Project
Afterglow
Scores all 402 US coal plant sites across ten possible conversion paths, each score built from ingested data about that specific site and county.
Built with Python, SQLite, Flask
StatusRepository is currently private, release forthcoming.
Afterglow scores every US coal plant site for how viable a conversion to another industrial use would be.
Every site carries a separate viability score for ten possible alternative uses: a large nuclear plant, a small modular reactor installation, manufacturing for the nuclear supply chain, general manufacturing, a natural gas plant, a solar farm, a wind farm, battery storage, carbon capture, and a data center that makes its own power.
Two of the ten are scored but not prescribed. Battery storage has no NAICS code, so no employment data exists to read at any occupation. The data center path is the newest and its workforce coefficient has not yet been derived.
The nuclear supply chain path covers fabrication only.
Conversion and retirement
Every site also carries a decommissioning priority score, which is not published as a ranking. The largest emitters tend to be the most economically durable units and the last to close, so a site scoring well for conversion is not necessarily one that should close first. A single combined number would order the sites by neither measure.
Ending domestic coal combustion and ending coal mining are likewise treated as separate steps on separate timelines.