“And our answer was: We’re not going to build another coal plant.” (The governor confirmed the account,<br />but added in an email, “I’ll continue to encourage power companies to burn more coal to put our miners back to work.”)<br />It’s the same story in Virginia, where Dominion, a leading utility based in Richmond — near where commercial coal mining got<br />its start — designed a special rate to make it easier for Amazon Web Services and similar customers to buy renewable energy.<br />“They’re looking to attract, as in the Appalachian case, new customers, and those customers aren’t attracted by coal.”<br />Almost half of the Fortune 500 companies have adopted at least one climate or clean-energy goal, with 23 of them pledging eventually to run their businesses on 100 percent renewable energy, including Walmart, Bank of America<br />and Google, according to a recent report by the World Wildlife Fund and other environmentally minded organizations and investors.<br />Appalachian Power, the leading utility there, is quickly shifting toward natural gas<br />and renewable sources like wind and solar, even as President Trump calls for a coal renaissance.<br />And in Wyoming, the nation’s leading coal producer by far, Black Hills Energy worked with Microsoft to create a complex arrangement for the technology giant to get enough wind energy to fulfill current<br />and future needs at Microsoft’s data center in Cheyenne.<br />Last year, utilities made deals with corporate customers through rate arrangements known as green<br />tariffs for 220 megawatts of power, enough to run about 40,000 average American homes.<br />Though corporations are buying renewable energy across the country, energy executives and analysts say it is notable<br />that the trend is taking hold in states where coal production is part of the economic heart and soul.
