The Challenge of Redeveloping Retired Coal Plant Sites: A Story of Contamination, Liability, and Inaction

The story of retired coal plants in the United States is a complex and often frustrating one. As power plant operators seek to offload these contaminated sites, they often turn to shadowy companies that specialize in taking on environmental liabilities. These companies, in turn, have little incentive to remediate the sites and instead prefer to perform minimal cleanup to avoid costly liabilities. This leaves many former coal plant sites vacant and unproductive, with communities left in limbo as they wait for redevelopment that may never come.

The challenges faced by communities like Lawrenceburg, Indiana, Tonawanda, New York, and Washington Township, Ohio, highlight the need for transparency in these transactions. Without transparency, the true motivations of the companies involved remain hidden, and communities are left in the dark about the future of these valuable properties.

As more coal plants are slated for retirement in the coming years, the issue of redevelopment of these sites will only become more pressing. It is crucial for stakeholders, including local governments, environmental advocates, and community members, to push for greater transparency and accountability in the process of transferring and remediating these sites. Only then can these communities move forward and reclaim these valuable pieces of land for productive and sustainable use.

The 733-acre parcel of land at the confluence of Tanners Creek and the Ohio River in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, was designated as the future site of the state’s fourth port in 2020, but environmental surveys found toxic substances that rendered the site economically unviable for development. The contamination was a result of six decades of coal combustion and waste from the Tanners Creek Power Plant, which closed in 2015. Since then, the site has remained vacant and contaminated, with no concrete proposals for redevelopment.

Similar challenges are faced by other communities across the United States where retired coal plants sit idle, leaving behind contaminated land that is difficult and costly to remediate. The closure of these plants has led to job losses and revenue declines, but also presents an opportunity for economic revitalization. However, the high costs of remediation and the liability associated with the contamination make these sites unattractive for developers.

Companies specializing in brownfield redevelopment often sign secret agreements with power plant operators to take over contaminated properties and associated liabilities, shielding the parent company from responsibility. These companies may prioritize cosmetic cleanup over proper remediation to minimize costs and liability. As a result, many retired coal plant sites remain vacant and unproductive, with little incentive for redevelopment.

Transparency and accountability are key to addressing these challenges and unlocking the potential for redevelopment of retired coal plant sites. Without changes in incentives and increased transparency, many communities will continue to face uncertainty and limbo as they seek to reclaim and revitalize these valuable waterfront properties.

Bryan Messmore describes the 733-acre parcel of land at the confluence of Tanners Creek and the Ohio River as a “perfect waste.” The property was designated as the future site of Indiana’s fourth port, but four years later, there is no port, only a contaminated dirt patch. Toxic substances like arsenic, boron, and lead have leached into the soil and groundwater, rendering the site economically unviable for a port facility.

The Tanners Creek Power Plant operated from 1951 to 2015, providing electricity, jobs, and property taxes to the community. A legal settlement in 2007 forced the plant’s closure, and by 2015, the final generating unit shut down. The property was transferred to Tanners Creek Development, LLC, and in 2017, it was conditionally selected for a new port. However, since the demise of the port plan, there have been no concrete proposals for redevelopment, and the property remains inaccessible due to soil conditions and access challenges.

The ownership structure of the Tanners Creek property involves several companies, including Tanners Creek Development, Environmental Liability Transfer, EnviroAnalytics Group, Industrial Demolition, and Industrial Asset Recovery. While some companies have functioning websites, others do not, and they all share an address in St. Louis under a parent company called Commercial Development Company (CDC). CDC claims to be the largest buyer of contaminated former industrial sites in the United States and promotes reclamation efforts at the Tanners Creek site.

The former Nanticoke Coal Power Plant in Canada was closed in 2013, leading to discussions about redeveloping the site for renewable energy. The Six Nations of Grand River Development Corporation agreed to take a stake in a solar farm project on the property, which was completed in 2019. The solar plant, with 200,000 panels, generates less power than the coal plant but represents a move towards carbon reduction and collaboration between corporations, governments, and Indigenous communities.

The Zimmer Power Plant in Ohio closed in 2022, leading to a legal battle over property valuation and tax revenue loss for the local community. Vistra Energy, the plant’s owner, appealed the property’s valuation, resulting in a settlement that reduced the assessed value. The property remains idle, with no clear plans for redevelopment, leaving local officials frustrated and uncertain about the site’s future.
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“Perfect waste.” That’s how Bryan Messmore describes the 733-acre parcel of land at the confluence of Tanners Creek and the Ohio River.

Messmore is the city coordinator and redevelopment director for Lawrenceburg, Indiana, a town of 5,000 people in the southeast corner of the state that in 2020 appeared on the verge of a renaissance. Indiana’s port authority had designated the property by Tanners Creek as the future site of the state’s fourth port, a potential game-changer for Lawrenceburg’s economy.

Four years later, there is no port. There are no ships or construction vehicles. Instead, there is a mostly empty dirt patch, dotted with murky pools and earthen berms.

An environmental survey commissioned by Ports of Indiana found that toxic substances—including arsenic, boron, and lead—had leeched as much as 40 feet below the surface, contaminating the soil and the groundwater. A terse statement from the port authority concluded, “Remediation work would take years to complete on a significant portion of the land, rendering the site economically unviable as a port facility at this time.”

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The toxic chemicals beneath the site were the result of six decades of coal combustion and waste. From 1951 through 2015, the 1,100-megawatt Tanners Creek Power Plant chugged away on the north bank of the Ohio River, providing not just electricity but also jobs and $1.9 million in annual property taxes to the community.

But in 2007, a sweeping legal settlement forced the power plant’s owner, American Electric Power (AEP), to permanently close the plant. On May 31, 2015, the plant’s final generating unit shut down for good.

By November of 2016, AEP had vacated the site, transferring ownership to a company called Tanners Creek Development, LLC. In 2017, Ports of Indiana conditionally selected the site for a new port. The following year, a planned demolition brought the old smokestacks crashing down. “Between the plant closing and the discussion about a port, there was some optimism that the property was going to be redeveloped,” Messmore recalled.

That optimism has long since fizzled. Since the demise of the port plan four years ago, Messmore has heard no concrete proposals to redevelop the site. Nor does he have any contact with the property owner. “We’re unable to get site visits or any real inquiries because of the conditions of the soils and access challenges,” he said.

It’s unclear to whom these inquiries might even be directed. While Tanners Creek Development owns the site, another company called Environmental Liability Transfer has assumed the liability for the property. A third company called EnviroAnalytics Group oversees remediation, while Industrial Demolition takes down the structures and Industrial Asset Recovery sells the valuable materials removed from them. Only three of these companies have functioning websites. Three did not yet exist when AEP announced that Tanners Creek would be closing. But they all share an address in St. Louis and a parent company called Commercial Development Company (CDC), which purports to be the United States’ largest buyer of contaminated former industrial sites.

On its website, CDC boasts of “robust reclamation efforts” at the Tanners Creek site, saying, “Today the property represents a rare opportunity for an industrial user to take advantage of the site’s outstanding development attributes.”

Tim Maloney doesn’t quite see it that way. He’s the former senior policy director for the Hoosier Environmental Council (HEC), an environmental advocacy group active throughout Indiana. “The site still has a lot of contamination issues,” he said. In 2023, the HEC sued the state’s environmental regulator, arguing that CDC’s remediation plan “allows pollutants to contaminate ground and surface water.” The suit was ultimately dismissed. CDC declined to comment on its involvement with Tanners Creek.

Messmore admits to being frustrated at CDC’s lack of urgency and transparency. “There’s a lot of property sitting over there that’s worthless,” he said. Powerless to accelerate redevelopment, he has dim hopes for the site’s future. “We’re looking through the fence, both figuratively and literally.”

Lawrenceburg is far from alone. In the past decade, the U.S. has retired 40 percent of its coal fleet. Those retirements mean the plants are no longer emitting greenhouse gases, but they have also left nearby communities reeling at the loss of jobs and revenue. They also present an opportunity for economic rebirth. Particularly in Great Lakes states, which have historically relied heavily on coal power, retired coal plants often sit on valuable waterfront property—property that could support new, more sustainable forms of economic activity. Decades of coal consumption and disposal, however, often leave these sites too contaminated to safely develop. Absent proper remediation, they remain vacant and unproductive—and potentially dangerous to the people and ecosystems nearby.

A Solar Solution Across the Border

Matt Jamieson remembers what it was like to live near the Nanticoke Coal Power Plant. “The wind pattern at Nanticoke was such that all of the emissions cascaded over our community for all those years,” he recalls. Jamieson is the president and CEO of the Six Nations of Grand River Development Corporation (SNGRDC), the investment vehicle for the most populous First Nations reserve in Canada, a community of 12,000 people located 50 miles west of Niagara Falls.

Every day for half a century, residents of Six Nations would drive 30 minutes to a site on the north shore of Lake Erie, where they would join 900 to 1,000 other workers to operate the largest coal-fired power plant in North America. Nanticoke Generating Station was an eight-unit behemoth with a nameplate capacity of nearly 4,000 MW. In 2010, it comprised over 11 percent of Ontario’s entire generating capacity.

Nanticoke was one of four power plants to close on Dec. 31, 2013, following a decision by the provincial government of Ontario to ban coal combustion. That decision came as little surprise to the plant’s operator, Ontario Power Generation (OPG). “We knew in the early 2000s we’d be closing the plant down at some point,” said Neal Kelly, OPG’s director of media. “So we opened up conversations with local leaders and employees.”

The most consequential of those conversations occurred in 2016, when OPG approached the newly incorporated SNGRDC about building a solar farm on the property. “It made economic sense and common sense to put renewable energy there,” Jamieson remembers thinking. “You’ve got this transmission asset that’s sitting there and doing nothing.”

“This is an example of what’s possible when corporations or governments collaborate with Indigenous communities.”

It made sense to Marie Trainer, too. She was the mayor of Haldimand County, where Nanticoke was located, from 2003 to 2010 and currently serves on the county council. Trainer says it was a shame that the coal plant had to be shuttered, but that the site was a “perfect spot” for a solar plant. “The capacity is there,” she said. “You don’t have to buy up a new [transmission] corridor or go through anybody’s yard.”

After a community consultation, SNGRDC agreed to take a 15 percent stake in what would be a CA$100 million ($73 million) project. Within three years, the entire power plant had been demolished and the site had been remediated enough to build a new industrial facility. On May 29, 2019, OPG brought online 200,000 individual solar panels, less than five and a half years since the site last burned coal.

Kelly acknowledges that the solar power plant is not a complete replacement for what was lost. “It doesn’t have the same amount of jobs,” he conceded. Nor, at a nameplate capacity of 44 MW, does it generate anywhere close to the amount of power its predecessor did. But he takes pride in the way the process was conducted. “We treated everyone with respect and generosity, and that went a long way,” he said.

Jamieson is likewise pleased with the outcome. “We’re certainly moving the needle on carbon reduction,” he said. “This is an example of what’s possible when corporations or governments collaborate with Indigenous communities.”

Kelly and Jamieson both see the project as a powerful demonstration of the opportunity presented by former coal plant sites. As renewable energy projects face more siting challenges, retired coal plants offer pre-disturbed land that comes with a substation, a transmission connection, a water supply and a nearby community eager to replace the lost jobs. “And you know what?” said Jamieson, “What a great story, to take what was the worst-emitting coal plant in North America and to turn it into something that is clean and green and renewable.”

Value Judgements

A tax court hearing had already been scheduled by the time the Zimmer Power Plant closed—and the local government stood to lose millions.

It was salt in the wound for Washington Township, a community of 2,200 on the southern edge of Ohio. The 1,426 MW coal-fired generator had been a vital cog in the local economy for three decades. In 2020, it provided roughly 15 percent of the local school district’s revenue and employed the equivalent of one in every 15 people in the township. So community leaders were already bracing for impact when Texas-based Vistra Energy announced that it would shutter the plant in mid-2022, five years earlier than initially planned.

Then the legal proceedings began. Vistra, which had been steadily reducing the value of the Zimmer property since 2015 as utilization declined, appealed its land valuation to the Ohio State Board of Tax Appeals. It argued that because the plant had closed, the property, which the Clermont County Auditor valued at $140 million, was only worth $28.5 million.

Local authorities decided to settle the case before it went to court. In a closed-door meeting, representatives for the school district and the county board of revision agreed to drop the site’s assessed value to $52 million in 2022, with the potential for a further reduction the following year. The devaluation would force local schools, libraries and governments to pay back tens of thousands of dollars worth of property taxes that they had collected from Vistra.

Dennis Cooper, one of three trustees elected to govern Washington Township, expects that the township will ultimately lose $70,000 in the devaluation. But he is baffled at Vistra’s persistence, particularly on the heels of its extravagant purchase of several nuclear power plants last year. “If you’re being a good neighbor and you can spend $3.4 billion on nukes, what is $70,000 to you?” asks Cooper. “It means everything to us and it must be beans to them.”

All the while, he said, the property continues to sit idle. “Common sense tells you if you have a property and you’re not doing anything with it, you’d either sell it or develop it,” he said. So far, Vistra has done neither.

If any redevelopment were occurring, Jim Suter would know. He’s the mayor of Moscow, a 156-person village within Washington Township that directly abuts Zimmer on the shore of the Ohio River. The plant’s massive cooling towers loom over the village, visible from nearly every street.

Suter hopes to see the land returned to productive use. “We’d like to see redevelopment somewhat quickly,” he said. Ideally, “something that will produce revenue and be a good neighbor for the village.”

But he doesn’t know what that redevelopment might look like, or when it will occur. Vistra indicated in a press release that it would evaluate the site’s suitability for renewable energy or storage installations, but, said Suter, “We can’t really get a definitive answer from them about what their plans are.”

Nor does Vistra seem eager to turn over the land to another developer. While several companies approached Suter for information about the property, Suter has seen no evidence that Vistra reached out to any of them. Vistra’s representatives have assured local officials that they are open to selling, but Suter is skeptical. “My personal opinion? I don’t think it was for sale. I think that was just a ploy.” Vistra did not respond to a request for comment.

For both Suter and Cooper, the two years since Zimmer’s retirement have been a frustrating exercise in opacity. Shut out from discussions about valuation, redevelopment, and property transfer, both men have largely resigned themselves to adapting their communities to a post-Zimmer reality.

Asked what he wants from Vistra, Cooper is firm: “No more backroom deals. No more.”

Sale or Seizure

In 2016, while AEP was seeking a buyer for Tanners Creek and OPG was kicking off its discussions with Six Nations, a coal plant in Tonawanda, New York, was belching its last steam clouds.

The C. R. Huntley Generating Plant had occupied the eastern bank of the Niagara River for a century when it closed on March 1, 2016, and community members were prepared when the day finally arrived. As far back as 2013, a coalition of government officials, union leaders, environmental advocates and school board members had been exploring options to blunt the economic impact of the closure. By 2016, the group, informally called the “Huntley Alliance,” had secured a first-of-its-kind stopgap fund from the state that would, in its first year, cover 80 percent of the tax revenue lost to Huntley’s closure. And by July of that year, they had secured a $160,000 grant from the federal government to build out a community-oriented redevelopment plan.

Joseph Emminger, Tonawanda’s town supervisor, remembers the enthusiasm of that year. Hopes were high that Huntley’s retirement could inaugurate a new chapter in the town’s economy by opening up a valuable waterfront property for redevelopment. “That is a generational property,” said Emminger. “This is something that comes along maybe once every hundred years in our municipality.” A quick procession of sale, remediation and redevelopment, he hoped, could provide the town new opportunities and new sources of tax revenue.

But the power plant’s owner, Houston-based NRG Energy, evinced no such urgency. By September 2018, with little remediation completed and no buyer yet identified, the Town of Tonawanda tried to take control of the property through eminent domain. Before a court could decide on the case, NRG announced it had found a buyer, New York-based WarrenBrook Redevelopment, LLC. Town officials, in a show of good faith, dropped the suit.

But in June 2020, with a purchase agreement signed and due diligence underway, NRG announced that the sale had been suspended.

Michael Edman was one of three partners at WarrenBrook, which has since dissolved. He says that the deal collapsed “for a variety of reasons,” including the economic uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the decision to suspend the sale was mutual, he said. “It was nothing nefarious.”

For Emminger and the Tonawanda community, the deal’s suspension meant an ambitious redevelopment agenda was once again on hold. Perceiving little progress on NRG’s part toward finding a buyer, the town revived its eminent domain case against the property.

“Nobody’s paying a lot of money for these properties, so there’s no financial incentive to sell.”

This time, the case went to trial. And Tonawanda won. The New York State Appellate Division ruled against NRG, saying the town’s seizure of the property would “serve the public use.” Two appeals to the New York Supreme Court also went Tonawanda’s way, with justices dismissing the case in December 2023 and again in March 2024. Town officials now say they expect to identify a buyer in the next 30 to 40 days. In a statement, NRG said it was “disappointed with the court’s ruling” and that it “continues to evaluate options regarding the future of the site.”

For Emminger, the satisfaction of a favorable ruling is tinged with frustration over what he sees as eight wasted years. “We’ve done everything that NRG has asked us to do,” he said. “They have done very little [remediation] other than the bare minimum that is required … They’re just delaying and delaying and delaying.”

He thinks he knows why. For years, NRG has leased out access to its water intake on the Niagara River, providing local manufacturers with untreated water at a fraction of the price they would pay to the local utility. “They would sit on that site for the next 30 years if they could, just making money,” Emminger said.

Edman concedes that the revenue from the water supply is likely lucrative. But he thinks there is another reason why NRG might be holding onto the site: environmental liability. “Nobody’s paying a lot of money for these properties, so there’s no financial incentive to sell,” he said. “If it creates financial liability for a seller, it oftentimes must be easier for them to just sit there and do nothing with it.”

In fact, it’s this single challenge, Edman thinks, that is keeping retired coal plants fallow across the country.

Liability Hot Potato

New York, Ohio and Indiana have collectively retired 47 coal plants in the past two decades. Of these, only 11 have been successfully redeveloped—converted mostly into gas-fired power plants, but also into data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations.

And the Great Lakes region is far from an outlier. Across the United States, retired coal plants sit vacant and rusting, with little to no chance of revival. They are, in many cases, the picture of neglect: abandoned lots with murky ash ponds and dirt berms, visible to locals only through barbed wire fences. In some cases, the deserted structures have been known to catch fire or unexpectedly collapse.

Yet they also occupy some of the country’s most valuable plots of land—large, contiguous parcels abutting major waterways, often within walking distance of a population center. These qualities make them attractive locations for parks, industrial centers, or, as in the case of Nanticoke, clean energy hubs. Why, then, are they so rarely redeveloped?

The answer to that question involves shadowy companies, secret agreements, and false promises—but it begins 40 feet below the Tanners Creek ash ponds. Before any redevelopment can occur, the site must be purged of the harmful toxins such as arsenic, boron and radium that decades of burning and dumping coal allowed to leach into the soil. All told, decommissioning and remediating a retired coal plant can cost anywhere from $3.5 million to $200 million. What’s more, thanks to a 1980 federal environmental law, a botched remediation job can trigger lawsuits against the original polluter, even if they no longer own the property.

Former coal plant sites, then, are not so much attractive assets as they are a monkey on the back of power plant operators desperate to offload them.

Dave Altman is the president of Cincinnati-based environmental law firm AltmanNewman. In his five decades of litigating remediation cases, he has witnessed the creative tactics companies employ to jettison contaminated sites. Initially, he says, “the dream of any polluting company was to turn over their contaminated property as a gift to the Boy Scouts,