‘Deeply demoralizing’: how Trump derailed coal country’s clean-energy revival

For a moment, Jacob Hannah saw an unprecedented opportunity to make Appalachia great again.

In 2022, the Biden administration earmarked billions of dollars to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities. The objective was to lay down building blocks for the region to transition from extractive industries like coal and timber to a hub for solar and other advanced energy technologies, with a view to long-term economic, climate and social resilience.

But on his first day in office, Donald Trump scrapped Biden’s clean energy and environmental programs, which he lambasted as woke, anti-American liberal hoaxes.

“We knew we were living in a historic moment, not just because of the amount of funding, but because the whole region mobilized to meet the moment,” said Hannah, 33. “It was a once-in-a-generation cash injection designed to prioritize extraction-based communities as part of the energy transition, which for the first time in almost a century made Appalachia very competitive. So to have it all taken away is deeply damaging and demoralizing.”

Hannah, a fifth-generation Appalachian with a bushy beard and signature wide-brimmed hat, has been crisscrossing the country on a mission to raise philanthropic capital to limit the economic damage caused by the Trump administration taking a chainsaw to Biden-era grants.

Hannah runs Coalfield Development, a non-profit organization headquartered in Huntington, focused on rebuilding south-west Virginia’s economy and social fabric through workforce training, job creation and revitalizing abandoned buildings and mines in some of the most forgotten corners of coal country.

Coalfield has trained over 4,000 people – including many formerly incarcerated and/or in addiction recovery – over the past 15 years in everything from solar installation to drywalling and first aid. Yet, historically, federal grants for community regeneration efforts in Appalachia have been mostly top-down, project-based and short-lived.

The 2022 cash injection came through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s landmark climate and infrastructure legislation, and was designed to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities over the long haul.

It was the largest investment in Appalachia since the 1960s’ “war on poverty” under Lyndon Johnson.

In response, Coalfield Development spearheaded a coalition of universities, unions, nonprofits, businesses and local governments to create collective infrastructure and capacity, enabling coal-impacted rural communities across the US access more than $900m of the historic IRA investment.

Rural communities in Appalachia were on the verge of breaking ground on projects when the grants were paused or terminated by the so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, led by the billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. The wholesale cull included the $3bn Environmental and Climate Justice Program created in the IRA to tackle the climate crisis and environmental harms at a local level.

A few grants have since been reinstated, but are subject to long delays – in part because so many staff at federal agencies were forced out by Doge. Many remain the subject of litigation. Every single grant Coalfield Development was helping coordinate has been impacted in some way.

The cuts have deepened existing mistrust in government, known colloquially as Appalachian fatalism, yet many of those interviewed by the Guardian blame Washington politics generally rather than Trump.

“This party has taken away that funding from Appalachia illegally: that’s the stone-cold fact. But by the time those facts reach communities on the ground, it’s just so muddy. I think some are asking questions about why training is being shut down and why they didn’t get their Snap [food assistance] benefits, but where they’ll find the answers is the big issue,” said Hannah.

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Huntington, the second largest city in West Virginia with 45,000 residents, was perhaps a perfect place to build a coalition for the massive IRA investment across coal country. Located on the Ohio river, it was once a major transportation hub for the region’s coalfields, but suffered major economic and social decline as the surrounding mines shut down – and then became an epicenter of the opioid epidemic.

It sits at the heart of the Bible belt, which once voted loyally with Democrats but like many blue-collar regions is now part of the loyal Maga base who believed Trump when he pledged to resuscitate coal country and put American first.

Trump has won big in West Virginia in the past three general elections, securing every county in 2024 with an average of 70% of the vote – the highest percentage any party has won in the state’s history. His vote share was even larger in rural counties including Clay and Wayne, which Huntington straddles.

The Guardian’s visit coincided with the Democrats drubbing the Republicans in several state elections – including the governor’s race in Virginia.

It was also five weeks into the government shutdown, just days after the Trump administration announced that millions of Americans would not receive food stamps and Tesla shareholders approved a trillion-dollar pay package for Musk.

The damage caused by Trump’s dismantling of Biden-era programs was visible all around Coalfield Development’s redbrick office, which is located in a former manufacturing hub between the rail tracks and the river.

Next door, a multimillion-dollar redevelopment of a sprawling industrial site known as the Black Diamond warehouse has stalled – at first due to grant suspensions, and more recently due to the federal shutdown slowing down payments. Coalfield is still waiting for close to $3m in overdue reimbursements.

The warehouse, which once manufactured military planes, jeeps and coal trains, is being repurposed as a hub for sustainable industries and training. But all six EPA grants for Reuse Corridor, a new social enterprise to salvage and repurpose mattresses, electronics and other materials frequently dumped in the Ohio river, were cut, effectively killing the business and with it countless job opportunities.

Meanwhile, Solar Holler, a solar developer and installation company with 105 employees across Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio and Virginia, signed up for a new office in the warehouse as the business had been growing 20 to 30% annually.

But tax incentives for residential solar, which accounted for 70% of the company’s business, will be axed at the end of this year thanks to Trump’s big, beautiful budget. Commercial tax breaks will end in late 2027.

Solar Holler uses panels made in Georgia, yet Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions have caused supply chain delays and pushed up raw material prices across the board, as well as almost doubling the cost of solar energy on the market. The company’s forecast for 2026 is down from 30% to “roughly flat”.

“The massive increase in costs ends up being passed down to customers,” said Dan Conant, founder and CEO of Solar Holler. “The IRA rollbacks are obviously disappointing but that said, no matter how hard you make it on the ground for people, solar is the cheapest form of power on the planet so it’s going to happen one way or the other.”

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Appalachian Voices (AV) is a non-profit working with local communities – and in Washington – on securing a just energy transition. In 2023, AV, which is part of the broader coalition with Coalfield Development, was awarded a half-million-dollar EPA grant to help five former coal communities in Virginia increasingly being hit by severe floods thanks to the climate crisis and the environmental legacy of mining.

The grant was among those summarily terminated by Doge. It remains the subject of class action litigation brought by 350 groups, tribes and local governments who claim the wholesale termination of the $3bn environmental justice and climate program is unconstitutional.

In Lee county, where 85% of people voted for Trump and almost half rely on food stamps, AV had earmarked $40,000 for an asbestos survey in Pennington Gap. This was among a stack of grants secured by the community to demolish a derelict supermarket – a concrete asbestos-ridden eyesore that frequently floods and cuts off neighborhoods from the main town – to create a green space that would mitigate against future flooding.

For small communities such as Pennington Gap, securing funding for revitalization projects is like a game of Jenga, and removing just one or two pieces can make the whole stack collapse, according to Emma Kelly, AV’s New Economy program manager.

“People in Appalachia are used to being let down by the government, but this time we had the money. It was still taken away, and people feel betrayed.”

A Department of Energy grant that the community hoped to use to install rooftop solar on public buildings that would save $400 or so in monthly energy bills – a reliable income source that could be reinvested in sustainability projects such as communal fruit trees and electric bikes was also cut.

“Regardless of who’s in power, there’s a lot of finger-pointing, while life gets worse for the common people and the oligarch class keep winning,” said Orville Overton, 34, a local business owner and member of the residents’ council. “I don’t think people know who or what to trust, because both [political] parties have failed us in big ways.”

About 60 miles east, Dante, a sparsely populated former integrated mining community that was once the second largest in Russell county, suffers frequent power outages – including a four-day blackout during a major flood in July, and nine days after Hurricane Helene in August 2024.

Dante’s share of the terminated EPA grant was tagged for a feasibility study on the old railway depot, once the hub of mining operations and the whole town. This is the first step needed to convert the depot into a resilience hub with solar panels and battery storage, a place for residents to charge their phones and keep medication refrigerated during the next blackout.

The post office has been closed since July, due to flood damage. The only place still open for business in Dante is the volunteer-run mining museum.

Dante is also currently without a fire station, after nearly $400,000 appropriated by Congress to replace the one demolished due to subsidence was rescinded by the Trump administration.

“These are not frivolous things: these are basic services. And when you work hard for two or three years to secure federal funds, you expect it to be delivered,” said Lou Ann Wallace, Dante’s representative on the Republican-controlled Russell county board of supervisors.

“I don’t think the president knew. I’m one of his biggest supporters, but we’re dealing with the ills of industry here, and we’ve got to be able to clean this up so our people in these hollers can have a quality of life.”

Trump won 83% of the vote in Russell county in 2024 while Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor, secured 81% last month.

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said: “President Trump cares about our miners more than any other president in modern history – which is why he has implemented his energy dominance agenda to protect their jobs and revive the mining industry … we can maintain the safety of miners while simultaneously rolling back Joe Biden’s Green New Scam regulations that were killing their jobs.”

Across Appalachia, people who believe in Trump will be hit hard by his wholesale cuts to Medicaid, veterans affairs, food aid, and education among other public services. Simultaneously, the region is scrambling to save projects that would improve resilience and bring jobs.

It’s a race against the clock, according to Hannah, to find enough money to keep afloat and help people keep faith.

“The funding was committed by Congress, so we know the law’s on our side, and that we will eventually win back some of these grants,” Hannah said. “One objective was probably to remove confidence in the system, so we need to outlast what is a game of cash flow and the battle of morale.”