Kentucky has a museum dedicated to the coal industry. It now runs on solar power.
If you seek an aggressively unsubtle encapsulation of the struggles of the American coal industry, look no further: The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum now runs on solar power.
The museum, owned and operated by Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, turned to solar when coal-powered energy became too expensive. "We believe that this project will help save at least $8,000 to $10,000, off the energy costs on this building alone, so it's a very worthy effort and it's going to save the college money in the long run," said Brandon Robinson, the school's communications director.
"It is a little ironic," Robinson admitted. "But you know, coal and solar and all the different energy sources work hand-in-hand. And, of course, coal is still king around here." For more on why this aging monarch increasingly has more problems than power, see this breakdown from The Week.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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