Green groups were also sanguine. “There is no plan at all in Germany at the moment to put the coal exit date in doubt,” said Christoph Bals, the policy director of NGO Germanwatch.

But the need to rapidly change tack on scrapping coal is ramping up political tensions.

In Berlin, the conservative opposition lambasted Habeck for allowing an increase in coal use while ruling out keeping Germany’s three remaining nuclear power plants operating past the end of this year.

“I don’t understand that the Green climate minister prefers to let more coal plants run longer, rather than carbon neutral nuclear power plants,” Jens Spahn, deputy head of the Christian Democrats in parliament, told German television on Monday. The nuclear shutdown policy was one adopted by his party’s former leader, Angela Merkel.

The policy is also causing stress within the governing coalition.

“What is necessary is to keep the three remaining nuclear power plants running longer,” said Bijan Djir-Sarai, general secretary of the liberal Free Democrats. “This is a fact that the economy minister cannot simply ignore.”

Admitting the step was “breaking a taboo,” Habeck said coal was still better than reviving atomic energy, arguing that a change in nuclear policy would only have an impact at the end of next year — too late to help this winter. He was backed up by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said in an interview published Monday that “nuclear power won’t help us now, not in the next two years, which is what matters.”

Political leaders are calling on their people to conserve energy and cut gas use, while governments work to boost storage levels to allow the Continent to weather a winter Russian gas cutoff. As a last resort, they’re mulling gas rationing.

A halt in gas supplies would almost certainly tip the bloc into a recession. The European Central Bank warned that the eurozone would contract by 1.7 percent next year should Russia close the tap entirely.

“The energy supply disruptions and the low possibilities for an immediate substitution of gas supplies from Russia would likely require some rationing and reallocation of resources, resulting in production cuts in the euro area, in particular in energy-intensive sectors,” the bank said, predicting if that happened, the bloc’s economy would recover next year.

But the ECB also had a word of warning for Putin.

“Regarding the Russian economy, the scenario features a severe recession with a contraction in output similar to the contraction experienced when the Soviet Union collapsed.”

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