Clinch Valley Program News Today

Freshwater mussels may be the most amazing Virginia natural wonder you’ve never heard of. Let’s start with their strange names — the Green Floater, the Creek Heelsplitter, the Atlantic Pigtoe,

Southwestern Virginia has a long history of coal mining, but its energy future is a work in progress. A pilot project is underway to transform former coal

Robbie Harris reports Former coal mines within the Cumberland Forest Project—nearly 253,000 acres of land managed by The Nature Conservancy in Southwest Virginia, Eastern Tennessee, and Eastern Kentucky—could be the site of the first utility-scale solar systems built in the Central Appalachian coalfields Credit The Nature Conservency The Nature Conservancy has been acquiring land to build the solar installations in the Cumberland Forest, a quarter million acres comprising parts of Virginia,...

That pluck has landed his Charlottesville company the opportunity to be the first to generate large-scale renewable power on the coalfields of Central Appalachia. If the bold venture announced this week comes to fruition, roughly 550 acres of deforested minelands sprinkled across an expansive Nature Conservancy preserve will generate up to 75 megawatts of solar energy within two to three years. “If it were easy, everybody would be doing it,” Van Clief said about plunging into untested terri...