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
Status Repository 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 never 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 are scored separately
Every site is also scored for decommissioning priority, and that second score is never published as a ranking. A conversion ranking read as a retirement queue would mislead: the largest emitters tend to be the most economically durable units and the last to close, so a site that scores well for conversion is not necessarily one that should shut down first. Blending the two readings into a single number produces an order reflecting neither.
The same separation runs through the phase-out itself. Ending domestic coal combustion and ending coal mining are treated as different steps on different timelines, because the people employed at a plant and the people employed at a mine face different clocks.